It looks like we are entering something of a golden age when it comes to serious discussions of tabletop games – at least in book form. I’ve had the pleasure of reading a respectable pile of new books on the subject over the past year, including several on historical wargaming. Last year saw the publication of Maurice Suckling’s textbook Paper Time Machines and Riccardo Masini’s philosophical treatise Historical Simulation and Wargames, and, last but not least, renowned designer Mark Herman’s personal memoir/philosophy/reflections on his own design process for historical games.
Published by GMT Games, better known for publishing Herman’s games than for publishing books, this is a hefty volume full of color pictures that draws inspiration from Herman’s frequent contributions to C3i Magazine. In addition to the two hundred odd pages written for the book, Wargames According to Mark includes sixty pages of design notes originally printed in many of Herman’s card driven games (CDGs). The book is subtitled An Historian’s View of Wargame Design (more on that later), highlighting up front that this is explicitly one person’s view of game design. This is not like Paper Time Machines, which hopes to provide a general view for individuals interested in analyzing and possibly designing games, but rather Herman’s own thoughts on how he has designed his own games. While some readers may find insight for their own design work, this is not a how-to guide. Rather, it is more closely aligned to the design notes that are usually included in Herman’s games.
I am of the firm opinion that the kindest thing one can do with someone’s creative output is to take it seriously – and to treat it with respect requires unfiltered honesty. This means giving praise, of course, but also offering commentary and critique where necessary. I enjoyed reading Wargames According to Mark and I would recommend it to anyone who is already interested based on the title and author alone – you won’t be disappointed. It covers a lot of ground and in it I found sections that made me consider viewpoints I never had before while also finding others that made me scratch my head and consider my own conflicting beliefs. I love books that encourage me to engage with them and offer my own critiques, and Wargames According to Mark achieves this with aplomb, kudos to the author.
Mark on Herman
Wargames According to Mark sits at a crossroads of different book potentialities, a position that I find easier to define by what the book isn’t rather than what it is. It is not a guide to design, that much Herman makes clear from the start. It is also not a history of Herman’s own design career; it dips into aspects of his designs but readers looking for a comprehensive account of the past forty or so years of Herman’s design work may be disappointed. The book is primarily a snapshot of Herman in the here and now with an emphasis on certain threads of his design career.
The book opens with an account of how Herman got into wargame design, including his early career with SPI and how he learned design at the feet of Jim Dunnigan. Fans of SPI and anyone with an interest in how they did design, including some detailed descriptions of pre-computer wargame design, will really enjoy this section. It explains Herman’s design origins and he even walks through the design of one of his games from that era to show the basics of his process. While the theme of him learning his craft at SPI reverberates throughout the book, beyond this section there isn’t a lot of detailed discussion of the actual games he made at this time – fans of Stonewall will not find a detailed breakdown of how that game came to be, for example.
Much of the book focuses on Herman’s favorite designs, which lean towards his more recent work and games on the strategic scale. We the People/Washington’s War, For the People, and especially Empire of the Sun loom large throughout the book, as do Churchill, Pericles, and the relatively recent new edition of Pacific War (technically the oldest game to receive substantial attention in the book). That’s not to say that these are the only games that Herman writes about, many other designs get a look in here or there, but in general if you’re a diehard fan of Great Battles of History or any of Herman’s tactical games (excepting Rebel Fury and its ancestors) you may be disappointed. On the other hand, if you’re an Empire of the Sun mega fan you will be delighted with Wargames According to Mark.
I don’t share Herman’s enthusiasm for strategic games (more of an operational man, myself) and I haven’t played many of the games he discusses in depth in the book, so I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t getting the most out of these sections. Discussions of the underpinnings of aspects of Empire of the Sun’s design are harder to appreciate if I’ve never played it and I don’t know much about the Pacific War (although, to be fair, Herman does usually provide some historical context before going on a lengthy piece about design) so it was hard for me to relate the history to the design choices. This is not a criticism, the book is what its author wants it to be, nor did it prevent me from enjoying reading it, but it is to describe how I may not have been the target audience.
For this reason, I enjoyed the general arguments in Wargames According to Mark more than the game specific stuff. One point he makes that has stuck in my mind is the notion that strategic games are the least abstract form of wargame while tactical games are the most. I suspect that many wargamers are like me and think of abstraction as increasing as you zoom further away from the specific and into the more general. However, Herman’s argument is that actual historical generals (at least in the modern era, we must caveat) were often interacting with the war they were commanding on a scale very similar to the strategic – maps in front of them, considering troop deployments, supply, etc. In this sense a strategic game can bring you much closer to the decision space of a general or national leader than a tactical game can bring you to the perspective of a soldier in the trenches. I think this is an interesting point, although I would controversially suggest that this is a view from the perspective of a game designer and military contractor who has spent substantial time interacting with real world militaries rather than that of a historian trying to look past the great men to discover the smaller factors that determined historical outcomes – but I’m getting ahead of myself. The strategic viewpoint also seems to me to run the risk of falling into traps of Great Man history and I would have loved to see Herman discuss how to avoid that pitfall. Still, I think his overall argument has a lot of merit and dovetails nicely into discussions about who the player is when playing a wargame and how these games are much better at putting you in the shoes of a real person at the strategic scale than at the tactical.
There are also chapters where Herman breaks down his thoughts on different systems for managing movement, how to construct a Combat Results Table, game balance, how to design a multiplayer game, designing solo bots, and the implications of your sequence of play. While I would not say I found these all equally effective, they generally hit a good balance of providing general philosophies or opinions on a subject supported by specific examples. However, there are times when the book gets so lost in the specifics of one choice on one game that I think it loses its perspectives. Fans of the chosen game will enjoy learning more about how it was made but I came for general arguments, not the a director’s cut of designer’s notes.
Of these chapters I found the one on movement systems to be the most successful. The general discussion on different movement systems and why you might choose them is interesting and avoids getting too lost in the weeds. The chapter then ends with a detailed discussion of how Herman applied these principles to designing his game Waterloo, and this section is for my money the best case of marrying design decisions to a specific design. I haven’t played Waterloo, but I have played Gettysburg and Rebel Fury which share the same core movement system. The way Herman highlights why he made changes to Waterloo and how those reflect his interpretation of history represents a high point in the book.
The Card Driven Game system that Herman invented in We the People receives pride of place throughout the book. The final sixty or so pages are just a reprint of the design notes for Herman’s various CDG games published by GMT games (controversially for some this includes Fire in the Lake, a COIN game which some would not classify as a genre of CDG). I happen to really enjoy CDGs in general, even if I’ve only played one of Herman’s, and reading his thoughts on things like separate player decks and whether to include different decks for different eras was another high point. He lays out the case for his own preferences well and there is a lot of insight on display in terms of how to construct a deck for the effect you want in your CDG. He does a great job at showing his own thought processes but still leaves plenty of room for the reader to disagree with his preferences from the position of understanding where Herman is coming from. The CDG discussion is also the aspect of the book that is probably the most useful to designers looking for actionable advice from Wargames According to Mark – anyone thinking about designing their own CDG could probably benefit from reading this book even if they ultimately reject Mark’s advice and make different choices for their design.
What Makes a Historian a Historian
I enjoyed Wargames According to Mark, it may not be the book I wanted it to be, but it’s certainly an enjoyable read with plenty of insight into many of Herman’s most popular and influential designs. What follows is largely tangential to the contents of the book itself, but a trait shared by historians and most cats is that if we see a thread we can’t help but pull on it and see what unravels. The book is subtitled An Historian’s View of Wargame Design and throughout its author argues that it is written from the perspective of a historian. That Herman is a top tier game designer cannot be disputed, even by people who may not care for his designs, but is he a(n) historian?
I’m not a snob, or at least not a huge one. I don’t think you need paper in Latin hanging from your wall to make you a historian. I have some fancy degrees that mean I get to add letters to my name, and certainly that was beneficial in my pursuit of being a historian, but I know plenty of historians who don’t even have university degrees. I am also happy to acknowledge that some people who do have fancy pieces of paper, like, for example, Dr. Naomi Wolf, are complete hacks unable to conduct even basic historical research competently.
At the same time, I’m not prepared to throw the gates wide open and say that anyone who has ever made a historical argument, written an essay, published a paper, or designed a game is a historian because they have engaged with the practice of history. It’s better to think of history as a field which has its own guidelines for best practice. A historian is someone who routinely practices history by using the methodology of historical inquisition, discussion, and writing in their work.
It is also possible to cease to be a historian. As an extreme example consider David Irving. His 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden while not beyond critique was considered a reasonable historical work when it was first published (but has long since been superseded by other books on the topic), however starting with his 1977 book Hitler’s War and continuing through his later publications Irving revealed himself to be a holocaust denier and racist. Nobody now would consider Irving a historian, he’s a conspiracy theorist.
Irving and Wolf are extreme cases, useful because they are so clear cut in terms of how they fell from the field into quackery and worse. They are a reminder, though, that the role of historian is not something bestowed once based on a single piece of work. Instead it must be maintained, and each new work evaluated fresh. If you want to argue that you are a historian you cannot just point to past work, the work you are presenting now that says you are a historian must also meet the necessary standards to be history.
I could spend the rest of my life debating exactly what best practices are in terms of historical methodology, so this is by no means a comprehensive breakdown, but to my mind there are at least a few baseline qualities a work needs to be considered historical, and its author a historian. These are: proper referencing, honest engagement with fellow scholars, and showing your work.
Let’s do those in reverse order. History is not delivering proclamations of your own brilliance from on high. It is not making a priori judgements based on what you’ve read or what you think makes sense. A work of history is an argument with which you attempt to persuade others to agree with your own interpretation of the past. For that reason, it is essential that you show your work, outlining what evidence you’re using, what you think it says, and why that supports your conclusions. This is a better way to persuade others, but it is also so that other historians can examine your reasoning and potentially identify faults with it or point towards alternate interpretations. History is a dialogue not a diatribe.
Naturally extending from that, it is essential to engage with the work of other scholars. I don’t mean just read it, which you should do, but also to honestly and seriously consider what they have to say. You should approach a new work on a subject, especially one you know well, with the assumption that this author may have found something new to you or may know something that you do not. The wealth of historical evidence is far greater than any one person could possibly know, so historians must constantly rely on each other and uplift each other through our work. It also means you can’t just rely on the same old sources that you’ve used for decades because you like them, you need to constantly be keeping up to date with new work – the work of new historians is not something to be torn down to show your own intelligence but rather a chance for you to reevaluate your sincerely held beliefs.
A common undergraduate mistake is to assume the inherent superiority of primary sources to the detriment of engaging with scholarly works that are essential to contextualizing those primary sources. We all have biases, no source, reader, or author is fully objective. Some students will hear this and use it as a basis to reject modern works, relying instead solely on the words written by historical actors. Rather than reducing bias, though, this merely enhances it as now the only bias on display is your own, with no counterpoints being introduced by alternate interpretations or evidence. For that reason one should not just read Thucydides or Froissart and assume one knows all that is necessary about the subjects they discussed, one must participate in the wider historical dialogue about those sources. You should, of course, read primary sources – they are the essential foundation of historical inquiry – but you need a balanced diet which includes modern research.
Referencing is the structure that underpins all of this. It both shows your work by directly pointing readers to where you got your evidence and simultaneously crediting the work of your fellow scholars whose work has made your own possible. While some works of history are very light on references that is almost always at the insistence of the publisher and is detrimental to the work’s overall value as history. Proper referencing is the lifeblood of historical discourse.
I don’t see the value in going through Wargames According to Mark line by line to evaluate it against my criteria. That’s not a good use of anybody’s time. Instead, I want to make a few general observations and consider a case study that I think gets to the heart of the matter.
There are essentially no references in Wargames According to Mark. There are no footnotes or endnotes in the book at all, despite it containing numerous sections of historical background. The few in-text citations that are present are often haphazard (e.g. a reference on pp. 148-9 to an article from the 1960s that apparently forms the foundation for the data for the CRT in For the People and Rebel Fury disagrees about whether it was published in 1964 or 1966).
Perhaps more frustrating, to me at least, is that there is also no substantive discussion of historiography or the work of historians on the subject’s Herman discusses, even those areas where he considers himself an expert. While Herman frequently refers to where in the design process he does his research, there is no detailed breakdown of what his research process looks like. For a historian’s view on design, I would have hoped for a lengthy discussion of what makes good vs. bad historical research, particularly on subjects that might have a challenging historiography (like, say, the American Civil War).
In the book Herman discusses the Pacific War through his designs Pacific War and Empire of the Sun. Pacific War was originally published in 1985, Empire of the Sun in 2005, and Pacific War was redone for a new edition in 2022. That’s nearly forty years between the three publications, an amazing opportunity to discuss how the historiography of the Pacific War has changed over the decades and how Herman engaged with scholarly works - and how they possibly changed his own perspective on the conflict. It would be too much to say that there is none of this in the book, but it is very limited and for a book that’s meant to be a historian’s view I expected more depth to it.
Let’s consider another example. On p. 231 when discussing the design of the 2014 game Hoplite, a co-design with Richard Berg and vol. 15 in the Great Battles of History series, Herman cites three books as influences: The Art of War in the Western World by Archer Jones and Victor Davis Hanson’s (VDH) The Western Way of War and A War Like No Other. I have no strong opinion on Jones’ book besides to note that it is a sweeping general history covering thousands of years of history that was published in 1973 – forty years before Hoplite was designed – which makes me question whether it was the best possible source for a historian who professes specialty in the field of ancient warfare to use. Rather, it is VDH I want to consider.
If you haven’t heard of VDH, well, I’m sorry for introducing you to him. The best primer on his work and how it has been received by academics is probably this summary written by Dr. Roel Konijnendijk from nine years ago, if you prefer an audio version Dr. Konijnendijk also recorded a discussion on VDH’s work five years ago. For the tl;dr crowd, to quote Dr. Konijnendijk:
I should say first of all that Hanson is (or rather, was once) a very capable Classicist. He knows the sources very well, and he knows how to write about them in an accessible and engaging way. His PhD thesis, which was published as Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983, 2nd ed. 1998), is an excellent piece of scholarship with a number of very insightful contributions to the field. His article on the battle of Leuktra (1988) is the best article on that topic ever to have appeared, and I believe it should have ended the Leuktra controversy then and there.
However, everything he was written since 1988 is drivel. It is increasingly ideological drivel, with very little academic merit, as u/Zinegata points out. He simply rehashes the same thesis over and over again, with ever less justification and ever wider supposed implications.
This is also not a particularly new opinion, you can read scathing reviews of VDH’s work going back at least as far as 2002, and probably much further (I am not a specialist in this field so I haven’t read every review). Even then, while several of the items I’ve shared post-date Hoplite’s publication, they are still years before the publication of Wargames According to Mark and reflecting on new research vs. an old design would have been a fascinating subject to include in the book.
Now, VDH isn’t a full-blown conspiracy theorist like Irving, but he’s an inflammatory figure who is increasingly a right-wing talking head and whose work – including the two volumes mentioned by Herman – has been evaluated by scholars and found to be completely lacking. I’m not the thought police, I won’t say that Herman isn’t allowed to use VDH as a basis for his work just because numerous scholars have pointed out the flaws in it – and to be fair to Herman, his discussion of hoplite tactics in the book does deviate from VDH orthodoxy. However, if Herman wants to be taken seriously as a historian, he needs to justify the use of VDH as a source that he recommends as the best the field has to offer – he needs to offer some rebuttal to the criticism to explain why VDH’s research provides valuable evidence for the work he is doing. That’s what the practice of history looks like, that’s showing your work.
Nit Picks
None of the elements covered in this section stopped me from enjoying Wargames According to Mark, but they were minor annoyances or things that slightly baffled me, included here both for completeness and because if these really annoy you, then the book may not be for you.
While I mostly don’t have a strong opinion on Herman’s writing style, I do find that he has a frustrating tendency to erect theoretical naysayers when making a point about why he made a certain decision or how his design choices have withstood the test of time and multiple plays. I don’t really care if there was some controversy around the balance of one of his games back in 2007, and I also don’t care if people were wrong on an internet forum or at a convention I’ve never been to. This rhetorical device makes me feel like I am reading someone settling grudges that have lingered for decades, and that makes me uncomfortable. I just want to know what decisions were made without hearing about how some random guy I’ll never meet was wrong.
Chapter 14 starts with an extensive section on how Pericles is apparently based on Herman’s reading of the debate around the US Constitution during the ratification process, including the views of ancient Greek democracy put forward in the Federalist Papers. This opens a huge can of worms of questions about the design and what exactly it is representing (is it meant to be actual Greek politics or how rich eighteenth-century Americans viewed those politics?) that is largely left unanswered by the rest of the book and goes completely unmentioned in the Pericles design notes included in the appendix. How America’s Founding Father’s viewed ancient democracy, and how those views were inherently the result of their own time, is the kind of subject that could fill a library, and I feel like I had a bombshell dropped at my feet that left me with far more questions than answers.
Every so often Herman grinds his axe about the three-to-one ratio in combat results. Take for example this line from p.59: “…and given that every wargame incorrectly perpetrates the unsupported myth that you need three-to-one odds to attack it should have failed, yet it did not.” It is, of course, objectively untrue that “every wargame” requires you to have three-to-one odds to achieve success. Herman even points this out later in the book. On pp. 137-9 he shows how even by 1965 Avalon Hill wasn’t using it’s same three-to-one is always best ratio. Herman includes an extensive discussion of how three-to-one doctrine was linked to post-WWII Cold War thinking and includes his own opinion on why it was never true (in the process revealing that it was widely debated at the time as well), which is interesting but just further muddies the waters. I think this kind of sweeping generalized statement hurts the book’s argument and makes Herman look dismissive of the work of others even though I know he plays and enjoys many other designers’ games.
Conclusions
I don’t want to end on a bitter note – I really enjoyed Wargames According to Mark and it is a good sign that it produced so many little threads for me to paw at. I much prefer a book that makes me want to argue with it, even just a little, to something that is completely milquetoast and bland. Many books I read could be summarized as “fascinating history, kind of dull writing” and so I’m always pleased when a book gets my blood going.
I probably would have preferred Wargames According to Mark if it had been more of a comprehensive retrospective of Herman’s entire career with coverage spread across a wider selection of his body of work rather than emphasizing his more recent designs, but I can’t fault him for focusing on many of his more popular and influential games – especially as they seem to be both his personal favorites and reflective of his own taste at time of writing. It does make me wonder what this book would have looked like if he’d written it back when Victory Games first closed its doors and when most of his games were of a more traditional hex and counter bent. That’s not to say that it would have been a better book, it almost certainly would not, but it would present an interesting contrast. There’s no point wishing the book was something different, though, and I can’t critique it for that.
Fans of Herman’s designs, especially Empire of the Sun, Churchill, and For the People, will learn plenty about these games and how they were made and more general wargames enthusiasts should still leave the experience of reading Wargames According to Mark with plenty to ponder and discuss next time they’re at the table. At the end of the day you can’t really ask for much more than that!
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