Wargames about Wars I Know Nothing About

Sometimes, the high school education of Australia, as good as it is, leaves you unprepared when entering into the baptism of fire that is tabletop wargaming.

You might complain that Warhammer 40,000contains no historical elements, but growing up, I knew more about the tragic history of the Fall of Horus and why the Emperor was so mad about the whole betrayal thing than what I knew about, say, the American Civil War, or the Spanish Civil War, sure, they taught us about World War I, II, Vietnam, that kind of stuff, but not really anything that was related to the board games American companies churn out.

There exist multiple board games dealing with World War II and its various campaigns, but it's slanted towards an American perspective I fear. I guess the reason why Risk is so popular is that it's so divorced from what the common man understands as actual history that it's easily accessible - and won't offend even the most hardcore of war history nuts.

Risk is so vanilla in wargaming history that one coloured troop is indistinguishable from the other in terms of cultural customs and theme. Which is probably why people play it as a means of playing out "taking over the world" in their own living rooms. We aren't really given a real context to the conquest, it's just bragging rights.

I want to try Battle Cry. I really, really do. But I know next to nothing about the American Civil War other than Gone With The Wind is set in those times and that the North won. Australians are so uninvested in the whole politics of the American Civil War that by some quirk of fate, a book written by an Australian about the Civil War called March, was a novel accepted by both sides of the argument over there because neither Northern or Southern readers had any reason to mistrust the other's bias.

I am utterly clueless about the whole Civil War thing, because they just didn't teach it to us at school. There's also a bunch of historical wars they did teach us about in minor detail, if you took the Ancient History unit in senior high. But Ancient History to me wasn't really about learning things, it was just about... well, cramming for exams with as much factoids that you felt emotionally divorced from so you'd get a good mark and get into a good university.

But why would somebody like me try a game like Battle Cry if I have next to no knowledge about the historical context of the game?

The answer is simple. If one has no knowledge of a historical war event used in a board game, the board game makes you want to learn more. Stuff you never even knew existed. I'm pretty sure there's quite a bit of World War II and World War I history I don't understand, but I'm completely lost when it comes to the Napoleonic Wars, which wasn't even covered in my syllabus because they taught about that in MODERN HISTORY, smarmy gits and their contemporary analysis of revolutions, think they're so cool because what they're studying seems more relevant to what we're learning about the Egyptians and Spartans - bloodysmart-alecs laughing at how inconsistent 300 was as a movie based on a comic book... 

Ahem. Sorry about that. Now where was I?

Ah yes. Wars they never taught me about in high school.

Essentially the first thing you learn upon graduating from high school, is how much you actually forget. Some might make fun of the historical studies nerds, but by God do they actually retain information about stuff that was actually real, instead of what you digested through exaggerations in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels...

I mean, good LORD. The amount of cramming for exams that happens to children at my age who are only just getting into university now is astronomical - how does the government expect these children to remember anything about what they "learn" in their history classes, no wonder it keeps repeating itself - if history is actually meant to be studied properly you'd get better value learning using a tabletop wargame like Battles for Napoleon or even Axis and Allies or Empire of the Sun than what you expect to have memorised from a textbook in high school.

There's entire bloody epochs of events that people my age were just never taught about - stuff we usually only find out about through the badly researched lens of a Cracked.com comedic list article. I mean... how much of history does the average person actually know, that isn't the entire plot of The Simpsons or the production history of each series of Star Trek?

Board games, particularly ones that deal with real life wars set in a real historical period - that's pretty much some of the best springboards for discussions of historical wars out there eh? Because your kids aren't exactly going to learn all this from their teachers, I know this as a fact because I only graduated from high school a year ago. And I did it longer than most kids. So pity the ones starting kindergarten this year.

I guess this is a case where I'm really asking the older F:AT members who have kids to listen to me on this one. History isn't just a textbook. You have to make it mean something.