A Paradox?

[Bligh]

Wargames provide a unique strategy game that have a sort of grounded realism, i.e. these tactics feel real compared to fantasy type games. The other part is that it's an abstraction of war. If we were playing these games and had to actually witness the horrors that our game actions cause, then I don't think anyone would play them.

Nowhere near the horrors of war, but we actually went through a phase in our wargaming, where if you could make an enemy regiment surrender to you the Standard bearer of that Regiment had to be given to the victor. They held it until said regiment captured another colour. They then got theirs back, and so it went on. The problem became accute when several colours were captured from different protaganists at one show, and some of the loosers only played spasmodic games so had little chance of getting their colour back. The book keeping was also getting out of hand on who had which person's colour. So we stopped it. The real killer was that if you captured a gun battery you got to melt down one of the guns. That stopped people risking guns in silly positions, but resulted in guns being withdrawn at the first sign of an enemy advance. We gave up on that idea too.

I don't think that the idea of keeping a struck ship would go down too well in our game either.
Rob.