I’m a sucker for fluff.

It ties into my preferences for a narrative rather than competitive game, I suppose, but I love all the little details and bits of background info in wargaming that you can add to your games. I’ve always loved games that give you a lot of creative freedom this way, and tabletop/pen-and-paper games probably offer the most freedom possible.

This can show itself in a few ways. TooFatLardies suggest naming your officers for campaigns of Chain of Command to personalise them, and I’m toying around with a similar idea for Tea and Toast – WW1 pilots from most countries personalised their planes after all!

When I finished my Chain of Command campaign recently I created a ‘Wikibox’ for the campaign. There are websites were you can make them pretty easily, and I’ve seen a lot of ‘alternative history’ Wikiboxes for PC games (the ones for the ‘Kaiserreich’ mod for Hearts of Iron 4 are particularly good.) Mine came out rather well, I thought.

But I’m not going to post it here.

The thing with my wikibox is, in trying to keep it as close to a ‘real’ box you’d see about the subject, it contains swastikas on flags. As it was something I’d made for a game between friends I didn’t see any issue with it, but sharing it on a public platform such as this is a whole different story. There aren’t many symbols with connotations as powerful as a swastika; it’s banned in certain countries, and it will greatly offend many people worldwide.

So why use it? Well for me, as this was for a game between friends and I knew that my opponent wouldn’t take offence to it. That’s the crux of the issue: considering how others will respond, taking the history and feelings of others into account and fitting my choices to that. Open conversation is the key here – talking to others and listening to what they say prevents a lot of issues that can arise from sensitive topics – we’re playing games that regularly involve nazis after all.

Up to now I’ve focused on entirely cosmetic elements. What about game mechanics? In my search for wargames that don’t do the typical ‘pitched battle’ and use dynamics that are interesting, I came across a curious 6mm game called Hind and Seek. It’s set in the Soviet-Afghan war, so as I already have a motor rifle platoon in that scale painted up there’s very little barrier to entry.

I found 6mm ‘insurgents’ minis without any difficulty, but to me the nature of those is a cosmetic matter and that’s already covered above. The challenging issue is a mechanic.

Hind and seek has three groups on the table, the Soviets, the insurgents, and the civilians. The civilians are neutral, and shooting in their general vicinity has negative consequences for the player. That, in itself, is a good game mechanic in my eyes – it reinforces that such an action isn’t the right thing to do, and will have implications. That’s the kind of logic I want from a historical wargame, I want games that recreate historic command conditions.

Where it gets difficult is the way this is further implemented. Civilians will appear near villages, but the insurgent player can also ‘buy’ civilians when list-building, hide his troops in groups of civilians, and move his squads near civilians so that the Soviets can’t fire out them without risking civilian deaths. Is this reflective of the real world conflict? Yes. Is it a positive? I’m not sure.

There’s a line in wargaming that most decent people won’t cross. We’re looking to recreate the generalship of warfare, trying to outsmart or outmanoeuvre our friends in games that quasi-simulate conflicts, historic or fictional. We want those games to present challenges that are not only fun but also have some basis in historic events (for historic games, of course,) but we can’t get around the fact that in the real world war is a very ugly business. The notion of warfare being a great adventure or a gentlemanly affair died in 1914, perhaps earlier, and the truth behind those notions never existed in the first place. Conflicts bring out the very worst in humanity, and these elements may not have a direct impact on the actual fighting itself; wargaming distances itself from such things, and rightly so.

When those darker elements begin to creep into games, we need to question why they’re there. Games can be tremendous educational tools, but they can also just be fun games (and both are perfectly ok!), and as such sensitive matters need to be considered seriously. I’m not in the business of telling others what they should or how to play it, but it’s worth asking ‘what purpose does this element serve?’ when we look at parts of games we find questionable, undesirable, offensive. It’s easier said than done, but taking that step back and assuming a level-headed approach can only work in our favour, remembering that what we take offence to will likely be very different to the views of others. It might not even need to be a particular part of an era – even the era itself can prove too challenging to someone if it brings back particularly bad memories.

And what if someone you’re playing with crosses that line? Tell them! Be honest and open and most people with understand; those that don’t probably aren’t worth the effort anyway. People who complain that ‘everyone is offended by everything now’ are essentially saying ‘you don’t have the right to find this difficult because I don’t think it’s worth considering your needs’. Maybe I’ve worded that harshly, but it’s true.

So after all that, what will I do about Hind and Seek? It’s hard to say. Personally, I think we need to try it out and see how things feel after a couple of games or a short campaign. Although I was made uncomfortable by it initially I think a lot of the difficulties will be negated by playing with the right people, so we’ll have to wait and see. Or maybe that was the point all along? Maybe the mechanic wants me to feel uncomfortable?

Suffice to say I’ll get a few AARs on here once we start playing and reflect on how I feel about this game. Regardless of the outcome, though, it’s good to think critically about our games in such a way from time to time, even when prompted in a difficult way.