30 December 2011

Random Friday Wargaming: Battle: The Game of Generals

A poster-child for generic wargaming, Yaquinto's Battle: The Game of Generals was an early-80s release in their "album" series of games. Yes, I owned this one; bought it at the post exchange on what was then known as Fort Ord, CA. I thought it would be cool if I could play a ton of different genres in one package! And you sure could, as long as you didn't mind them all basically looking/feeling the same, or constantly checking the reference pages to see what the counter symbol meant for this particular scenario.








Anyone else out there give this one a run? It's barely more than "chess" with NATO symbols and some lookup tables. What'd y'all think?

Master links/images from Boardgamegeek.com; message boards linked to Consimworld. Other links to the actual game pages...


By: Brant

3 comments:

besilarius said...

Yes, I thought this would be a good intro game for curious people. Unfortunately, it was just too unfocused or something, to ever catch on.
IIRC Ironclads was Yaquinto's only real hit. Which was brilliant. It was exactly what ACW fans wanted. Even liked their optional rules, like the one where the faster a ship went, the harder it was to get a hit on it. Seemed very reasonable, and made for a very exciting game.
One of their album games (think they released four: one was a horse racing game that no one seemed to try) was a space fighter game. It was simple, and had a nice, easily understood relation of power to thrust and weaponry. A little gem that never found an audience.

Scotten said...

Bought that game on some clearance sale back in the day, but never really played it. You're right, I remember it being very generic.

Brian said...

Yaquinto did some nice simple games, e.g. Apache and Attack of the Mutants, but this was not one of them.