The Great Debate: Grognard, or Eurogamer?

 I posted this a few weeks ago for a general thread on Wargames on BoardGameGeek.  It was meant as a comment on the juvenile, "much ado about nothing" nature of the debate.  Personally, I tend to fall more on the grognard side of things, but I am very much a To Each His Own kind of guy.  

Cartoon from Berg's Review of Games #18

Grognards: (as viewed by Eurogamers)

1. You view anything other than ¼” monochromatic counters emblazoned with military unit symbology as “bells and whistles”

2. A ruleset less than 10 pages long is “overly-simplistic”

3. Six-sided dice are holy relics; polyhedrals or cards profane the Temple of Gaming

4. The visible universe is divided into scaled hexes; anything else is a gross misrepresentation

5. You refer to the day SPI closed up shop as “The Day Gaming Died”

6. You know who Richard Berg is and consider him a role model

7. “If you don’t like losing, you shouldn’t sit at the gaming table, kid.”

8. If a game takes more than two hours to play...good!

9. Game reviews are to be read, not seen on ‘YouTube’. 

10. “Historically-accurate” and “fun to play” are antithetical concepts.

Eurogamers (as viewed by Grognards)

1. You consider playing wargames from the 20th century akin to watching TV in black-and-white.

2. A ruleset over 3 pages long is “needlessly complex” and the result of bad game design.

3. “Who needs dice?  I have a Random Generator app on my iPhone.”

4. You proudly wear a T-shirt bearing the motto, “Abstraction Is the Spice of Life”

5. “Wargames?  Sure, I play wargames.  My gaming krew and I have Risk sessions in the dorms two weekends a month.”

6. You roll your eyes at the thought of using scaled maps as gameboards (assuming you knew how to read them in the first place…)

7. There are no Losers; there are only graduated classifications of Winners.  

8. If a game requires more time than it takes for the players to kill a pizza and a 2-liter of Dew, it takes too long.

9. If a game requires more knowledge of history than a Disney film, it stays on the shelf.

10. “How is a rectangle with an oval in it a tank?  Why don’t they just show a tank?  Better yet, give us little plastic or wooden tanks, or something.”