Wargame
Hex maps, supply lines, and an unhurried audience
Military conflict simulated at the level of units and terrain, not individual action. The computer wargame inherited its rules, its audience and its typography from the tabletop, and kept them long after the rest of gaming moved on.
A wargame simulates military conflict at the operational level: the player commands formations across terrain, manages supply and morale, and wins through position, not reflex. It arrived on home computers as a direct descendant of the tabletop hex-and-counter hobby, and for years it kept that hobby’s conventions — dense manuals, numbered scenarios, and an assumption that the player already knew what a zone of control was.
It was a substantial category in the British press. Searching this library for wargame, wargames and wargaming returns 7,956 pages across 2,972 issues; widening to war game and war games raises it to 11,089 pages, though that catches other senses of the phrase. Either way it is a large body of coverage, and usually in its own reviewing ghetto: many magazines gave wargames a separate column, on the reasonable grounds that their readership overlapped little with the arcade audience.
Distinguish it from later real-time strategy. The wargame is turn-based, historically specific, and interested in accuracy; the RTS that displaced it in the 1990s is real-time, usually fictional, and interested in tempo.
Fast facts
- Core loop: assess, order, resolve, repeat by turn.
- Map: hexes or squares, with terrain modifying movement and combat.
- Subject: usually a specific historical campaign.
- Defining titles: the SSI catalogue, Laser Squad, Chaos, later UFO: Enemy Unknown.
- Audience: older, overlapping with tabletop wargaming.
Genre conventions
- Turn structure: orders issued, then resolved simultaneously or in sequence.
- Combat resolution: odds ratios and a random factor, inherited from tabletop tables.
- Supply and morale: units degraded by attrition, not destroyed outright.
- Fog of war: limited intelligence about enemy positions.
- Scenario sets: one engine, many historical situations.
The £1.99 crossover
The wargame’s specialist audience was a commercial ceiling, and the clearest record of someone going through it is Edge’s September 1996 retreview of Julian Gollop’s Rebelstar.
Rebelstar Raiders appeared in 1984 as a two-player, single-screen Spectrum skirmish wargame, published at full price by Red Shift. Edge’s verdict on how it did is one line long: it “sold less than ‘some’”.
Gollop rebuilt it — several screens, a one-player option, the word Raiders dropped — and took it to Firebird, who released it in 1986 at £1.99, “whereupon it promptly sold thousands”.
The design did not become less of a wargame. Only the price changed, and the audience that had been the genre’s boundary turned out to be a function of what it cost to find out whether you liked it. Edge credits Rebelstar with introducing action points and opportunity fire, and with inventing what it calls the sugar-coated wargame — the strategy game that does not require you to already be a wargamer.
That line runs directly to Laser Squad and then to UFO: Enemy Unknown, which is how a hex-map hobby became one of the best-known systems in strategy gaming.
Evolution
- 1980-84: direct translations of tabletop systems, often by their designers.
- 1985-89: the computer starts doing what paper could not — hidden movement, automatic resolution, an opponent.
- 1990s: the squad-level branch (Laser Squad, UFO: Enemy Unknown) reaches a wider audience than the operational one.
- Mid-1990s: real-time strategy takes the mainstream, and the wargame returns to its specialist base.