I like sci fi wargames with super soldiers and battle mechs and drones. I like fantasy wargames with ghouls and vampires and vapire slayers. Wargames set in the real world never interested me, in part because the real world is uncomfortably close to home. Thanks to world wars and violent uprisings and mass shootings, imaginary war that resembles real life just doesn't seem like a game to me. Some people can disassociate what happens with tiny (28mm tiny) little plastic playing pieces on a gaming table from what goes on in the larger world, and I don't begrudge them for that. I guess I'm a little sensitive about certain things, though, and I'm just not inspired by modern weaponry. The word "modern" is key, because recently I got fascinated with the relationship between ancient Egypt and Rome. Next thing I knew, I was frantically building Egyptian and Roman armies and playing games set in the 40s and 50s CE. Maybe there's something to historic wargaming after all! Here are five reasons I play historic wargames.
I started researching ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire because I wanted inspiration for some Pathfinder adventures set in Kobold Press's Southlands. I watched hours of documentaries, I searched for history text books (more on that frustration in a separate post), I read Wikipedia. It didn't take long to realise that, for me anyway, 3100 BCE or even 31 CE resembles real life only about as much as an imaginary, say, 40,000 CE does. Human nature stays consistent, but I can barely comprehend the daily lives, economies, and conflicts of people living in a geographic location I've never visited and during a time several millenia ago. To me, it's basically a fantasy world
Of course, that's strongly influenced by my own heritage. I have no personal or emotional investment in events that happened in and around Egypt and Rome prior to the 1490s at best (1492 being a significant year for the continent upon I myself would be born, 500 years later). To someone closer to Rome and Egypt today, the early history of those regions may well feel very much like actual history and not at all like fantasy. It's a quirk of humanity that we can sometimes disassociate from the experiences of other human based on geographic displacement, and in historic wargaming I personally capitilise on that.
In a way, it's like accepting "the movie version" of a distant reality as canon. Movies basically never get anything right, but they often make things entertaining. You probably have examples based on your own area of expertise, but for it's movies about technology or gaming. They always get the details wrong, and I can't ignore the inaccuracies. Most people don't see them, and most people don't care.
Likewise, when I look at history, I don't see the major turning points, the tragic loss of cultural traditions, the impact of social order being destroyed and desperately and forcefully reformed. Some history is harder for me to ignore, so I choose not to imagine even a fantasy version of those times. But with a lot of history, I have the luxury of happily ignoring the details, and so it's easy to have fun imagining the fantasy version of those times.
History is a long time ago, almost without exception. When I look back at old stuff, I'm usually looking back beyond the boundaries of my own life. It's so old that it's usually unrecognisable to me. That's both the appeal and danger of history, I think. The world seems so different then (whenever "then" is). It seems so foreign that it can be hard to learn from it.
In fact, I think it's dangerously easy to put ancient history and fantasy fiction into the same perceptual framework. Growing up reading Tolkien, I can remember a time when it hadn't occurred to me yet that Middle Earth never existed. It made sense to me that the maps in the front of the book were literal, and that as long as I followed them, I would end up in Mordor or in the Shire. I actually tried it. My starting point was the front door of my house, and I never got further than the end of the block because by that point it seemed that walking all the way to Morder might be a little boring.
As an adult, Ancient Egypt and Rome are similar to Middle Earth. In my imagination, they're as vividly real as Middle Earth. I see Egypt and Rome in my mind and on my wargaming tabletop, and it feels real. I understand that real human beings lived during those times, had lives and dreams and stresses and relationships and beliefs. It was real. But rationally, they're impossibly old and, contradictorily, as fictional as Middle Earth. I can't talk to anyone from that time, I'll never understood how they perceived reality. They're just characters in a story.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether historical figures feel real or fictional, or even whether the stories we tell about them are accurate or half-imagined. The same is true for fictional characters. Reality doesn't factor into questions of emotion and motivation. Whether Cleopatra and Caesar were in love in real life, the way the stories go, doesn't change Cleopatra's political cunning. Whether Tutankhamun was buried in his or someone else's repurposed mask doesn't matter, in the end. The stories are still being told, and as a wargamer you can benefit from them, and interpret them yourself for your game.
I'm not one of those historical wargamers who tries to recreate specific battles, and I'm not interested enough in military history to research specific strategies and tendencies of actual generals. But I am vaguely interested in historical flavour, and it's within my tolerance to attempt to at least structure and mave armies with some historical flavour. I don't know what decisions Pompey would have made when defending against the Egyptian army, but I do at least understand how his legion would have moved. I know that when building a Roman army, I can choose between triarii and hastati and equites forces, and so on.
I'm not interested in painting really tiny models so I'll never play with anything approaching a full cohort anyway, so I aim only to pay tribute to the ancient Roman and Egyptian militaries in my games. To get the flavour, though, I found myself driven like never before to do research. It wasn't enough to look at some stock photos on the Internet and hope for the best, for several reasons.
First of all, what were those stock images even of? How do I know their uniforms are accurate to what Roman soldiers would have worn? Am I just looking at a bad Technicolor movie version of Rome, or am I seeing what Romans would have actually looked like?
Secondly, how do I build a Roman army? What were the ranks? What kind of deployment and tactics would they have used? Who would they have been fighting, and why?
While army building drove me to learn more about Rome (turns out it was around for hundreds of years, so there was a lot to learn), what was available at stores helped me narrow my focus. My first thought was to build Roman and Gallic armies so I could concentrate on Caesar's campaigns against the Gauls. But I couldn't find any Gallic miniatures from local vendors. I was able to find Egyptian miniatures. I've long been a fan of ancient Egypt, so this inspired me to turn my attention to its battle against Pompey instead. To do that, though, I had to learn more about Egypt, and again more about Rome in correlation.
It's the most research into history I've probably ever done. It wasn't until I was painting my miniatures that I realised I'd been tricked into learning. I'd learned more from my toy soldiers than from school text books and teachers.
If you want the lore about the planet Earth, you have lots of material to draw from (although probably not as much as historians would prefer). People study our past and reconstruct the events of past civilisations and ecologies, and they write about it. And it's not just the people of today. People have been writing about the world around them for centuries. Accurate or not, voices from our own past reveal much about the ways of the old world, and thanks to visionary librarians and antiquarians, we have accounts that date back thousands of years.
It's easy to choose to become captivated about some aspect of our shared heritage. It might take a while to find the "hook" but if you look at the vast history of humans on Earth, you're bound to find something. Admittedly, Earth doesn't have an ent society to explore or an elf kingdom to read about, and it doesn't have magic or teleporters or intergalactic travel. If you're captivated by those kinds of fantastic flights of fancy, then Earth history just may not be a place you want for your game. I get that. However, for me the idea that ancient Egyptians believed their prayers to Amun-Ra influenced a battle is as interesting as a fantasy druid actually throwing lightning bolts from her fingertips. It's intense to think of how, to most people, the written words of a Roman priest had basically the same power as a spell scroll in a fantasy world. Interpretation of reality, regardless of how wrong it is, does influence people's actions. That's fascinating, sometimes morbidly so in the event of religious war. It's not the same as pitting your fighters against ACTUAL DEMONS, and for that reason I don't play only historic wargames, but I think as an occasional variation it's a fair replacement.
It's fascinating to me that as a wargamer I get to analyse the actions of civilizations long past and scrutinize the choices made by influential people. That there are even influential people is noteworthy. The power of leaders and political figures and army generals is frightening because it's as true now as it was thousands of years ago. The through-line of human nature is downright surprising, when you pick up on it. Does it have to be this way? Do we have to run our societies like this? Are there alternatives? Well, if you ever thought wargaming was just about pushing model soldiers around a battle map, think again. Once you start asking why those soldiers even decided to rush toward each other's spears, you're not just a wargamer any more. You've earned the title of armchair philosopher (that and 4 dollars will get you a free cup of coffee at your local café, but you have to pay extra for an audience to sit at your feet and listen to your anthropological theories).
The wargamers I've met so far are typically excited by the idea of building battlefields, assembling armies, painting toy soldiers, and rolling dice. Different games provide different degrees of guidance on all of these activities.
You might think there would be more guidance for the real world militaries, but I've found that there's more direct guidance for the fictional militaries. I think this is because fictional armies were developed specifically for wargames. Those game developers know exactly what you need to know to build your roster. It's often in the interest of the game developers to be so specific about their made-up armies that you're inspired to buy exactly the miniature they've developed for a specific role.
Real history, though, is messy and confusing and it doesn't exist only so you can waste an afternoon replaying it as a game. You have to do your research. You have to find rules that you like. You have to build an army that suits those rules and that aligns with what actually happened. It's a different kind of puzzle than the one you get with fictional wargames, and it's kind of exciting for it.
What's also exciting is that once you understand it, you can fictionalize real world histories. It's not written anywhere that fish people or vampires can't attack your roman army. Ghouls can attack your Egyptians as a mummy's revenge. You could send your ancient Egyptians into space, you can have Romans battle Cthulhu's horde of Shoggoths and Gibbering Mouthers. There are all kinds of variations you can do on the real world history you've learned in your research, and it's a whole new game all over again.
Like plain wargaming, historical wargaming is, as it turns out, a lot of fun. If you've only played in a fictional setting, consider trying out a historical one. You may not change history, but you can at least pretend like you have.