Wargame SITREP 24-08 ~ Warfare wargaming grognard—my wargamer self

With the announcement of the categories for the 2023 Charles S. Roberts Awards the arguments over “What is a wargame?” will almost certainly be resurrected. While I recognize the question will never be definitively answered I still search for a personal definition to help better understand my wargamer self.

To be clear, this is a personal quest. There are some voices in the wargame conflict simulation games community that wish to marginalize me because, as a proponent of wargaming, I am hobbled by “conservative perspectives” that makes me one of those “individuals rooted in the hex and counter culture of the 1970s and 1980s [that] limits the progress and growth of the hobby.” They tell me that my “last generation” thinking supports a label (“wargame”) that has only a meaning to me. In this “progressive” era of politically correct terms and identity politics they want me to drop my identity in the name of diversity.

I take a different perspective; a perspective where inclusion comes first before diversity. You can’t have diversity if you don’t practice inclusion, which means you must be self-aware of which tribes are in and which are out. In this case, I seek to better understand the identity of my wargamer tribe.

Wargaming and war game

If I can’t define a wargame, how can I call myself a wargamer? The last time I looked deeply at the definition of a wargame I approached it by studying what wargame practitioners historically thought. This time I am going to use a different approach and go back to the elementary school way—look it up in the dictionary.¹

Here is the definition of “wargame” from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Here is the American Heritage Dictionary defintion of wargame:

Note that both dictionaries have a verb and noun form of the word. In both dictionaries “wargame” is the verb form and “war game” is the noun form. According to these dictionaries both hobby wargamers and wargame practitioners commonly—and apparently incorrectly—use the one-word form “wargame” as a noun.² For example, BoardGameGeek includes the game subdomain “Wargames” not “War Games.”

War versus warfare

My recent professional reading list included the book The Battle Beyond: Fighting and Winning the Coming War in Space by Paul Szymanski and Jerry Drew.³ The introduction, “War versus Warfare” stuck me as a wargamer:

Like so many elements of contemporary war, the word war itself comes into the western lexicon from the German. It is related to the Old High German words werren, meaning “to confuse,” and werra, meaning “strife.” Whatever else war might be—the continuation of politics, hell, a “disease,” an “act of murder,” or a “defeat for humanity”—confusing strife seems to be as good a definition as any. In the twenty-first century, war follows the decision of the state to employ available military means to achieve its policy objectives. It is an acknowledged hostility that involves various government agencies as well as the various military arms.

Warfare, in contrast, is the application of military means to the war effort. It is the practitioners’ business—both of the generalists and specialists—and its practice includes knowledge and experience unique to the multitude of tribes. In land warfare, the tribes are the infantry, armor, artillery, logisticians, and others. In maritime warfare, the tribes are surface warfare, subsurface warfare, and naval aviation—to name a few. Marines constitute their own tribe. In air warfare, the tribes include fighter pilots, bomber pilots, and transport pilots. In space warfare, the tribes are emerging. The list may include groups of experts in missile warning, electronic warfare, communications, intelligence, cyber warfare, and orbital warfare. Their skill sets will remain simultaneously unique to their domains and complementary to the skills of the other groups with whom they engage in joint and combined arms efforts.

Excerpt from The Battle Beyond, Paul Szymanski, https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-battle-beyond/id6472735019

“Warfare…is the application of military means to the war effort.” That interested me so I went back to the dictionary again. Warfare is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a noun with two meanings:

Again, the American Heritage Dictionary has a similar defintion of the noun warfare but with three meanings:

Note that in both cases the first meaning (i.e. the most commonly used) of the word is military operations or armed conflict. The word warfare helps me to understand that war games I prefer to play come in the form of the first noun meaning from both dictionaries. In other words, the focus on military operations or armed conflict is what makes a war game distinct to me. That said, I fully recognize that warfare games are a small niche of the broader strategy board game hobby (like the 2023 Charles S. Roberts Awards Charter recognizes by making “wargames” a subset of the domain of “conflict simulation games”). There are other strategy board games out there that cover political conflict or economic competition between entities, but my preference is to play games related to military warfare, i.e. “war games.”

Grognard

There is a definition of another related word I use to describe myself which is important to my self identity and tribe: grognard. Once again the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has a definition but in this case further slang meanings are more relevant to my identity:

• noun. An old soldier.
  • often capitalized  : a soldier of the original imperial guard that was created by Napoleon I in 1804 and that made the final French charge at Waterloo.
• noun games, slang. Someone who enjoys playing board wargames, particularly the counter-heavy strategy board wargames from the 1970s and 1980s.
• noun games, slang. Someone who enjoys playing previous editions of roleplaying games when new editions of the game are available.

If you look back over past postings on this blog you will see that I often use the capitalized form of grognard to describe myself. Once again I discover that is an incorrect usage because, though I may be old, I was not part of the final charge of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo. Further, I feel that my preference for military warfare games is the modern definition of the “counter-heavy strategy board wargames from the 1970s and 1980s.” I am a grognard and proud of it.

Wargamer

Putting all those definitions together I discover I am a warfare wargaming grognard gamer or, more simply put, a grognard. Further, when compared to the larger group of hobby board gamers, I am a member of the wargamer tribe.

Sadly, there are some in the hobby board game group that strive to redefine a war game to conform to their pet (and politically divisive) definition in order to label my tribe out of existence. That is sad because in order to have a diverse hobby board game community one first needs to be inclusive of all members—regardless of their tribe. To paraphrase Szymanski:

Wargamers constitute their own tribe. Their skill sets (wargaming) will remain simultaneously unique to their domains (i.e. a subset of “conflict simulation games”) and complementary to the skills of the other groups (in the domain of games) with whom they engage in joint and combined play and design efforts.

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1. The dictionaries I use are for American English and I fully recognize that some dictionaries focus on The King’s English which does not always have the same meaning. Hey, we fought a Revolution for a reason… ↩︎
2. A notable exception is the U.S. Naval War College that has long used the two-word noun form “war game.” ↩︎
3. Szymanski, Paul, and Jerry Drew. The Battle Beyond: Fighting and Winning the Coming War in Space. Herndon, VA: Amplify Publishing, 2024.  ↩︎

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