What Makes CMGs so Awesome! – Part 1: History and Reflection on the Games played by Dad, Grandpa, Great Grandpa, Great Great Grandpa…

This week I have spent some time thinking about what makes CMGs so awesome. I can honestly say that between Star Wars, GI Joe, Spawn and countless other intellectual properties (including those in the hobby game market) I have spent more on toy soldiers than I have spent on anything else, short of food and shelter. Going back to my childhood, my friends and I would play with GI Joes and Star Wars action figures. We would form some force of figures and then engage those figures in small-scale skirmishes until the inevitable dispute between “I hit you” and “No, you didn’t” would arise. When I was 16, I discovered hobby gaming and tabletop miniatures games, and I have played miniatures games since then. My love of minis games is obviously shared by many people and generations, going all the way back to the beginning – of time.

Since the dawn of civilization adults and children have played with toy soldiers; archeologists have discovered toy soldiers in Egyptian tombs. Metal toy soldiers appear in various German states in the 18th century, and as time went on metal miniatures continued on to their pinnacle [PP link]. If you think back to movies like Braveheart, where “strategic planning” was done, toy soldiers make an appearance (they even had cool little wooden boats). The Patriot featured toy soldiers being turned into lead bullets to fire at the British. I am sure that even little caveman children would play with toy soldiers made of sticks and mud to recreate great battles between their insurance-selling fathers and gigantic woolly mammoths.

Thus our love of these little figurines is engrained. We can project onto them all we wish we could be. We channel our imaginations through these props and tell the stories of our heroes. The visual dimensions of the figure allow us to relate to it more than a two-dimensional piece of paper. As most of our childhood games like Tag or Hide-and-Go-Seek are about techniques for survival, maybe our desire to play with toy soldiers contains some of those instincts as well. While it is good to play and imagine as children, the problem of “I hit you”, “No, you didn’t” still exists.

In 1913, H.G. Wells, author of such classics as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds wrote a book that created a great “mediator” for childhood play called Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books. (Really, that is the entire title of the book. Obviously gender-based marketing did not concern Wells overmuch). Little Wars is the first set of rules using toy soldiers written and published for the public and came from Wells and his friend shooting match sticks at toy soldiers to knock them over. He added rules that gave advantages and disadvantages to cavalry, artillery, and line soldiers. All in all, the game was pretty simple and even provided a platform for Wells to share some opinions on the subject of war (from what I have heard – I do not own a copy).

Check out the tangent:

When Little Wars is considered along with The War of the Worlds, you can see that H.G. Wells actually has dual influence on Monsterpocalypse. Matt Wilson drew a lot of inspiration from The War of the Worlds when developing the Martian Menace faction, including the large saucers and tripod walkers that feature in the science fiction classic.

Now back to the topic at hand.

As a kid, my friends and I would line up our GI Joes and Star Wars action figures and take turns shooting rubber bands at them (and incidentally at each other as well – ouch). In some ways we had developed a system for resolving combat in much the same way that Wells had. Great mind think alike!

Many other historical miniatures games followed Wells’ offering. The hobby that we share today grew out of hobbyists like you and me painting up armies for Alexander the Great or Stonewall Jackson and leading those armies into battle on the weekend. If we choose instead to play games featuring the likes of Aragorn or a 60-meter tall giant lizard rampaging through a city, it is only because we have the opportunity. In the early part of the century, our forerunners did not have the joys of movies, cartoons, and comic books in the same way that we have them today. While they had comic books, movies, and later television, these were all emerging mediums and their storytelling had a ways to go. Further, the concept of expanding an intellectual property beyond its debut medium had not developed its fullest potential. Real men like George Washington or Hannibal, their stories blown into mythological proportions, filled the heroic roles today played by the likes of Iron Man or Luke Skywalker. When a modern movie launches, it launches alongside lunch boxes, cartoons, comics, games, and toy soldiers.

Then Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren took their love of historical miniatures gaming, combined it with their love of all things fantasy, like The Lord of the Rings and classic mythology, and gave us Chainmail, which really spawned the entire hobby gaming industry. At this point people began to dream of their own heroes and merge them with their games.

Then the rest happened to get us where we are now (you know the games, who made them, and what they are made of).

The advent of pre-painted plastic miniatures drew a lot of attention and praise from those players that wanted to play minis games but did not want to put in the “heavy lifting” of painting their miniatures. Players would no longer have to endure the disgrace of unpainted or merely primed miniatures on the battlefield. Figures became more specialized and individualized with their stats and rules printed either on a card made just for them or on their actual base, but I think this really came out of another genre, one that kept the lights on in the Yaple home for many years. That genre is the CCG/TCG genre.

The story of CCGs cannot be told without the story of Magic: The Gathering. This fresh take on card games released to the public in August of 1993. A lot of minis players instantly took to the new Collectible Card Game genre because it shared a fundamental core element with the minis game: you got to select your force before the game even started. For a similar reason role-playing games were hugely popular at the time – but RPGs do not feed your competitive hunger. There are a good number of people who want to express creativity in their hobbies. Designing a deck, making a character, or building an army feeds this need. While Wizards could have just printed flat numbers on their Magic cards, the addition of rules that affected the game in a unique way set the game apart from anything else we had seen before.

MTG arose from games like Cosmic Encounter, which had elements that pushed the mechanical limits of the game. Once the CCG phenomenon had settled, other games started playing with the concepts that CCGs had introduced. Collectible card games made players hungry for effects that could “combo” well with one another and effects that could drastically shift a game’s course. Tabletop miniatures games began publishing elements with more dynamic rules. Every soldier of the battlefield brought some sort of rule that set them apart from the other soldiers on the table. Generally speaking, older miniatures games had more standardized rules for units. Usually just a stat bar conveyed their differences, and only special elements received individualized rules. Now you rarely see a unit/hero/monster without a unique special effect tied to it.

This all boils into where we are today. Hobby games like HORDES and WARMACHINE are unlike yesteryears’ games. Collectible miniatures games like Monsterpocalypse push that concept even farther.

A few games have taken on the kaiju genre over the years, but none of them have featured minis of this quality. I will bet dollars to nickels that our game plays much more dynamically, elegantly, and challengingly. The pre-painted figures prevent the unholy sight of unpainted miniatures on the battlefield. While making a great game is never easy, it is made a little easier when you look back at the rich history of games that have come before you and learn the lessons that they have to teach.

Minis games provide a way to share stories with one another. Every time you back away from the table and look, you can see a scene from a movie. The closer you move in, the more detailed that movie becomes. Miniatures games allow all of the players to participate in the storytelling, and the rules act as a fair mediator between the participants to make sure all the actors get the screen time they deserve. While the army/hero/monster you may be rooting for does not always win, if the rules were dynamic and engaging, you had fun telling the story, and ultimately that is what it is all about. And unless you are playing that type of game where you smash the figure with a hammer when it is destroyed, your army/hero/monster will always return to fight again.

Part 2 will probably be a bit shorter and delve into what I dig about actually playing the game.

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