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Oh, and if you want to pay for a pre-made product instead of getting it free and providing the labour yourself, Ukrainian Crisis is now available as a boxed game from Hollandspiele:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/223436/ukrainian-crisis-little-war
It comes packaged with The Little War, a mini-game on the short but spirited border war between Hungary and Slovakia in March 1939.
Volko: Thanks, I’ve now added it to the list.
Here’s one that I have obtained a copy of: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167707/majdan
(blush) sorry, meant to say “conquer Ukraine” at the end there, I have a cold and am even less lucid than normal….
Thanks Rex, for posting the interesting exchange on Tesera.ru. I hope you do get some comments from Ukrainian and Russian readers, and post them.
Traffic on my website is back to near-normal now.
I think that most people went there, saw that a) it was a paper game and b) they would have to print it out and make it themselves, and then clicked away.
I think perhaps seven or eight people might have made up the game.
Revisions to the design continue, but I hope it was clear that that was how I offered it.
The ethics of producing a wargame, even an experimental one like this, while the larger conflict it explores and takes different directions is actually going on pose better questions than the practicality of doing so.
The latter has an obvious answer: It’s not practical! You’ll look like an idiot! Don’t do it! Wait! But there I go again.
Cue the old arguments about how ghoulish and scab-pickingly weird the hobby of wargaming is, pretend we’ve listened to them again, and move on…
I wrote in a post on CSW (got deleted for being off-topic, rightly so as it was in the wrong area) about how I don’t think you can produce a truly “neutral” wargame, no more than you can create a truly neutral novel, or play, or any creative work dealing with humans and human memory.
You have to make choices, based on your judgement, which is fallible.
Even the most “historical” wargames suffer from using historical records which themselves are the victims of accidental and deliberate distortion over the years.
Thanks for the notice about the Flashpoint:Campaigns mod for Crimea.
It’s apparent that some computer wargames can gin up scenarios for current events even faster – I spent several hours trying to get my simple area-movement paper map to come out right; the author for the scenario probably just went to Google Earth and dropped something in.
I also note that of the games you’ve mentioned in the post (and I think we’ve got all of them now), mine is the only one that explicitly excludes participation of NATO forces – the other three are all devoted at least partly to the problems of introducing and fighting NATO troops, something that is in my view more far-fetched than Vladimir Putin looking to conquer half of the Crimea.
Excellent–I’ll update the report to reflect that.
Hello,
Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations was also used with great success to model both the current military balance in Ukraine and what-if escalation scenarios.
See here:
http://www.warfaresims.com/?p=2237
And the video series:
Wow, that is impressive…
Thanks for the notice Rex!
So far, not quite 16 hours after I posted it, nearly 800 visitors and over 1,200 views of that one page on my website. On a usual day I get like, two and eight. Ukraine, USA and Russian Federation all in the top three at about 300 views each, with Canada a distant fourth.
But I’m not in this for the clicks….