Thin Red Lines: The Problematic and Evocative War Game

Just before sixth grade, I moved from rural New Hampshire to the planned suburbs of Columbia, Maryland. The environments could not have been more different. It took a while to make new friends, but within a year or so, I started to settle in and find “my people.”

It was in those formative middle-school years that my lifelong hobbies were set in stone. I played Dungeons and Dragons with friends. Alongside all my peers, I made pirate copies of Apple II games on school computers under the nose of the librarian. (Don’t hate us! We genuinely didn’t know any better back then, and I’m still guilty about it today.) 

And I discovered historical war games. 

A next-door neighbor across the street was a couple of years younger than me, but through sheer proximity we became friends. His dad had a regular weekly game of Squad Leader with a colleague set up on a table in his office. One day my friend, after a series of repeated admonishments to NOT TOUCH ANYTHING, let me sneak a peek at the game in progress.

I was immediately fascinated. Scattered across colorful terrain divided up into hexes, a myriad of tiny cardboard chits representing men, trucks, and tanks played out World War 2 scenarios ranging from skirmishes to giant battles. 

Even at that age, I was something of a history buff. I’d visited tons of Civil War battlefields with my dad and stepmom, and used to draw giant battle scenes of stick figures on massive pieces of paper. 

Without really knowing it, I was engaged in basic war game design prototyping – imagining how much damage cannons would do to a line of infantry, or how a hill might affect line of sight.

Squad Leader put rules and a structure around my old battleground fantasies. Eventually – and I don’t remember the details of how – we talked my friend’s dad into teaching us how to play. 

Immersive, But Deeply Flawed

One summer afternoon, we set up the classic first scenario, “The Guards Counterattack” – an all-infantry urban battle, Germans versus Russians fighting it out in the ruins of Stalingrad. I don’t remember if we finished it, but we had a blast despite struggling with the arcane and often contradictory rules.

As drug dealers say, the first taste was free. As I had done with Dungeons and Dragons books, I begged my parents to fund my new habit. With their grudging help plus whatever I had saved up from my allowance, I bought as much Squad Leader material as I could afford – and there was a lot of it.

Before long, I’d laid out giant maps on the carpet and surrounded myself with trays of cardboard chits, all carefully sorted by nationality and unit types. I ignored most of the official scenarios and instead just threw interesting units down on the map, crashing massive tank columns into hordes of infantry.

Though I don’t remember for sure, I probably got most of the rules wrong and ignored a bunch of others. Because here’s the thing about Squad Leader – it’s fundamentally broken as a game in a lot of ways. 

The basics of moving and firing are simple compared to most modern war games, but the rule exceptions are too many to count. Indeed, being “good” at Squad Leader is often more about knowing and exploiting an obscure rule than it is about smart tactical thinking.

There’s a reason the first scenario was just a few infantry on a single small map. Each subsequent scenario in Squad Leader ramps up the complexity and difficulty. Eventually, the turn sequence bogs down with checks and sub-checks – tracking how smoke shifts, placing and removing vehicle wrecks, checking and re-checking line of sight, and a host of other minor bookkeeping.

I squeezed years of fun out of Squad Leader despite getting most rules wrong. I mostly played solo, taking turns for both sides. I could talk my friends into Dungeons and Dragons sometimes, but Squad Leader was a bridge too far (pun intended). Even my neighbor buddy across the street quickly gave up the game as he got older, though his dad continued to play.

Eventually, I lost interest in Squad Leader. I dabbled in Advanced Squad Leader when it was released in 1985, but I mostly moved on to computer wargaming to scratch the old itch.

Since Squad Leader days, war gaming has thrived not just on tabletops, but in its video game format. For years, turn-based war games played on hex grids, just like Squad Leader, dominated the landscape. Later on, they were joined by less traditional models – real-time strategy games, games without hexes, full simulations of tactical combat, and an explosion of genres all dealing with the art of war.

A Problematic Hobby

There’s no escaping the problematic side of traditional war gaming. If you’re playing a war game with a friend, odds are one of you is commanding an army that not only lost a war but was fighting for a historically repugnant cause.

Considered in terms of pure mechanics, the losers are always more interesting to play in war games. In the abstract, it’s an interesting challenge to see if history can be changed. 

The Battle of the Bulge is one of the most commonly gamed scenarios from World War 2, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s a sprawling, massive battle stretching out over a month, featuring end-of-war technology on both sides, with weather and logistics playing key roles in the outcome. Though in retrospect, the German attack was doomed from the start, there are enough what-ifs to make for a great game scenario.

Tactically and strategically, the Battle of the Bulge is most interesting from the German side. Early on you’re the attacker, seeing how far west you can push before your tank columns run out of fuel. Playing the Allies, by contrast, is typically a frustrating exercise in shuffling a thin line of defenders around as a delaying action until reinforcements arrive.

Yet for many, the historical realities of the battle make it highly uncomfortable to play the German side. The German order of battle included several notorious SS units, including a group that during the battle perpetrated a famous war crime. 

War games that tackle the Bulge – and there have been a ton of excellent ones, both board games and computer games – have to decide how to handle those elements. It doesn’t feel right to ignore them entirely, yet placing a player in command of Joachim Peiper’s SS Kampfgruppe is uncomfortable at least.

Indeed, the worst parts of humanity infest the hobby, giving war gaming a bad name. There’s a jokey term – “wehraboo” – for a particular type of gamer, one that’s unusually obsessed with the glorification of the World War 2 German army and its technology. Too often, you stumble across someone playing Germany in World War 2 game not because it’s tactically interesting, but because they’ve embraced elements of a repugnant Neo-Nazi ideology.

Then, too, there is a serious question of general appropriateness. How fresh of a conflict is a suitable, respectful subject for war gaming? There’s no clear answer, and some would say certain topics should never be the subject of a game. For many years, games about the Vietnam conflict or the U.S. invasion of Iraq seemed inappropriate. 

Today, releasing a war game about the invasion of Ukraine, or one covering the ongoing tragedy in Israel and Gaza, would feel like nothing more than a cheap way to get negative publicity. The blood and horror of the conflicts are far too fresh and real. 

Yet – purely as an abstract exercise – both of these conflicts are militarily interesting, and within a decade, I expect both will be the subject of war games.

I’ll admit to feeling more than a little uncomfortable when poisonous ideology collides with gaming. Though the amateur historian in me has enjoyed playing Germans in World War 2 war games and the Confederates in American Civil War battles, it’s a challenge to separate the experience of the game from the truly odious and distasteful philosophies of the history of the armies I’m commanding.

For budding war game designers, avoiding a minefield of potentially problematic content is tricky. It says something negative about the unfortunately short memories of human beings, but the easiest way to circumvent the problem is to reach further back in history.

For instance, no one today would object to a war game about the conflict between Rome and Carthage, or one covering the English Civil War. And for obvious reasons, World War 1 is far less problematic than World War 2, despite the horrific levels of carnage.

Forever Niche

Between clunky old-school traditional mechanics, problematic content, and tiny budgets, traditional war gaming will always remain a niche hobby. For the genre’s devoted fans, that’s okay. If a war game is well-researched, and the mechanics simulate the decisions a commander would make, that’s enough.

And niche genres can survive on the backs of a small, dedicated fanbase. Recently I picked up Second Front, a game that’s essentially an unpolished but solid computer version of Squad Leader in all but name and official license – right down to the first scenario being a thinly-veiled knockoff of “The Guards Counterattack” I played so many years ago.

The publisher of Second Front is the back-from-the-dead modern version of MicroProse. (The old MicroProse, coincidentally, was the first game company I ever worked for – that’s a story for another time.) The reborn MicroProse occupies an independent publisher space, releasing a ton of smaller titles in the last couple of years – mostly niche experiences or sequels to older obscure games. Traditional war games like Second Front fit their portfolio perfectly.

Similarly, Matrix Games has successfully catered to a specific hardcore audience for many years. Traditional war games make up the bulk of their catalog; if you’re a hex-and-counter junkie, they’re the go-to publisher for the latest and greatest in the genre.

So war games are still alive, if not exactly “well.” Second Front will never approach the sales figures of a Call of Duty, or a Baldur’s Gate 3 – but it doesn’t have to. Modern war games serve a particular audience that knows what it wants.

I’ve written before about how games, like any art form, can evoke memories. For me, playing a good traditional war game summons up fond childhood memories while also feeding my inner amateur historian. I am, personally, able to separate the strategic, tactical, and historical elements I find so interesting about war games from the problematic elements.

Decades later, I can still see that starting setup for “The Guards Counterattack” scenario in my mind. I immediately start planning the first moves: where to flank, where to place my leader, and how to get across that one narrow alley. 

I’m transported back to my middle school days – and, for a fleeting moment, back to a bloody Stalingrad street in late 1942.

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