30 January 2026 ~
Kicking off the new season, our erstwhile co-hosts take a deep dive into the wide world of wargaming and discuss what they think the wargaming hobby is missing.
So you can hear what our couple of wargaming yammerers think, but what do you—the educated & erudite audience—think we’re missing from the overall wargaming hobby? Sound off below or in our forums or on any of the different service feeds where you hear our podcasts.
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I read that first sentence, then reread it several times and I don’t think the word “erstwhile” means what you think it means. I think the word you’re looking for might be “intrepid”, “undaunted”, or something similar.
You’re probably right. Sometimes we’re putting all the effort into the podcast edits and not enough into the article blurbs!
The discussion about Vassal and TTS about time and complexity as barriers to gaming generally. Why haven’t I really learned to use Vassal or TTS? My perception that they are complex, and that I am going to have to devote a lot of time to the process. I either have to make it a priority, or brush it aside. The same for other things in the hobby. Why do I tend to play games in the same series and not learn anything new? I don’t perceive that I have the time to learn a new rule set. Computer wargames are, unfortunately, the same. I open a game, and there is an array of buttons across the top that I need to learn. Then I move a computer counter, all sorts of things on my side and the other side start shooting automatically, then I get a report that doesn’t mean anything to me, and I realize that learning the game is going to be work. Tutorials are typically not helpful. In contrast, I can open up a great many non-wargame computer games, and the tutorial will have me up and playing quickly, without reading a long PDF. (The Troop has a good tutorial for a wargame.)
A lot of the discussion also involved the perpetual question of how to get new and younger players into the hobby. I suspect that many of us “older gamers” started at age 15, give or take, so assume that is your target audience is a 15-year-old kid who has an interest in games and history. Going to a dedicated wargame convention, or even a game convention, isn’t an option unless there is a convention close by and parents willing to take the kid. Instead of using conventions or clubs to get new wargamers, look at the way I started. For the cost of postage, SPI would send you Napoleon at Waterloo in an 8½ x 11 envelope. A reasonable-sized map, a real counter sheet, and one page of rules. You could learn the game in a couple of hours of pushing counters around, and play a full game in an hour (including set up). Once you learned some basic concepts such as strength and movement points, terrain cost and effect, ZOC, CRT, and retreats, you knew the basic concepts for most SPI games.
I don’t see why a publisher or group of publishers could not do this and consider the investment a “loss leader.” Run ads for the game in publications devoted to other types of games such as D&D and chess. But don’t do print-and-play; it often looks cheap. Besides, pushing the counters is fun; give people real counters and show them what the hobby can do. Maybe try to develop a similar game that is not overtly a human battle, since a lot of schools and groups might get squeamish about a “war” game. Maybe a relief supply game or sci-fi so that only robots are shooting robots. (Get them into the hobby first, and then let them fight over what is a true wargame.)
Anyway, it was a thought-provoking podcast. Thanks for all the effort.
Thanks for listening. Great thoughts and we’ll have to mull them over a bit 🤠
Stores will chase what pays the bills. Clubs are sort of the niche. Magazines that support clubs, even if they are embedded in a store space, is what is missing – similar to garage bands fanzines.
Going after Mike pointing out the gaming articles that bring more history behind the gameplay, it is one of the flags flown by Wargames Soldiers & Strategy and certainly sets them slightly apart from many others.
On that note the big 3 “cardboard” wargames mags in europe – Vae Victis, Para Bellum and Alea – do have a strong cross over articles.
I’m biased for Vae Victis simply because they actually do cover the entire spectrum of the hobby, be it cardboard, minis, rpgs, etc and see it all as one without discrimination. And rows against the tide because it is print only. So they must be doing something right.
An English-language equivalent to VV would be *awesome*
Finally caught up on this and it raises many good questions about what’s missing. A couple of them raised what seems to me to be something of a paradox (to borrow from another Dragoons article) in both having a community publication and pulling in a new generation of wargamers to the community.
I’m old enough to remember the excitement in things like computer gaming magazines that, like tabletop game mags, would have a sampler CD of a game to play through. I might not get all of “Quake” but I got a level, and if it was multiplayer I could have lots of replayable fun with that. Given that the Internet back then was dial-up, waiting a month for a new gaming magazine didn’t seem like THAT much longer of a wait than having a webpage about new games load up on a 14.4k modem. For game companies, it was a good model for chumming the waters and things like PC Gamer were easy to find in pretty much any magazine rack.
That’s not the world of today, which is why I’m not entirely convinced that a community print publication would have legs on its own or be a good avenue for bringing in new gamers. The kids these days…print magazines just don’t seem to be their thing when they can hoover up more information, and info that’s more current, through a plethora of digital devices. Not that kids don’t read physical media–my kids, at least, ask to go to the bookstore and always seem to find the next novel in some teen drama series about dragons and magic powers and contrived battles to the death (or to true love). But I think, frankly, that for many disciplines, a community hard copy magazine just isn’t how those communities are organized or share info today; and given that fact, you need a different hook to bring in new wargamers.
So…how is that to be done? There’s always the method of master and apprentice by playing games with your kids and hoping they pick it up and keep joining you, and then others, as they get older. But that’s not going to get you much throughput, either in volume or speed.
Ironically I think part of the answer to your question comes from the very medium by which you posed it. Digital written and spoken media is a huge part of how the younger generations gather information. You’re already there. Which means maybe the better question is how do you get your platform(s) to a broader audience? I hate to say it but it may require leaning deeper into the medium, doing it with more dynamic content, or maybe joining/merging with others in the space to both increase the diversity of content while offloading some of the burden. I think this can be done and still be taken ‘seriously’ by those deeply invested in discipline so long as the content is engaging and editorial standards maintained. While not a perfect model, I often contrast how “War on the Rocks” has turned itself into one of the strongest voices in discussing national security issues while the professional journals of the various Services find themselves increasingly bereft of good material. WOTR is entirely digital but has a strong editorial process, offers multimedia content of various styles from long-form podcasts to 10 minute “hot takes,” and has a couple of partners that straddle national security and other worlds to expand their brand name while bringing in new contributors. It wasn’t too many years ago that I started recommending WOTR as a go-to platform for prospective Marine Corps authors. It wasn’t the professional journal the way the Marine Corps Gazette is, but WOTR was very open to Marine voices; had, frankly, more editorial rigor than the Gazette; and if your piece was accepted by WOTR, it could be published within weeks of submitting it so that it could actively shape contemporary discussions. Submit to the Gazette, and your piece would show up 6-9 months later and the issue you were writing about could be overtaken by events or irrelevant.
I don’t have a great answer to the fact that digital entities don’t have “free stuff” like mini-games you can grab out of the plastic wrap. But I wonder if there’s been any market research done on how effective, if at all, those free games from industry mags are in actually getting new subscribers and/or boosting company sales. If those magazines are restricted to 2-4 issues annually and have been like that for years…all that tells me is that their market share isn’t growing, which means they’re not bringing in meaningful new numbers of subscribers/new generation of wargamers.
So where do you get the new generation? I heard talk of conventions and game stores but in some respects that’s a self-selecting audience. I think we need to break outside those self-selecting groups and look at other venues/events that are perhaps gaming-adjacent, and they need to be events that Gen Z/Gen Alpha frequent. And the games offered there need to pull people in, not turn them off. I participate in a wargaming educational series for a friend’s organization in the DC area and his goal is to target young staff members with little to no previous wargaming experience. So I leave all my gajillion hex-and-counter games at home and bring “Wings of Glory,” every time. And I get a full table, every time. I think of the free games offered in the industry house magazines, and I just don’t think that’s what’s going to get you the next generation. Maybe they come to it eventually; but that’s not the seed to start growth.
So it’s a paradox, though as I said fortunately part of the answer is what you’re already doing; but growing the discipline means doing more, different, and dynamic, and sadly until we invent true Star Trek replicators there’s a gap in between how you snag the interest of new generations digitally and then get some tactile in their hands quickly to reinforce that interest. I don’t have a great answer for the latter part of the paradox but I think it needs to be solved, and I don’t think falling back on print media gets the disciple there.
well, not everything in the “what’s missing” episode was intended to be “things to bring in new wargamers”
at a certain point, you want some service for the wargamers that have been here a while, too! 🤠