Calling all Grognards

[Richard Gaskin]

One of the unexpected personal upsides to the pandemic has been a 
discovery of tabletop games, at last recognizing them as forms of 
systems design.

Of the many types of board games I've developed a particular interest in 
hex-and-counter wargaming.

While mostly used to model historical battles, the format is both simple 
and extensible enough that I've seen it employed for modeling encounters 
as varied as pre-European conflict among Tahitian tribes all the way to 
the protester-vs-police conflicts of Seattle during the WTO "Occupy" 
movement.  I've even seen it used in modeling non-combat encounters like 
those related to supply chains and other logistics challenges.

The classic counter format is so flexible I find myself daydreaming 
about using it to model peacetime activities for possible learning systems.

I have some work obligations to fulfill so this is definitely 
back-burner and non-urgent, but while it was one my mind this morning it 
occurs to me that given the demographic intersection of some of our 
members and many fans of old-school wargaming there's a likelihood some 
of our members may have already done some work in this area.

If you've ever built anything that delivers a hex-and-counter format 
game, or tooling for print-and-play options for enjoying such things, 
please feel free to drop me a note. I'd love to learn what you've been 
working on, and see if there are ways we might share bits and pieces to 
move such systems forward more easily.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems