@onlyonepinman – I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. And I started this thread as a little tongue-in-cheek response to the question “why don’t we already have THE perfect wargame”. The responses sort-of prove the point I was (rather clumsily) trying to make – any why I try to qualify “for me” with any assertation that “this is better than that because” – it’s this qualifying because that causes the problem: for example, the dice vs. cards issue – those who are dead against cards, and those who think they’re the dog’s danglies, we all agree that cards make outcomes more “predictable”. Cards are better than dice because they make the random-ness more predictable vs. cards suck because they make the randomness more predictable

We’re all in agreement about the “fact” – cards make randomness more predictable; where we differ is the opinion on why this is a good/bad thing!

@limburger – you took me straight back to hold’em poker: playing an “amateur” (poor player) at chess is boring, because you know you’re (almost certainly) going to win. Playing against a poor player at poker is frustrating – because they don’t know what they’re doing, you can’t plan how to play against them, so you’re literally playing against the odds of a card being drawn. If you win, there’s no satisfaction because you could just have easily lost – but if you lose, it’s doubly frustrating because there’s nothing you could have done to mitigate against it.

I’d much rather play against a good player and get beat, than against a poor player and lose because of luck!

For me in The Ultimate Wargame you win because you’re the better player, not just because your opponent got a few lucky dice rolls. In fact, I’d probably change that – because I’m not actually that bothered about “winning”; more having a good “gaming experience”.

In The Ultimate Wargame, you should be able to control the narrative of the game more than the results of random events do.

Assymetric games can be great fun – even if the odds are stacked against you (Space Hulk and Blood Bowl immediately spring to mind). Blood Bowl used to be a goofy, satirical swipe at the razamatazz of professional sports. Nobody played goblins to win. But to field a troll, pick up the ball and throw your team mate into the end zone was the kind of “story narrative” that made playing goblins such a hoot. A lot of GW games (in taking themselves very seriously in recent years) seem to have lost this – the focus is on the “win” rather than the gaming experience.

In fact, the more I think about The Ultimate Wargame ™ the more I think I’m not actually a wargame player. The more I write about what I want from a war game, the more I think I’m actually a small scale, skirmish, RPG-like game fan. I’m not even sure that I like “war games” that much, after all!