I hate Steam. No, make that "I _HATE_ Steam!" Dealing with Steam has never been easy for me. It seems that EVERY time I am required to interact with Steam, something goes awry.

Today I broke down and acquired Mafia II. Got home, opened it up and saw that authentication via Steam is required. [Queue the ominous music.] So I start the install process and instead of installing the game and then going to Steam, you are _first_ required to open a Steam account. Okay, I can deal with that. Create the account, copy the account info to MyDocuments, and receive the happy message that I am now the proud owner of a new Steam account. Then I continue with installing the game. Finally, it's all done and ready to go!

Or is it?

[Note: this was originally the _lengthy_ intro to "AGEOD's American Civil War". It was hacked out to save space, but the editor requested that I blog this bit of gaming history.] [Definitely click on the popup photos to get just a _hint_ of what I'm talking about.]



Before there was a Graphic User Interface to provide a point-and-click approach to games, before there was the first Role Playing Game that most current games can be traced back to, there was this thing called a "board game". Not your ring-around-the-rosie kind of games like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, or Parcheesi. Basically, it was usually a map on stiff fiber board, with some kind of movement grid to regulate the movement of the pieces. Most such games utilized hexagons (yielding paths of movement similar to Chinese Checkers) or squares (Chess or Checkers), but some used variable areas such as counties (Kingmaker) or provinces (Risk). Such games covered a broad spectrum of subject matter, ranging from historical subjects to futuristic science fiction to full blown fantasy. The games usually involved two or more opponents, with forces more or less balanced, starting from opposing sides of the board, with the objective of winning by eliminating all or most of the opposing pieces. Most such games usually involved at most several dozen pieces per side, with rules amounting to less than 10 pages. But there were some games that were downright HUGE, with an enormous playing board with hundreds or even thousands of pieces in play. My favorite of these "monster" games was a series published by Game Designers' Workshop, and was named the Europa series, based on the German military operations of WWII. The first in the series was Drang Nach Osten ("Rush To The East") which covered the Russian Front from 1941-1942, followed quickly by Unentschieden ("Undecided") covering 1942-1944, and eventually by Die Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods") which took the game well into 1945. The neat thing about these games was that you could piece them together to make a gameboard that easily covered two Ping Pong tables set side by side. As mentioned, each side had literally thousands of playing pieces to contend with. And the game rulebook was, indeed, a BOOK. (We used to break them down to the individual pages, which we put into sheet protectors which were then placed in a 5-inch thick binder. This made it easy to collate addenda and errata pages into the affected areas in the rules.) You would think that such a massive game would appeal to very few people, but instead the games were enormously popular to the wannabe generals of the era (the early 80's). The demand was so large GDW redesigned and re-issued the Europa series as: Fire In The East, and Scorched Earth, and expanded the series to cover the entire European Theater of Operations by adding Marita-Merkur (the Balkans campaign), Narvik (Norway), Their Finest Hour (the Battle of Britain), Western Desert (North Africa), Case White (the invasion of Poland), The Fall of France (self-explanatory), The Near East (the Eastern Med), Spain & Portugal (which allowed for the proposed German invasion of the Iberian peninsula, "Operation Condor", meant to get at the British base at Gibraltar), and Torch (the Allied invasion of Vichy France's North African territories). That was as far as GDW got before it went the way of most game companies. But the GDW series was picked up and expanded by Game Research Design which retitled all of those games and added Second Front (the Allied invasions of France at Normandy and the South coast of France), The Urals (which updated Unentschieden), and A Winter War (which added the Soviet invasions of Finland).

Now, keep in mind that all of these games pieced together to give you a playing board that stretched from the North end of Norway to the Indian Ocean, and from the Atlantic Ocean West of Portugal and Morocco all the way to Siberia. The scale of the map was 16 miles to a 5/8th-inch hex: that means when it was all laid out, it would be bigger than your living room floor (even if you had a humungous living room). The unit scale was usually divisions, but those frequently could be broken down to their component regiments (which was usually to reflect attrition from combat and lack of supply). That resulted in literally tens of thousands of pieces PER SIDE. And each turn equaled about two weeks. Figuring that the war started on September 1, 1939, and ended May 8, 1945, that means that a complete game from beginning to end would be _only_ 148 turns.

Who in their right mind would want to play such a game? Well, these games were usually played by teams of 6 to 12 players on each side, and/or involved just the game components for those sections that were currently active. That is, the entire map didn't come into play until the Allied invasion of North Africa. At which point, the map was segmented to allow players to move around within the different areas so it was possible to maneuver pieces on the map without having to walk on it. Being a traditional "Side A moves, then Side B moves" game, on a given night one team would move its pieces and execute combat with one or two opponents present as witnesses (i.e., to keep their opponents honest), and the next night it would be the other side's turn. A complete game could take well over a year to complete, with players dropping out and others joining on a regular basis.

You definitely have to have a certain kind of mindset to want to play such a game.



The advent of the desktop Personal Computer was something of a mixed blessing. It took the myriad dice rolls, the score of steps involved in executing just one turn, and processed those in the blink of an eye. Huge, cumbersome games such as those described above could be played through in a fraction of the time of a "traditional" game. HOWEVER, the sheer sprawl of a monster game was no longer as apparent as you scrolled and zoomed in and out of the on-screen map. Furthermore, what had been an immensely social interaction became remote as multiplayer games became something to be played over the Internet. Text messaging just doesn't have the same feel as face-to-face conversation as team players would literally get their heads together to plot strategy (and make rude remarks about their opponents on the other side of the table). Still, being able to play through a HUGE game that would have taken days, weeks, or months on a tabletop in just a matter of hours is undoubtedly a great compensation. So much so, we have become SPOILED ROTTEN! We have become increasingly plug-'an'-play gamers. Most games have gotten to the point where game manuals have shrunk to just several pages of an itty-bitty pamphlet which is enough to get us up and running within 10-15 minutes. Tougher games may actually require playing through a series of tutorials, just so we can figure out the play mechanics and understand the interface.

Growing up, some of my favorite movies involved views of the War Room (didn't matter whose), with officers standing around, pointing here and there as enlisted personnel pushed unit markers of tanks, planes, ships, and soldiers hither and yon with long sticks with pushboards at the end. That was neat! Playing "monster" boardgames in the '80's, I got to be like those generals. (Minus the Luger to the head when my strategy didn't pan out, of course. Didn't want to get _too_ into the scenario!) But now, with computer games being what they are, I -- and every other wargamer out there, may never get to experience such grandeur again.

[**Sigh**]