Note I used AI to aid my research and provide snappy headings FYI.
A fortnight ago I wrote about John Curry’s deception book and, on the way past, complained that the word “wargame” was being asked to cover two different activities. I used Magnificent 7 a solitaire game about running a hedge fund through China’s rare-earth export controls as the example.
Its designer replied. Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha writes Wargaming Weekly, and his answer is #081: Am I stretching the definition of a wargame too far?!
He replied better than I argued, so let me start with where he’s correct.
What he gave up, and what I’ll give up
On the book review he concedes the lot: “About the book review, I don’t really have any pushback.” He agrees the headline should have read professional wargaming book, and adds something genuinely disarming “ it didn’t even occur to me that there might be a ‘more important book’ that’s specifically relevant to the hobby wargaming side of things alone.”
That was the whole of my complaint. Settled.
Now mine. I wrote: a wargame involves kinetic action between two or more parties in the game. His reply is that this doesn’t only throw out business and political games. It throws out logistics wargames, MEDEVAC wargames, intelligence wargames and cyber wargames. Then the line that made me give pause:
“if a game about something like cyberwarfare doesn’t make the cut, then it’s obvious that something’s off.”
He’s half right, and the half he’s right about matters. My sentence threw a MEDEVAC game into the same bin as a hedge fund game, and those two are not alike. A game about lifting casualties off a battlefield belongs to war in a way a game about rare-earth supply does not.
Lumping them together was sloppy and I’m not defending it.
But the fix isn’t to call them wargames. It’s to stop pretending there are only two boxes.
The test, in two stages
Stage one — delete the war. Is there still a game?
Take the armed conflict out entirely. If what’s left still functions, it was never about war.
Out at the door, and for a reason that has nothing to do with quality. Magnificent 7 may be excellent. It is not about a war. It is not and will never be a “wargame”.
Now the ones Rwizi raised:
All four survive. He was right that they don’t belong with the hedge fund.
Stage two — where is the war actually fought?
For what survives stage one: does the player resolve armed combat, or operate on the politics, economics and logistics around it?
Resolving combat therefore a wargame. Operates around it, then it is clearly and obviously a conflict strategy game.
Four boxes, not two
Four boxes gives Rwizi everything he asked for. His games get a home, and a respectable one. What he doesn’t get is the noun.
Now the hard case, and I’ve gone and reread the rulebooks
COIN. Fire in the Lake, Cuba Libre. Volko Ruhnke and Mark Herman, GMT, arguably one orf the most admired series in the hobby, that has grown to many titles. There is an entire other post waiting to be written here about what is a COIN game….another time.
There is no combat system in Fire in the Lake. No combat phase. No combat results table. No odds ratio, no morale, no fire and movement. The Key Terms Index runs from Accompanying to Withdraw and contains no entry for “combat” why? because the game has no such concept.
What it has instead:
My wargamer mates used to call COIN titles the ‘play-a-card-take-a-cube game’. That was meant as a jab and I assumed it was unfair. Reading 3.2.4 back, it is just a description. You play a card, you count cubes, you take cubes off and of course the reverse. There is no roll to make. No combat. Its worker placement with a different label.
And the victory conditions (7.2) are not military in any way shape or form:
Casualties exist and are tracked and they function politically. Rule 6.2.5: subtract from Aid three times the number of pieces in the Casualties box. Losing men costs you funding.
None of that is a criticism. It is a precise, deliberate design, and the designers say so in the first paragraph: “Using military, political, and economic actions… players build and maneuver forces to influence or control the population, extract resources, or otherwise achieve their Faction’s aims.”
Influence the population. Extract resources. That is the game.
And then there’s Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre is COIN Volume II, same series, Ruhnke again. One of its four playable factions is the Syndicate organized crime, baby!
The Syndicate’s Operation is Construct: build casinos, five Resources a space. Its Special Activities are Profit, Muscle and Bribe. It manipulates Cash markers, which rule 4.5.2 describes as “major stashes of loot principally stacks of US dollars just awaiting laundering or deposit in the United States.” Rule 6.2.3 is called The Skim.
Its victory condition, 7.2: “Syndicate has more than 7 open Casinos and Resources above 30.”
Run stage one on that faction. Delete the armed conflict, and the Syndicate still has a functioning game about casinos, protection money and laundering.
Cuba Libre contains Magnificent 7. Not an analogy a business-strategy faction, playing for cash and property, inside a box everybody wants to call a wargame. If the hedge fund is out, a quarter of Cuba Libre goes with it.
The best argument against me
It goes something like this. Vietnam was not decided on the battlefield, as we all know. The United States won essentially every major engagement and lost the war. So a game that resolves Vietnam through popular support, control and political will isn’t dodging the war it is perhaps modelling it more truthfully than a hex-and-counter treatment does. On that reading Fire in the Lake is the better wargame, not the lesser one.
I think that argument is correct about the history and wrong about the word.
Stage one passes it without a murmur: delete the war and there is no Fire in the Lake. It is a superb model of the conflict. But the player’s decision space is Support, Opposition, Control, Resources and Patronage.
He is not commanding an engagement. There is no engagement to command, the rules do not contain one.
So: an outstanding conflict strategy game. Box two. The best thing in it.
And notice what that costs me, ‘cause we got to be real about these things fellas. Under my own test Twilight Struggle goes in the same box, and so does a MEDEVAC game I’d previously have thrown out with the hedge fund. That’s a definition doing work rather than a preference wearing a badge or gatekeeping.
The other direction: what does his test exclude?
Rwizi offers three requirements: at least one human player, decisions about military, political or business conflict, consequences over at least three turns.
Try it on things that are not wargames.
Monopoly has a human player, decisions about business conflict, and consequences over rather more than three turns. So does Acquire. So does Power Grid. So does Catan, if trading and blocking counts as conflict, and nothing in the test says it doesn’t.
I don’t think he believes Catan is a wargame. But his definition can’t tell me why not, and a definition that excludes nothing isn’t doing the job a definition exists to do. That isn’t a bigger tent. It’s no tent just a breeze blowing thru.
Look at where he does draw lines. One-turn games are out; three turns are in, though he says three “feels like a stretch.” Why three? There’s no principle in it, it’s a number. Then AI-versus-AI is out, “not a wargame!” ….followed immediately by “despite not making the cut technically, I’m still okay with nominally calling it a wargame.”
That’s the tell. If the word can be applied where the definition has just failed, the definition isn’t doing the work. Something else is instinct, convention, the feel of the thing. AKA Feelings. Which is not really an straight up take, and it is exactly what I meant by the word being worn out rather than abused.
Conservatives and liberals
He frames this as purists against expansionists and reaches for hip-hop: underground versus mainstream, each accusing the other of selling out or being stuck in the past. He says the tension is healthy. He’s right that it’s healthy. He’s wrong that it’s the same argument.
Hip-hop purists were arguing about quality ; is this any good, is it authentic. That’s a value judgement and people fight about it forever. Once again feelings.
I’m arguing about category. About facts. About reality. About history. Not whether Magnificent 7 is good, I’ve no idea, I haven’t played it, not in my unicverse of titles. but whether the word picks it out.
Collapsing those two is how a classification dispute gets recast as snobbery.
Nobody calls a taxonomist conservative for saying a whale isn’t a fish. Nobody thinks he’s calling whales inferior. He’s saying the word “fish” has a job, and the job requires edges, boundaries, definition.
So I’ll decline the label. I’m not conserving anything and I’ve no interest in guarding a door. I love the creativity that “liberal” designers are employing to expand their hobby, seeking new mechanics, new ideas. Cross pollinating systems. All good. However I want a noun that still denotes something when I use it, because the moment it denotes everything it’s useless to the people who need it most, the ones deciding what to spend sixty quid on.
He already knows the answer, because he used it
He conceded that his headline should have said professional wargaming book. That concession only makes sense if the field has halves a bare noun can’t separate which is my whole argument, granted in the first third of his own post.
The adjective is the answer. Business wargame. Policy wargame. Cyber wargame. Hobby wargame. I never said those things don’t exist or don’t matter. I said one word was being asked to carry them all, and a superlative that doesn’t say which one it means is speaking for an audience nobody asked.
Qualify the noun and the problem dissolves. He did it once, correctly, and then argued against doing it generally.
Where we agree, which is more than either post suggests
He’s softened on solitaire, he used to think solo games didn’t technically count and no longer does, I’m still unclear why. I got there first but I’ll take the company: a solitaire game is still a wargame if what it depicts is a fight, there are 100’s of them.
And he’s right that the argument is the healthy part. A field nobody bothers to define is a field nobody cares about.
Well, that went places. But it matters. Wargamers, and wargames is a niche, but an open friendly engaging, fun welcoming one. But words matter, the definitions matter. If there is no war, and no kinetic action to resolve, there is no wargame.
And that my friends is my hill with my flag planted on it.
#rolldice
P.S – Best of luck on the 27th at Alllies of necessity. I’d love to hear how that goes. It would be epic to pit skills against professional wargamers. Enjoy!
