There are lots of wargames out there, and lots of them share essentially the same game loop, but many of them feel more unique than you might expect. When I started my War of the Rohirrim campaign, it was after a year of wargaming only in Warhammer 40,000. When I played, I was legitimately surprised at how different Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game (MESBG) felt, on the tabletop, compared to 40k. After all, they're both basically dice games where 2 opponents roll dice and hope for the highest number. They're even published by the same company, and the turn structure of each game is very similar (move, shoot, fight), and yet somehow Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game and Warhammer 40,000 feel remarkably distinct.
This blog post is an attempt to analyse why and how 2 games that are basically the same game still manage to feel like completely different games. Most of my observations probably apply broadly to many comparisons, but I'm primarily using Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game and Warhammer 40,000 as examples because they happen to be the games that prompted the thought exercise. It's also useful to have specific examples to illustrate a point.
I'm calling modern wargames "dice games" because they do, to be fair, involve a lot of dice rolling. But obviously the miniatures, and particularly the means you're given through the rules to control them, are hugely significant in a miniatures wargame. This, at the very least, influences how the game feels as much as dice rolls do.
You might think that a seemingly small rule like charging the enemy would be perfunctory. The rules have to include it, obviously, but does it matter whether it requires a dice roll to perform or not? But small choices made by the rules writers end up defining how the game feels.
The effect of this minor difference changes the way you think about your strategy and your turn. In Warhammer 40,000 a charge can fail, but it can also mean a lot of "free" movement, and the privilege of fighting first.
In Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, a charge just part of being on the battlefield. You move, and should you run into an enemy, you fight.
There's obviously a lot more variation. In the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness, a charge action can be interrupted by your enemy's Reaction. It can also fail with a bad dice roll, but you still have to (get to?) move half the distance (making it easier on the next turn for your enemy to charge into you.)
There's no way to play Warhammer 40,000, Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, or Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness with the same strategic mindset. An actions in any game translates into a choice for the player, and demands a benefit and cost analysis. Small variations in the implications of seemingly simple actions become surprisingly influential in how the game plays.
In Warhammer 40,000 units of soldiers shoot and fight other units of soldiers. The target of an attack almost always gets to decide which model within a unit takes any applicable Wounds. Aside from Precision attacks and Character models, there's not really a way to declare that an individual miniature is attacking a specific enemy miniature. This isn't a weakness in the system, it's just that Warhammer 40,000 is designed to portray a battle at a regiment level. If you want to play a skirmish game, you play Kill Team.
Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game isn't a skirmish game, but it's not exactly limited to regimental tactics, either. When a miniature makes a ranged attack during the Shooting Phase, it targets a specific miniature on the battlefield.
When 2 miniatures are in base contact, it's not called "melee" or "close-quarter combat". It's a Duel because in the movies or books you don't follow a whole squad of men fighting each other, you follow a specific hero dueling a specific villain. Combat focuses on a single interaction.
In both cases, all Hero models have special stats to decrease the likelihood of a rank-and-file soldier taking down an epic hero, and there's a rule to stop the Duel interaction (the loser gets pushed back 1") so no model is locked in place. The battles are dynamic and fluid, with miniatures moving relatively freely across the battlefield, in and out of melee, targeting and attacking when the opportunity arises.
Admittedly, there can be a lot more individual rolls in MESBG than in 40k, depending on the composition of your army. Realistically though, you probably bought a box of 20 orcs and 20 humans, plus a few Hero models for each side. The rank and file tend to fight one another, so Strength and Defence values tend to be pretty steady throughout the game. Heroes tend to fight other Heroes, just like in the movies, and those are often the "surprise" Strength and Defence and Attack values that keeps the army book open as reference.
The process of playing a game is stepping through a list of procedures as defined by the rulebook. The steps you take to play the game are the literal experience of game play. When a game claims to be about something, it ideally triggers your imagination. That's why modern games have strong themes. But once a game has evoked something in your imagination, it's up to the game's rules to calibrate the play procedure with the images its theme has conjured.
In Warhammer 40,000, the Stealth rule starts with this explanation:
Some warriors are masters of disguise and concealment.
Sounds pretty cool. You can imagine a lone soldier, maybe even an Assassin, darting behind ruins, crawling through rubble and craters, hiding in shadow. Undetected, the soldier creeps up on a target, taking each step as delicately as possible, balancing the risk of being noticed with the risk of missing an opportunity to strike. But the actual Stealth rule? It just imposes a -1 to Hit:
each time a ranged attack is made against it, subtract 1 from that attack's Hit roll.
The disconnect couldn't be greater. If you're shooting at someone in Stealth mode, then stealth has already failed. This rule plays and feels like improved armour, or maybe a rudimentary visual filter like the Mirror Image spell in dnd.
There's no stealth mechanic in Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game that I'm aware of, but an obvious comparison is the One Ring itself. In the lore, when you put on the ring, you become invisible. Here's the mechanic from the rulebook:
Whilst they wear the Ring, the Ringbearer cannot be directly targeted by Magical Powers or shooting attacks [...]
Of course, wearing the Ring doesn't cause you to vanish from reality. You can still be hit accidentally, or detected by means other than sight. To reflect this, the rules include a sliding scale of penalties for enemies wanting to target the Ringbearer by essentially just feeling around or maybe sniffing the air:
If an enemy wishes to Charge the Ringbearer whilst they wear the Ring, it must pass a Courage test, applying a penalty of -1 to the roll for every 1" the Ringbearer is away from the foe.
If you manage to find your invisible opponent and engage the Ringbearer in combat, your Fight value is halved during the encounter.
Appropriately, Sauron and Ringwraiths don't suffer these penalties, and in fact benefit from the Ring being worn.
To some degree, I guess this is a criticism of the Stealth rule in Warhammer 40,000 but that's beside the point. Charitably, my point is that 40k doesn't really claim to be a game about stealth, or at least no more than it is about any other aspect of its vastly setting. Some rules strongly reflect its setting, and others offer token acknowledgment of mechanics that ought to exist in any setting. Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game has a very limited set of rules for its world, as written by Tolkien. Every rule written for MESBG is designed to reflect Tolkien's Middle Earth. Both rule sets do their job well, and so it's because Warhammer and Middle-Earth are different settings that the games feel different when you cycle through the rules.
For the same reasons we paint 28mm miniatures to get them ready for an imaginary little war, game designers create rules written with evocative language. For the same reason that playing MESBG with space marines would feel wrong, a rule written in the "language" of 40k would feel wrong in the MEBSG rulebook. The "flavour" of rules matter a lot more than it logically should.
In the Chaos Space Marines codex for Warhammer 40,000 10th edition, there's a stratagem called Veteran Instincts, which allows a space marine in Terminator armour to re-roll a Wound roll of 1 (or any Wound roll against a monster or vehicle.) They can do this because they're experienced:
Space Marine Terminators are veterans of hundreds of war zones and can recognise the weakness of Humanity’s many foes. Such experience can be drawn on in battle to crush the most stubborn of attackers.
In Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, there's essentially the same rule, except it's a magical power called Enchanted Blades:
The caster is able to imbue the blades of their allies with powerful and ancient magic, making their weapons more likely to find a chink in their enemy's armour. In the Fight Phase, the target may re-roll all failed To Wound rolls.
Allowing for minor variation, it's basically the same rule. You spend some resource (either a Command Point or a Will point) and grand a miniature the ability to re-roll its attempt to impose a Wound on its enemy. But you can't read those 2 rules as being actually the same in the emotional sense. One is the result of countless battles, hard fought and won by hardened marines who know exactly what weakness to target. The other is ancient magic that enchants a blade so that it defies physics and guides a strike to become more serious than it would be otherwise. They're definitely different, even though we know, deep down, they're both essentially "re-roll your To Wound roll."
There are countless other examples, like the Grenade Stratagem and the Collapse Rocks spell, or even, simply, shooting a bolter rifle or shooting a long bow. When the rules describe an action on the tabletop, it plants an idea in your imagination, and your dice rolls almost feel physically different as a result.
I've heard people say that the Horus Heresy game "feels like a historical wargame." That's partly, I think, because the Horus Heresy has always been treated as ancient history within the Warhammer 40,000 lore. However, it's also down to mission design. Horus Heresy missions are presented, in many ways, as documentation of battles that occurred long ago. Missions like The Battle for Felweather Keep and Battle for Kalium Gate spend several pages describing what happened on those battlefields. To play the mission, all you actually need is the final, single page that describes the battlefield layout and the relevant objectives. What fictionally happened on a pretend-historical battlefield has no impact on gameplay whatsoever.
That's Horus Heresy, so imagine the historical feel of Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, set way back in a sort of medieval age, with books and movies we all know and love describing all the major events of Middle Earth. To many of us, it's closer to our hearts than real world history. Playing a mission in MESBG can feel exactly like playing out a famous real world battle, like Agincourt or Waterloo.
Even if you're not playing a mission as written because you happen to not own every single MESBG miniature produced, the way the missions are written aren't focused on objectives and victory points. The missions are about the [fictional] history. It tells you who was involved in the battle, it tells you where they started, it tells you what might happen (the castle wall is breached, or the Mûmak is driven into the water, or whatever) and what the repercussions are. The outcome of the battle may even have an effect on the next mission.
The Warhammer 40,000 missions in Pariah Nexus and Armageddon are written in the present tense. The mission is happening to your army now:
A shimmering wall of Warp energy flickers into being, dividing the battlefield and impeding vision...
Its language is focused on what your army must do to win the battle. The first half of the Crusade books contain lore, but there's no conceit that you're playing the exact battles you read about, only that you're in that war. You might be miles away from the specific battles you read about in the lore section. You can win or lose and possibly have no real effect on the results of the war. It's every army for itself.
The pretense of each game is different. It may or may not affect how you play the game, but I think it affects how you approach the table. And frankly, during any Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, it's always in the back of my mind that what I'm doing on the tabletop is an alternate reality to what "really" happened. I know Merry doesn't actually die in battle. I know Frodo wasn't really on the same battlefield as Aragorn. But in 40k, everything that happens on my table is canon for my faction. It's feels so real that sometimes I have to remind myself that my "dead" miniatures are really only Out of Action and can rejoin the battle in the next game.
Wargames can seem pretty similar at first glance. Move some miniatures, roll some dice. That's refreshing, because once you learn one wargame then you've sort of learned the basics for most other wargames. However, it's also deceptive. There's a lot more to a wargame than just measuring and throwing dice. Next time you play different game systems back-to-back, take a few moments afterwards to compare them. You might be surprised at how dissimilar they actually are.