by Armchair Dragoons PAO, 24 July 2023
We’ve partnered with Beyond Solitaire to launch a short survey about your solo wargaming preferences. The plan is to run this survey thru the end of August, and then take a look at what everyone’s reported to us as their favorites. We’ll let Liz Davidson explain what’s going on:
Hello, solo gamers!
Many of us are omnigamers who enjoy a wide range of solo games, but I think solo historical and wargames don’t get as much love as they deserve. Every year, I love commenting on the People’s Choice Top 200 list, but also spend a lot of time complaining about how my favorite games keep falling further down the list, and further out of the public eye.
So, Brant from Armchair Dragoons & I have partnered up to try something new—we are putting together a “People’s Choice Top 20” list of solo historical games, and we want you to help us out by telling us your favorites!
“Historical” is a term we have deliberately chosen to allow a wide array of games to be considered. Your nominees can be traditional wargames, conflict simulations, or games that actively engage with history in some way. (A game with a pasted-on historical theme should not be included here.)
By “solo games,” we truly mean games that you enjoy on your own. No official solo mode is required—wargamers commonly play multiple sides against each other. Just make sure that if you put a game on your ballot, you do it because you actually enjoy playing it by yourself.
If you want to participate, please fill out the Google Form linked here. We will be leaving it open through 12:00 PM EST on August 31, 2023. Once we have closed the form, we will crunch the data, prepare some fun commentary on the results, and publish the list for everyone to enjoy.
Thanks for joining us in this new project, and happy gaming!
Liz (Beyond Solitaire)
If the survey does not appear below, or if you have trouble scrolling through it (as sometimes happens on phones) you can use this link to fill it out directly through Google forms
Thanks for your participation and we’ll look forward to sharing the results with you as we get to the end of the Summer
Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and saddling up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)
You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
IF YOU ENCOUNTER A COUNTER CASTING A HEX IN A HEX
AND YOU COUNTER THE HEX WITH A COUNTER-HEX IN THAT HEX DURING THE ENCOUNTER,
AND YOU HAVE TO COUNT HOW MANY HEXES ARE IN THE HEX DURING THE ENCOUNTER
ARE YOU PLAYING A HEX-AND-COUNTER WARGAME?
Great history games research for solo. When will you do one for wargames? I put my votes in all Train games. Excellent historical games.
if you truly think train games are excellent historical games – rather than trying to be a curmudgeonly troll – then by all means vote for them
if you want to continue to ignore the primacy of “wargames” in the descriptor
or the use of Jim Dunnigan’s preferred euphemism, and only focus on the final part of the statement that is specifically there to avoid having to draw bright definitional lines around whether games like the COIN series or Red Burnoose or Churchill get ruled in or out, then that’s just you throwing a tantrum because someone else is taking the lead on something you could have done yourself, but chose not to.
But as Rocky noted here, there are plenty of different definitions of wargame and they’ve evolved over time, and that’s just for the professionals, never mind the hobbyists. Peter Perla literally WROTE A BOOK on wargaming, so you’re going to have be a little understanding that we’re going to follow his lead over yours, even if you weren’t pitching a toddler meltdown fit over not getting your way
So go ahead and continue to throw your public performative tantrums so you can preen about to your fellow regressivists and brag how you “pwned those woke inclusionist libs” or whatever other pejoratives you prefer. The rest of us will be out here actually broadening the knowledge of the hobby as a whole and making it a place where people want to be, instead of a place full of people just looking to complain about what they want to avoid
Wait, you mean he didn’t mean my games?
They don’t all have solo modes, but they are by and large historical ones….
B~)