CHESSIC WARGAMING

CONCEPTS & APPROACHES

SUMMARY STATEMENT

The title of this Web site directly reflects my very personal ideas about and highly focused approaches to wargaming. 

The contents of this page are mainly intended to warn a huge slice of  self-professed "wargamers" to quickly depart for... greener, more agreeable wargaming pastures. Putting it plainly, only a tiny, intellectually curious minority of wargamers are expected to find this Web site interesting, even relevant...

If you are looking to download "stuff", I am afraid that you will be very much disappointed. This Web site is totally dedicated to "understanding and clarifying". Yeah, all this is kind of old-fashioned...

Chessic Departures

Chessic Wargaming takes the classic game of chess as its point of intellectual and aesthetic reference. Any departure from chess tradition present in wargaming is fair game for critique.

Historical Considerations

"Historical Wargaming" constitutes a time-honored slice of wargaming as a whole. It bifurcates into "Historically Themed" and "Historically Simulated" subcomponents.

Historical Simulations

Wargamers enamored with historical simulations usually refer to themselves as "Historical Wargamers". Quite a few of them use the term "Grognard" as well.

CHESSIC WARGAMING IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH HISTORICAL SIMULATIONS

Historical Simulations are not games. For sure, one can "play". But, one cannot really "game"... In the veritable chess tradition, "gaming" takes place in a highly stylized, aesthetic environment where symbolic abstraction directly aids skillful play. Most importantly, the "rules" are totally transparent to players.

Historical simulations exhibit excruciatingly representational detail which is detrimental to classic "gaming". Computer versions invariably "hide" the "rules" as well. Moreover, such versions often attempt to trigger "actually being there", psychological states in wargamers by employing various audiovisual effects and role-playing language.

CHESSIC WARGAMING INVITES THOUGHTFUL CALCULUS

At first sight, Chessic Wargaming may come across as extremely conservative, even blatantly reactionary... In my opinion, such is not the case. I consider it quite worthwhile to put various "departures" under a critical microscope so as to ascertain what exactly is gained and what might be lost every time one adopts some "departure"...

Panos Stoucas