BOARDGAMES OF YORE I WISH I HAD

Today I'm at Rising Phoenix, a small tabletop gaming convention in Milford MA. Talking to folk, I'm reminded about how I started out in the hobby. It was in high school, and we had a wargaming club that I participated in. This was in the 1980s.

We played Dawn Patrol and Circus Maximus a lot, as well as WWII miniatures. It was here that I was first exposed to Diplomacy and other, similar political games. Which tended to be my jam. Talking about all this put me in mind that there are at least two games from this period that I lack and that I really need to work at acquiring. Both are ameristyle games with broader political / cultural themes at play.

Let me explain the notion of Ameristyle games. This is a dated concept / genre that has largely been superseded by the more family-friendly, mechanical and now-dominant genre of Eurostyle games. 

Ameristyle games are derived from wargaming and are primarily aimed at simulation -- what if and how history might have played out differently if X happened instead (e.g., Napoleon won Waterloo instead of losing it) OR what X experience would feel like / be like if you participated in it (e.g., what flying a biplane in WWI would be like). The rules are meant to recreate that experience. The downside is that because things can snowball in real life, you can often know who's going to win the game well in advance of reaching the actual victory conditions. If you are on the losing end, well, you need to find your joy elsewhere in the game.

Eurostyle games privilege mechanics over simulation, with the theme usually being more of a theme / skin than an attempt to replicate an experience. To make them more player-friendly, for players of various backgrounds and abilities, they build into the game "catch up" mechanics to give players at the bottom of the pile still a chance to catch up and perhaps still prevail in the end and win!

Both are valid. But I do miss me some classic Ameristyle games. These two are at the very top of my list:

Machiavelli is an official Diplomacy variant, set in Renaissance Italy. I've mentioned elsewhere that I find traditional Diplomacy tending to become somewhat static with repeated play and the incentive to exploit established lines of play. One aspect of Machiavelli I love is that it uses scenario-based setups, where each game has a different feel and development based on the different available starting points provided by the scenarios. It also has some mechanical variations that include -- use of gold as the medium to measure competitive status and success, the garrison as a new unit (and the ability to convert from army to navy or vice versa with the garrison as a transitional state), elite units, and optional rules for plague and assassination. I didn't have much chance to play it much before I lost the game in a fire.

The other is Advanced Civilization, not to be confused with the Sid Meier computer game. At the time, it was notable for the fact that it didn't use dice or cards (mostly!) to resolve situations on the board. It is a game or resource management, since you can only have a combined pool of population and money equal to 55 tokens. Each phase of the game is an algorithmic, mini-game of its own, that add up together to provide a unified game experience. Which power starts each phase depends on different criteria for each phase, which tends to effectively shift tactical advantage throughout the game in semi-predictable ways. The problem of course is that once one power gets ahead two or three squares on the Archeological Succession Track, there is precious little to nothing you can do to stop them from winning. However, because of its multi-phase gameplay, there is always something in the game you can work on improving or "winning" at. Both are long-ish, which was a feature not a bug, in that this is what us grognards at the time were wanting it to be.

I haven't been on eBay for a long time, but it looks like it's time to re-engage and work to score some games in relatively good condition. Probably will cost me a tidy sum to acquire them, but in my mind, it'll be well worth the time, cost and effort to re-acquire them.