A long time ago I bought a game called Storm Over Arnhem. I think I was 14 years old. Because I was 14 years old, I didn’t realize just how groundbreaking the game was. All I knew is that I loved playing it. I didn’t know it then, but this was a system so good that it would become known as area-impulse, and it would be around forever.

When I first played the game, I was fascinated by the idea that my die rolls and my opponent’s die rolls were in a sort of “competition.” Being very competitive, and being 14, I would think things like, “I can win this combat if I just out-roll him by 5!” Probably because I was 14, I didn’t quite get that it didn’t work like that, where I just had to try harder to roll a high number. But I loved the idea of this direct conflict of dice, and that turns were short that we were mostly playing and not waiting, and that the game itself felt so much like Cornelius Ryan’s book that I had already read twice.

Storm Over Dien Bien Phu takes advantage of this amazing system born 35 years ago, but I’m not sure that we remember just how remarkable a design the original system is. The gaming world has become so accepting of novel ideas, such as cards, chit-pulls, worker placement, traitor mechanics, and mancalas, that it seems weird to think that people once dismissed games solely because they didn’t use hexes. “Area movement” was a dirty word, because the implication was the designer somehow was so bad at research that he couldn’t even get enough terrain information to make a hex map. “Eh, just get a map from the library and draw some lines through it,” the designer seemed to be saying. This was the antithesis of both “detail” and “realism.”

I’ve played two different Historical Advanced Squad Leader modules about Arnhem bridge, and both of them are significantly more complex than any area-movement game. Yet neither one of them captures the feel of the overall battle as well as Storm Over Arnhem. The fact that novel systems could do just as good a job (or better) simulating a conflict as your standard hex-based odds calculator was a revelation for many people. After all, point-to-point movement is really just a variation on area movement, and Paths of Glory is considered the definitive game about World War I. And it uses point-to-point movement and cards.

It seems ridiculous that area movement was at that time so disrespected, but sometimes it can be hard to see past your prejudices. When I was about 12, I played War at Sea against a friend of mine who was 14, and neither one of us could figure out how the Germans could possibly win. “Well, that’s because it’s realistic,” he told me. I guess. Except after maybe a dozen plays, we realized that we had been playing wrong: the German player always moved second. Suddenly, the need for the British player to anticipate, and stretch to cover more ocean that he could, and hope the German player failed his speed rolls, made it seem like the Allies who were on the back foot. And that’s when I started to appreciate how much you could do with a few numbers and some clever mechanics. And, admittedly, a lot of dice.

Game design has come so far since then that a friend of mine refers to a time “before they knew how to make good games.” I think there’s more than a little truth to that. But we also risk a time “before we learned to appreciate good games” if we write off the years when such designs were fermenting. I’m admittedly biased towards discussions of hobby history, since I’ve experienced a fair amount of it now. But more than simple nostalgia, I think it can be very useful for new designers to appreciate just how hard to was to get players back then to take revolutionary ideas seriously.

Of course, there are still people who dislike any abstraction. I found the following post on the old Usenet group for historical wargames, dating just to 2013, in a discussion about the acceptability of using cards in a wargame, which I will present without comment: