Is DBA the perfect game?

[Patrick Carroll]

What would the perfect game be like? Find out some avid gamers' views at the link below. Number 10 on the list is the miniatures wargame De Bellis Antiquitatis.

http://tinyurl.com/7yabb

 

[Alan Hamilton]

Wot, No Chess?

 

[Patrick Carroll]

Originally posted by Alan Hamilton
Wot, No Chess?

Looks like the chess snobs jumped right to shogi (with several comments saying xiang-qi is better). Well, chess by any other name. . . .

 

[jguritza]

It's a good game but I have yet to find a miniature game that is perfect!

 

[Patrick Carroll]

Originally posted by jguritza
It's a good game but I have yet to find a miniature game that is perfect!

Well "perfect" is subjective. But here's the criteria given in the list header:

A game is perfect when:
is "easy to learn and hard to manage"
involve minimum luck,
have high player interaction,
have balance between players (also of different level of skill),
have a short time to play (1-2 hours),
have high replayability,
have some strategy/philosophy in there that is extendable in the real life.

Not the best English, but I think it's clear enough. And I'd say DBA meets all the stated criteria--except maybe the "minimum luck" criterion.

 

[Alan Hamilton]

Not to spoil the criteria but where is "fun" and "enjoyment"?

When I get fun and enjoyment out of a game I consider it "perfect". The other stuff? Well I can take that or leave it.

 

[Patrick Carroll]

What's fun?

Originally posted by Alan Hamilton
Not to spoil the criteria but where is "fun" and "enjoyment"?

When I get fun and enjoyment out of a game I consider it "perfect". The other stuff? Well I can take that or leave it.

Unfortunately, "fun" is too subjective to make an acceptable criterion. What's fun to you may be boring or unpleasant to me.

At the top of the list is the game of Go. Yet every comment beneath the description mentions how boring it can be for some people. It's such a widely popular game, though, that obviously it's fun for many people.

So, to add an objective criterion that ties in with "fun & enjoyment," I think it would have to be popularity: i.e., a perfect game is widely popular.

 

[jguritza]

I will clarify a little bit.

I play DBA and love it. To me it is a great game that is widely played. You go to any historical miniature convention and you are most likely to see or play DBA. The rules are simple to learn but there are some sticking points.

In terms of easy to learn and play, DBA is great. The biggest selling point is everyone is playing it!

 

[Alan Hamilton]

As for DBA - I've played miniatures games for more than 35 years and despite having several Ancient Armies (Romans, Gauls, Britons, Egyptians, Greeks, Byzantines, Sassanids etc.) amongst many other periods I've never played DBA. Nor have a large number of other folks that I regularly wargame with. So as for "everyone" playing DBA - I think not.

That's not to say that it is not popular with a segment of the wargames fraternity. It does seem common in "competitions".

 

[jguritza]

Originally posted by Alan Hamilton
As for DBA - I've played miniatures games for more than 35 years and despite having several Ancient Armies (Romans, Gauls, Britons, Egyptians, Greeks, Byzantines, Sassanids etc.) amongst many other periods I've never played DBA. Nor have a large number of other folks that I regularly wargame with. So as for "everyone" playing DBA - I think not.

That's not to say that it is not popular with a segment of the wargames fraternity. It does seem common in "competitions".

Regionally where I am at if you are playing 15mm ancients you are playing DBA. What rule set do you play with?

No rule set is perfect. I find myself picking and choosing the elements from one rule set and taking another element from another rule set.

 

[Patrick Carroll]

Originally posted by jguritza
In terms of easy to learn and play, DBA is great. The biggest selling point is everyone is playing it!

What I like about DBA is that it's small, quick to set up, fast to play, and has been house-ruled to cover all periods of history (and fantasy/sci-fi genres as well).

I'm a wargamer, not a craftsman. What I like is summed up in the following quote (snitched from the Fanaticus site):

I have been playing DBA's cousin Hordes of the Things (HOTT) with cardboard counters for quite some time, and I like the fact that the rulebook & game slips easily into my laptop case. Like Alexei's, my counters are double-sided (red lettering on one side, blue on the other). For terrain, I keep pads of Post-It notes of several colors that can quickly be stuck onto the table as needed. Similarly, the generals on each side are marked with a tiny sticky rectangle cut from a Post-It note. And, as Alexei says, once the game begins, the counters seem to vanish and the armies come to life.

If you want to see & read about Alexei's counters:
http://fanaticus.org/DBA/universal/

 

[Alan Hamilton]

Originally posted by jguritza
Regionally where I am at if you are playing 15mm ancients you are playing DBA. What rule set do you play with?

John (Slim) Mumford and I have playing out wargames at least once a week since the early 70's. In those days and to this day we write our own rules and have continued, over the years, to tinker with them. The others in the group have come and gone. At the moment we are 5 strong but we have had as many as 9.

Our older rules owe a lot to the style of Don Featherstone, Tony Bath and others of our time period. Indeed Slim still corresponds with Tony to this day.

Our newer ones are mainly skirmish in style and examples can be found on my web site.

That is not to say that we are closed to other sets. We've tried Wargames Research Group (various), Dungeons & Dragons, and so on. Now we're trying out "Astounding Tales" and "Rugged Adventures". We'll probably go back to our own rules but include some ideas from these in the "tinker".

 

[jguritza]

Originally posted by Alan Hamilton
John (Slim) Mumford and I have playing out wargames at least once a week since the early 70's. In those days and to this day we write our own rules and have continued, over the years, to tinker with them. The others in the group have come and gone. At the moment we are 5 strong but we have had as many as 9.

Our older rules owe a lot to the style of Don Featherstone, Tony Bath and others of our time period. Indeed Slim still corresponds with Tony to this day.

Our newer ones are mainly skirmish in style and examples can be found on my web site.

That is not to say that we are closed to other sets. We've tried Wargames Research Group (various), Dungeons & Dragons, and so on. Now we're trying out "Astounding Tales" and "Rugged Adventures". We'll probably go back to our own rules but include some ideas from these in the "tinker".

I guess that is the beauty of miniatures is you can develop and change rules as you go on. We have several rules that we had to tinker with because they were overlooked in the core rules.

One good example was Battleground WWII. If a unit fired an antitank weapon and you missed that was it. We argued about for sometime with the reasoning that the shot has to fall somewhere! We made a vertical deviation chart and it works great. Like in real life you may aim at one thing and hit something else. Good or bad it has to hit somewhere!

Excellent web site by the way!