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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?

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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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