Harpoon V | Hacker News Reader

Harpoon V

forbes.com

39 pointsluu17 comments

No idea how this old Forbes article turns up on HN now, but I recognise that author! His own blog is kinda interesting http://www.hisutton.com/Covert_Shores_Articles.html and full of excellent illustrations, explanations and cutaways.

(am a regular reader)

Publisher site here: http://www.admiraltytrilogy.com/harpoon.php

Includes link for a free “Jumpstart” version of the game, among others.

Who needs Harpoon when there's Command? (One needs to be retired to play both, but I digress)

I play Harpoon as a palate cleanser between runs of The Campaign for North Africa... I do agree with the article though, the tabletop boardgame was somehow more satisfying than the computer version of same.

You might like DEFCON.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/DEFCON/

"...between runs of The Campaign for North Africa..."

I'm not sure whether that is a boast or a cry for help. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Africa

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/campaign-north-afri...

Very tongue in cheek.... but I have a copy of the rules that I will pull out every time I move house and scan through before putting back into the big box of old games I almost never look at. I cannot believe how much time I spent on Squad Leader in my youth -- not even ASL, the original four box sets. Squad Leader, Starfleet Battles, and AD&D; it is amazing how much of a summer in the mid to late 80s could be occupied by those three and a group of geeks ready to play all day long in someone's basement.

I immediately thought of Command — it's a very deep rabbit hole to go down, and the sine qua non if you're into this stuff. But if you are not (1) a defense analyst or (2) a retiree you will be horrified to discover how much time you can sink into reading things like "Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat," or "NATO Defense Expenditures 1970-1990."

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076160/Command_Modern_Op...

I used to play computer Harpoon a lot (before I retired!), so I thought Command would be right up my alley, but I came away with extreme brain ache. What I would like is a modern version of computer Harpoon, without the zillion bugs that were in the last iteration.

My assumption is that war games like this are generally complex and would be difficult for the non-boardgame player to just jump into.

Arm I wrong about this? Is there a satisfying option in the genre that could be played by - say - a clever 12 year old?

I think Harpoon can be done by a clever 12 year old. Its not Squad Leader after all. Its more a carefully walk through the steps type thing.

Harpoon (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/300724/harpoon-v-modern-...) isn't necessarily the most complex of the games, but it's not the least complex either.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamecategory/1008/nautical/li... is a list of the modern naval games on BGG. Unfortunately, I didn't see anything that I recognize as a good game (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2073/sixth-fleet-modern-... is popular, with the recent resurgence of late-Cold War games) and is not excessively complex.

If you go back to WWII, there are more options (and many more games). I'll just make one suggestion: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3670/battlewagon (A print-n-play edition is available from WargameVault.) (It's moistened Star Fleet Battles, if you know that game.)

Note: if you're talking about wargames in general, the sky's kinda the limit. How about another suggestion: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6544/battle-moscow, which is old, but intended to be an introductory game, is freely available (https://grognard.com/bfm/game.html), and has a really spiffy online verion (https://oberlabs.com/b4m/).

This is one of my favorite threads about a board wargame ever: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/371289/1914-jim-dunnigans-g...

"This game should have been produced 55 years earlier and the General Staffs of the major combatants forced to play it at least 12 times before actually going to war. They may have been too old to begin a war at that point."

I still have a copy of Totaler Krieg! My brother and I tried to play it once, in the 90's. We did not finish setup before dinner, and decided to give up and relinquish the table. It's classified as being in the middle of the spectrum of difficulty. Despite that failure, I don't regret the experience. It produced a tangible connection between the computer wargames I had been playing and the history behind those.

It's a different kind of way to think about play, and it helps to imagine you're back in 1970 and computers are a thing only really available for Serious Projects, and working through a simulation with maps and minatures and calculation tables is the next best thing. Spending most of the day setting up the board made sense. A 12-year-old could do it, but Fortnite is more immediately gratifying.

Part of what killed wargaming as a major tabletop genre is that computers are better at being simulators of the "noisy" elements of warfare. On some level, you know that ranking a unit with "attack" and "defense" ratings is going to be bullshit. If you make up more numbers and add more tables and put more rules in the game - which is what the complex end of wargames did - that doesn't make it better, but if you take an approach where physical reality is referred to as often as possible(which you can do in real-time on a computer), you can make a claim to accuracy emerging from that.

What tabletop has done since then is to get better at being a more immediate experience and to convey things in broad strokes of abstraction, instead of setting up dozens of units and running calculations of troop morale and weather.

I am trying to figure out how these work because this seems interesting to me. My understanding is that the "game books" tell you the rules and the scenarios. But how do you play the games: software, on a table like board games?

You play it on a table with miniatures or markers, or even on a big sheet of graph paper. You can even play it on a whiteboard. The rulebook gives various stats for your assets (ships, planes, missiles and weapon systems), and you roll dice for things like sensor detection (radar, sonar, etc), scoring hits and damage to the target. There might be modifiers to various dice roles for weather, countermeasures, equipment and troop quality, etc.

I played an early version a few times in the 80s, and read The Hunt for Red October the year it came out. Funnily enough I watched the movie last week, it really holds up.

See Miniature Wargaming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_wargaming).

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