Tactical wargame
Tactical wargames are a type of wargame that models military conflict at a tactical level, i.e. units range from individual vehicles and squads to platoons or companies. These units are rated based on types and ranges of individual weaponry. The first tactical wargames were played as miniatures, extended to board games, and they are now also enjoyed as video games.
The games are designed so that a knowledge of military tactics will facilitate good gameplay. Tactical wargames offer more of a challenge to the designer, as fewer variables or characteristics inherent in the units being simulated are directly quantifiable. Modern commercial board wargaming avoided tactical subjects for many years, but since initial attempts at the subject appeared, it has remained a favourite topic among wargamers. Perhaps the most successful board wargaming system ever designed, Advanced Squad Leader, is set at the tactical level.
Miniatures-based wargames
Tactical wargame rules have appeared for every period of human history and even into the future. The first true "miniatures" games may have developed in antiquity, though Kriegsspiel, a command study invented in 18th century Prussia, is generally accepted as the first true miniatures game. Commercially available miniatures, however, only became popular at the start of the 20th century.Naval miniatures
Jane's published several sets of rules for naval games in the early to mid-20th century.Land-based miniatures
The number of land-based tactical miniatures games produced for the commercial market increased exponentially following the Second World War as interest in that conflict and disposable income increased.Combat resolution systems
Various games have different methods for resolution of combat results, a central core dynamic for any wargame.Attacker-defender ratio
The wargame Panzerblitz is a leading game in the genre of tactical wargames, and was an iconic new type of game when published by Avalon Hill in 1970. In this game, each unit has an attack strength and a defense strength. To resolve combat, the attacker's attack rating and the defender's defense rating are calculated into a simple ratio; the result is rounded off in the defender's favor. One die is rolled. The Combat Results Table provides the result for the dice roll; the results can range from "no effect" to partial damage, or another role, or complete destruction of the unit being attacked.Attack and defense values
The game series Axis and Allies includes some games that are tactical in nature, such as Axis & Allies: Battle of the Bulge and Axis & Allies: D-Day. In all Axis and Allies games, each unit has an attack value and a defense value. During a single attack, each attacking unit gets one dice roll and each defending unit gets one dice roll. If a dice result is the same or less than the appropriate value, then that unit destroys the enemy. it is possible for both units to be destroyed using this system.Tactical board wargames
History
The genesis of tactical board wargaming goes back to 1969. Up until that time, wargaming—which in the modern, recreational form only dated back to 1958—tended to concentrate on operational and strategic subjects. Charles S. Roberts of Avalon Hill had developed a wide range of strategic wargames based upon historical battles—the first of these being the 1961 releases of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, issued to coincide with the beginning of the centennial celebration of the American Civil War. AH issued a wide range of similar games in the years that followed, and established itself as the market leader in board wargames. However, most of these games were at the army, brigade, battalion, or regiment level. Few were at the more tactical levels.Tactical Game 3 was introduced by Strategy & Tactics magazine as a platoon/company level game focusing on tactics on the Eastern Front. In 1970, that game's designer, the legendary James F. Dunnigan, sold the rights to the game to Avalon Hill, who quickly released PanzerBlitz. This was the start of the so-called "Second Generation" of wargaming. PanzerBlitz eventually sold 250,000 copies, though it was not without critics.
In the early 1970s, several tactical games made their way onto the expanding wargaming market, including Grunt featuring platoon-level warfare in Vietnam and Combat Command: Platoon-Company Combat, France, 1944 billed as a western front sequel to PanzerBlitz, and Soldiers about World War I, all by Dunnigan/SPI. Dunnigan then crossed another boundary and became the first publisher to release a game on the then-ongoing Cold War, called Red Star/White Star: Tactical Combat in Western Europe in the 1970s. While the game was successful, Dunnigan was disappointed with it, citing difficulties in realistically portraying tactical combat in a tabletop board game.
Dunnigan tried to take tactical games into a new direction in 1973 with KampfPanzer and Desert War, which featured simultaneous movement, expanding on an optional rule for PanzerBlitz. Unfortunately, the quest for greater realism was having a price in complexity and "bookkeeping", or recording of moves on paper. Nonetheless, other tactical games on a man to man level were released with simultaneous movement, with Sniper! being released by SPI in 1973, Patrol!: Man to Man Combat in the 20th Century and Tank!: Armored Combat in the 20th Century both in 1974. That same year, Avalon Hill released Panzer Leader: The Game of Tactical Warfare on the Western Front 1944-45.
The problems with true tactical games were all too apparent. According to Lorrin Bird, writing in Special Issue #2 of Campaign Magazine:
The major disappointment with the three major Avalon Hill games was the obvious sequential nature of the whole situation. A shoots, A moves. B shoots, B moves. With a little opportunity fire thrown in. In situations like the Battle of Kursk in Panzer Blitz confronting the enemy meant possible extinction. The hardest part to accept was the situation where three German tanks block a pass and cannot be seen by the T-34s on their combat phase. On the Russian move they move up to the Mark IVs and have to stop. The T-34 move might have taken only a two-hex advance and then they idle their engines for the next 5 minutes. On the next German move, the Mark IVs cleverly dart away, in and out of cover and take position again. The T-34s...move a few hexes, stop and idle, awaiting the German movement which frees up the next few hexes for them. Another funny situation is where a Tiger unit sits in the open and a Sherman comes out of nowhere and ends up adjacent to the Germans. With ideal conditions, the Tiger can decimate the Shermans in no time flat without any "defensive" fire by the M-4s at all, and then move off....While Panzer Blitz, Panzer Leader and Arab-Israeli Wars are wonderful games, and demand a high degree of tactical ability to play, victory can be obtained in a manner very often that runs contrary to reason and a player's intelligence...
This much anticipated sequel to PanzerBlitz was successful, and the next year SPI replaced their earlier titles with games featuring a new "Simultaneous-Sequential-Play-System", eliminating the bookkeeping involved in games like KampfPanzer and Tank and attempting to address the problems described by Bird, above. And so MechWar '77 replaced the earlier Red Star/White Star, Panzer '44 replaced Combat Command, and Search & Destroy replaced Grunt.
The new Simultaneous-Sequential-Play-System allowed for much greater realism without sacrificing playability, and was considered the new "state of the art" for tactical wargames. The first era of tactical wargaming had come to an end. The new state of the art was extended to Avalon Hill's Tobruk in 1976, as well as SPI's Firefight. But neither game did well, with increased realism in the form of detailed penetration tables in Tobruk and rigid rules for modern Soviet doctrine forced on the players of Firefight making games once again less playable. Tobruk also suffered from an unattractive map surface which depicted basically flat terrain.
Another point for players of tactical wargames to consider was the increasing amount of unit data that was being built into the games. Rather than pieces depicting generic "infantry" or "cavalry" units as in Civil War strategy games, for example, games like Tobruk were inundating players with tables of complex ballistics information. Firefight came with a separate booklet on "Reference Data" amounting to 20 pages of information, much of it not immediately necessary for gameplay but certainly useful to defend some of the design decisions which restricted game play.
At this point, Avalon Hill approached developer John Hill to "do a game like Tank! a squad level game...." Hill was well known, and had recently written an article in Moves entitled "Designing for Playability." He had recently published BarLev and Battle for Hue.
''Squad Leader''
The result was Squad Leader, which went on to become the best selling tactical wargame ever, spawning three add-ons and an Advanced version which produced twelve "official" core modules, several historically based modules, a solitaire version, and hundreds of third party add-ons and variants.Squad Leader, released in 1977, used a semi-simultaneous system as well, focusing on infantry combat. The physical components for the game were unmatched in terms of quality, using full color painted mapboards on rigid mountings that had the added advantage of being geomorphic. As the Squad Leader game system grew and more boards were added, they could be set up in a variety of configurations and used to represent a wide array of units, as the infantry counters were generic and did not portray specific units. Some innovative rules for such things as leadership and "penetrating fire" were introduced.
Some observers felt Squad Leader was too romantic a view of infantry combat. Bird felt that the game "completely sidesteps the effect of widespread panic and morale breakdowns, and treats every soldier as if he were totally dedicated to the cause..." Others felt that games like Search & Destroy received short shrift.
Few tactical games during are comparable to Squad Leader... which is quite popular and is of a similar scale, but has a needlessly complex combat system, leadership rules that would be more appropriate for 18th Century combat and ridiculously simplistic casualty rules...The wargame industry has basically ignored the more accurate portrayal of company level combat in S&D for the more glamorous version portrayed in Squad Leader.
Even the developers of Squad Leader admitted that "our troops assault with a tenacity that would make Kelly's Heroes proud."