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271 pages, 2007, $32.95
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Content
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16
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Organization
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12
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Consistency
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14
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Intelligibility
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12
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Overall
13
Hit
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Review Scoring
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Most boys have owned toy soldiers at sometime in their lives
and acted out battles using them. Some of these boys move onto playing wargames with
with these various toy soldiers, planes, ships, tanks and other war themed toys. Some
grow up to be history teachers. And some, like John Bobek, the author of The Games
of War, grow up to do both, and write a source book to instruct others on gaming
with the toy soldiers that might be gathering dust in the closet.
The book has five chapters covering different eras of war, from ancient times to modern
naval and air battles. These five chapters are sandwiched between an introductory
"Getting Started" chapter and a chapter of miscellaneous rules and references. Each
of the chapters contains numerous pre-made scenarios for historical battles, which
underlines the main goal of the book, that it is written to be more of a teaching tool
for other history teachers, than a source for gamers.
While overall the content and rules in the book are fleshed out, the rules limits itself
to just the six-sided die, and the author leaves no doubt about his bias against other
dice sizes. This is unfortunate, because the number of tables, exceptions and oddness
that occasionally crop could be addressed more eloquently by allowing even the
eight-sided die or ten-sided. There are occasional editting errors, but that can be
forgiven in a book of this size. Unfortunately, the rules and scenarios, as they are
presented, quickly grows to be a dry, tedious read. The layout and design of the
book are reminscent of older gaming source books, although this is expected for
a self-published title.
Ultimately, The Games of War would serve a history teacher wanting to liven
up the battles of history well, but gamers would be better served spending their
hard-earned gaming dollars elsewhere.
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