My path to wargames

I started playing board games long ago. As a kid, I used to play classic games like Monopoly, Battleship and Uno with my mom and siblings. I also liked chess, and even won a chess tournament in high school. Then I stopped playing board games after I got my first job. As an adult I mostly played party games like Sushi Go! and Exploding Kittens at family gatherings like Christmas and Thanksgiving.

It wasn't until recently that I rediscovered board games, and found the world of board gaming had grown tremendously. For me, it all started thanks to Pandemic during the pandemic. When the world shut down, like everyone else, I ended up spending a lot of time home. I bought Pandemic as a way to help pass time, and had a great time playing it. From there I started branching into other popular games, and soon started to find a pattern in my personal taste:

I've found I often dislike Euros-style games. For example, games like Terraforming Mars, Spirit Island, Dominant Species, Ark Nova, etc. Some of these games are extremely popular, some of the most popular in the world, but I just don't enjoy playing them. Of course Euro-games are a huge genre, and there are games like Pandemic that I love. But for me they tend to be very hit or miss.

On the other hand, the games that I consistently loved playing most were games like Root, and Pax games like Pax Porfiriana and Pax Pamir. I started to find a pattern: I like games in which there is a lot of direct conflict, and I like card driven games (CDGs). This eventually led me into exploring the world of wargames (Empire of the Sun, Washington's War, etc.), and its in that world that I've found some of my favorite games. The thing about wargames is that they can often be quite complex, their rulebooks can seem overwhelming, and it often takes several games for you to fully internalize the rules, and even more games to become good at them. That complexity keeps their target audience small. In this blog, I'll talk about some of the wargames I love and hopefully provide some insight on strategy that might be useful to someone someday.