For some great context around this, I highly recommend "Playing at the world" by Jon Peterson (https://www.amazon.com/Playing-at-World-Jon-Peterson/dp/0615...). It's a fairly detailed history of paper and pencil games with quite a bit of focus on Little Wars, Kreigspiel, and D&D. If you're a gamer, I highly recommend it.
A boardgamegeek [1] user named Pete Belli has been creating and playing scenarios that use Little Wars rules. He has posted reports (with photos) showing how the plays went. [2].
Can anyone offer any recommendations on any accessible war games - other than Risk. I've looked around previously and it seems that most are incredibly complex and/or require a tremendous amount of time to play.
Memoir '44 and other games under the same system (there's an Ancient Rome themed one, for instance) are fairly accessible and (depending on scenario) play quite a bit faster than most Risk games. They're (mainly) 2-player, though. They're also at the battlefield level, rather than worldwide strategy or anything like that.
Diplomacy's either a much better or much worse alternative to Risk. Depends who you ask. Not directly comparable but scratches the same itch, possibly better (see: depends who you ask).
The Board Game Geek site probably has some lists for semi-casual or otherwise less-hardcore wargames. That'd be the place to look. Then see whether Shut Up & Sit Down has done a video review of any that look interesting to you, before buying (they have for Memoir '44, IIRC).
The rules are pretty elegant and fun, and are quick to teach and play. A game usually runs 30 minutes to an hour. Miniature wargaming is always going to be a bigger investment in money and effort than a board game, but DBA is pretty easy to get into: you only need a couple dozen figurines for an army, and a playing surface of about two or three feet square.
The central conceit of the rules is that the important thing is modeling a unit's role on the battlefield, and the rest can be abstracted away. So for example a unit of pikemen is a unit of pikemen, whether they're a Macedonian phalanx or a Swiss landsknecht. This lets the same set of rules support battles from the bronze age to the renaissance.
How accessible? "I Ain't Been Shot, Mum" by Too Fat Lardies and "ColdWar Commander" are fun, quickish, and just a step above beer & pretzel rules. The TFL guys in general are big fans of the original Kriegspiel style. There's also a whole series called "Two Hour Wargames".
THW is particularly good. A coupe of years, I've helped a friend set up All Things Zombie games in the gaming room of an anime convention. We set up little towns of prop buildings (that he got used and super-cheap), and people walked up, curious but assuming this is some Super Complicated Thing that will take all day. We go, "Hey, wanna play? Pick a figure and fill in this little sheet. If you gotta go at some point, feel free. Just remember, you're in charge of moving the zombies near you. We'll explain how."
And so, we'd have a gaggle of people merrily running around the town, trying to scoop up supplies and whatnot, as things got more and more chaotic. Always a blast.
I don't mind some complexity, but I would like to learn the game well enough in 30-60 minutes. I have definitely lost patience with new board games where some friends and I spend our entire evening just learning to play rather than playing.
I hear you. We have a group that really likes Twilight Imperium but my God, the amount of rules consultation...
I think the ColdWar Commander / Blitzkrieg Commander games can be picked up in that time. Movement, command, and combat rules are quick and intuitive, and it generally lends itself to a "resolve-problem-by-common-sense" approach. It's great for casual gaming.
Might I recommend Bill Banks' Ancients? It's quite good, if you can hunt down a copy. Or don't mind assembling one, since it was posted online for free by the publisher at one point, and nothing dies on the internet:
My girlfriend and I play a lot of GMT wargames and it’s not unusual for us both to study the rules for a week, she takes extensive notes, run through the playbook’s tutorial, and still play wrong the first time. They’re worth it tho. Cuba Libre, Labyrinth, Falling Sky, Commands & Colors: Ancients, and Twilight Struggle are some of the best games we’ve ever played.
The tutorial in the Twilight Struggle app is a good, fast-ish, introduction to the game.
Neuroshima Hex! Is one of the greatest games of all time, but it’s more of an abstract than a what people think of as a wargame. You build competing programs (Armies) that execute during battles.
I would say that the sort of girl who is drawn enough to something to pursue it, even though it wasn't labeled "for them" (and it being the early 20th century, gender lines were a lot more sharply drawn), is the more intelligent sort.
So I suppose you have never/will never read Tom Sawyer, due to Injun Joe?
People in the past had (what we now consider) backward mentality, and we have to deal with it somehow. I did mutter "wtf, man?!" upon reaching that paragraph, nevertheless I kept reading.
