Resuming the blog

As you may have noticed, the blog has had a few posts, interviews above all. This is because I have started the History and Heritage degree. The first year of the degree has taken up a lot of my time, this second year I have learned to manage my time better so that I can afford to write. Wargames and history go hand in hand and I think that they are not used as they should be. To get back to the blog I would like to start with a reflection on wargames and history and how this union can give us new perspectives.

One of the main reasons why we play these types of games is because we like to delve into the past, a window that allows us to see a very specific period and place. These games not only recreate battles and campaigns, but they allow us to immerse ourselves in a historical context, analyze the situations of the leaders and understand why they took them.

One of the points that we often overlook is historical recreation, they are very detailed and complex games, but they are for a reason. The designer of this type of game delves into the period like a researcher, he doesn't pull the game out of nowhere and this is reflected in the rules. This complexity, in some cases, represents the passion that the designer had about the period or about the battle in question. This research is supported by detailed maps, the topography of a conflict is very important and can give a unique touch to a game. The orders of battle reflect the strengths and weaknesses of each side and allow us to understand the importance of each unit.

An example of all of the above would be Andean Abyss, the COIN series is one of my favorites. The games in this series are abstract, but that has an explanation. We are dealing with an irregular conflict in Colombia, the fact that the representation of the insurgents' pieces is like this makes sense, we are never told what these pieces represent, we only know that it represents a cell, this fits very well with the mechanics of the insurgents. If we look at the terrain, we can see that, in a simple way, it represents very well what it means to operate in that type of terrain. I don't want to go into more depth, since I want to dedicate an article to each game in the COIN series.

And this brings us to the next thing: What am I going to publish? I want to increase the quality of the posts, the GMT interview section will remain more or less the same. Regarding the other articles, I want to focus on political violence, since that is what I want to investigate. I will try to publish a post every month.