| Its an OK piece of journalism. He's a popular designer and its a popular game. Not the best or the most popular and there wasn't much discussion about the lively ecosystem other than some company 30 years ago went out of business, which is like claiming computers are dying because Atari stopped making the 800 about three decades ago. Its a fairly healthy marketplace. According to boardgamegeek the avalon hill "up front" is more anticipated or whatever than this. I like the solitaire wargames and I'm really looking forward to Nimitz (which incidentally beat Distant Plain in the "anticipated" rankings for solitaire). I'm waiting to hear about the solitaire rules in Distant Plains before playing it. The internet is whats driving modern tabletop wargaming, first excellent desktop publishing tools, second excellent printing-over-the-internet and third the community rallys around places like boardgamegeek, probably not so much WashPost. One interesting thing about cardboard games, of which I have quite a few indeed (like, almost everything DVG has ever made, along with many other games) is the costs aren't flinched at very much because they last a long time. I have very little use for the first Bioshock game I bought many years ago for like $30, but the copy of DVG's Napoleon (probably long out of print) around the same time for about a hundred bucks is still perfectly playable. Given the cruddy weather I may do some gaming tonight... Before someone pipes up about "putting these old fashioned things on a computer" there's already VASSAL although I don't like it because its so low res. By low res, imagine professional printing at 600 DPI across an eight foot wide dinner table, thats like, what 60000 pixels across, and there are no 60K pixel tablets available the size of a kitchen table anyway. So, no, online or on a tablet has little artistic appeal to me for playing. On the other hand I lurk BGG and other websites to learn, its hardly a technophobic hobby by any means. One interesting social media type effect is the designer might not be able to financially swing certain addons or feelies in the game, but the community will host them anyway online for printing at home. So if you always thought "Alexander" was supposed to be a card game instead of a counter game, there's a printable set of cards available at BGG to replace the random counters. I have a set and I agree Alexander should have been a card game not counter game. I'm sure you'll be totally shocked to hear that designers / distributors who support / tolerate their communities tend to be dramatically more financially successful than the cease and desist crowd. Another socially shared board game characteristic is print at home helpers. Flow charts, place mats, that kind of "artwork" that can't be economically shipped with the games but you can print at home if you want. Checklists, AARs, flowcharts, sometimes mods or alternatives... Its a fun hobby which I greatly enjoy. Board gaming / war gaming is already pretty well successfully startup'd and social media'd and could provide a good role model / map for other industries to do "stuff" online. If you're in another industry and you don't have a BGG work alike in your industry, well, you should, so some startup should hop to it and make some dough. |
More like claiming that the sales of wargames are way down from a peak around 1980, when two million were sold. Sales of wargames are few orders of magnitude lower than this today, and that's an interesting point to mention in an article about a particular designer of wargames.