Thursday, September 04, 2008

The German Games

The Economist has an article on the cottage industry of the German board games, An affinity for rules?. The article in a little bit of pop psychology of how Germans are oppressed with rules which is why there are so many complicated rules.

From my perspective there is a major genre of games that is not done by the jerries, war games. Kriegsspiel was originally a creation of some Prussian staff officers, Von Reisswitz father and some, who created was is essentially table top miniatures, see here for photos of rare surviving copy. That was the 19th century after the great loss of WWII Germany was under new management that banned the use of nearly all WWII symbols, no swastikas. I have a sub game wherea red diamond is used instead of that symbol. Also WWII put militarism out of fashion so economic games are produced instead. Avalon Hill was an American game company that could be seen as a counterpart to German board game industry except nearly all their games military and most of these were set in WWII. Sadly Avalon Hill is now owned by Hasbro and most of their back catalog is out of print.

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