(* for me)

The Girl and I took the past week off work for our anniversary. We did some old married couple stuff and some maintenance, but a lot of the week was spent in our respective monotropic foci. For her, that was a lot of editing and gap-filling on her current fiction project. For me, it was entirely too much time spent playing, deconstructing, and sketching out house rules for Eagle Leader.

I’ve spent the past few posts braindumping on that game, and as I was wandering around the house today, I found myself considering just why it’s so compelling. It’s easy for me to lose myself in PC games, particularly turn-based tactical stuff (looking at you, X-Com and Doorkickers series), but what’s so fascinating about analog solo wargames? They’re not nearly as cost-effective or space-efficient – for what I’ve spent on Eagle Leader, I could make an immense dent in my Steam wishlist, and that wouldn’t require any shelf space.

My introduction to wargaming was really my introduction to gaming in general: Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars, which a kid in my fourth-grade class brought to school for our free-play time. At the end of that school year, I swapped him my Transformers for his Car Wars stuff in what we both intended to be a summer-long loan. That was the year I was shifted into the public school system, and I never saw that dude again. I hope it turned out to be as good a trade for him as it was for me.

Ads in Autoduel Quarterly, SJG’s house magazine for Car Wars, led me to Ogre, SJG’s hex-and-counter game of future nuclear battlefields and cybernetic supertanks. Ogre was where I first flailed toward solo wargaming. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but an article in The Ogre Book (the original staple-bound collection of magazine articles) presented a random/algorithmic method for solitaire play. As the bookish, socially-awkward, unathletic, only kid living in a neighborhood with no one else of my generation, solo play was the only mode of play accessible to me until middle school, when I encountered other nerds in my Boy Scout troop. Even then, more often than not, I wound up doing the lone gamer thing of reading books and idealizing the concept of actually playing.

Other than a few years playing AEG’s Clan War in the early 2000s, I didn’t do much wargaming in college or the couple of decades that followed. About the extent of it was buying and reading Battletech material, more to follow the metaplot and immerse myself in the setting than to actually play.

Like, I suspect, a lot of gamers, I (re)discovered solo wargaming during the COVID-19 pandemic. In my case, I started on solo roleplaying, but that’s basically a structured set of writing prompts for me, and I have enough writing projects struggling to get out of my head. I was looking for something more satisfying and stumbled upon a Reddit thread endorsing Dan Verssen Games’ Warfighter. I ordered a copy and was, well… not exactly hooked, but at least intrigued. And DVG apparently also published Thunderbolt/Apache Leader, a solo wargame focusing on my favorite aircraft of all time… huh.

In the five years since then, the collection has expanded a bit more than I like to admit. I have a couple more permutations of Warfighter and four Leader-series games, with a fifth in the Kickstarter fulfillment queue. A couple of others have also made their way onto my shelves – Fields of Fire is too intimidating for me to try until the next time I’m home alone for a few days, and I’ll get back to Forward Defense ’85 someday, if only to rewrite the rulebook.

All that history still doesn’t answer the question, though: why? What it is about these games?

Part of it is the simple fact that they’re analog. I spend a ridiculous amount of my usual day staring into screens, both at work and at home, and I’m becoming increasingly cognizant of how bad that is for physical and mental health alike. Getting away from my desk and physically manipulating dice and record sheets and counters and cards is weirdly therapeutic in a way I struggle to grasp, let alone describe. It’s a reminder that there is fun to be had in meatspace.

Part of it is a greater degree of engagement with the mechanics than I get from most PC games. Digital gaming is happy to handle all the mechanics for me. This leaves me free to concentrate on tactics and logistics, but it also makes me into something of a passive consumer. With analog solo games, there’s no digital amanuensis to autocalculate the chances of my actions. Getting my neurons on the structure of the game is deeply rewarding.

Part of it is the emergent narrative. Particularly with the Leader-series games, player-controlled units are pilots or commanders with individual names or callsigns (or, in the case of Spruance Leader, individual warships and their crews). That tiny bit of personalization makes it easy for me to get invested in the achievements and struggles of those imaginary protagonists. While they won’t take on stature in my personal mythology the way some of my LARP war stories have, there are no-shit-there-we-were guys like Screamer, the F-4G pilot who turned out to be the surprise MVP of my first Eagle Leader campaign, never missing an AGM-45 shot to plow the road for the strike aircraft – or the unexpectedly scrappy USS Doyle, the only ship to survive all the way through my recent playthrough of the Linked Atlantic Campaign in Spruance Leader.

And then there’s the solo aspect itself. One of the prices of being an aging introvert, now in my fifties, working in a niche industry in a small Appalachian town, is that it’s damned hard to find local gaming connections with shared interests in anything beyond D&D. I get to see the tribe a couple of times a year at cons, and I’m still running my Twilight: 2000 campaign with occasional Shadowdark excursions… but all of those require work and, more critically, scheduling of a group of busy adults. Sometimes it’s easier for me to just crack open a box and find a way to entertain myself.