Historical War games without luck or cards?

Question

Can anyone recommend any historical war board games that lack luck or cards? Pure strategy, cunning, etc. where the most skillful player usually wins. My eras of interest are: The Seven Year's War (aka French and Indian War), the American Civil War, WW2, Vietnam, and cold War conflicts. Thanks.

Answer 1

Avalon Hill used to make hundreds of these type of games, but unfortunately, they decided to get out of the gaming industry back in 1998, and sold the rights to their games and their name to Wizards of the Coast (you may know them from the popular trading card game 'Magic: The Gathering'), which is a division of Hasbro. Hasbro decided that they only wanted to keep Diplomacy, Acquire, and History of the World, and have sold most of the rest.

The company that they sold their strategy war board games to is 'Multiman Publishing'.

You can order many of them through their website (http://www.multimanpublishing.com/) or the following website:

http://www.gamersarchive.net/theGamers/a...

The second link is the page that has the games categorized by type (Civil War, WWII, etc...)

I was also disappointed when I learned that they were sold, but I'm happy that this type of game still exists and is still available.

I still own one called "The Desert Fox" which is about Rommel's conquest of Northern Africa, in which supply chain plays a heavy role. Multiman Publishing doesn't offer that one, that I can find, but they do have others in a similar vein.

I hope this helped!

Answer 2

try medal of honour

Answer 3

The Luck of  choices and  decisions are an essential part of even real war-IF. In  Diplomacy order of Battle and possible allied action always  effect the outcome. Diplomacy  has  no CARDS.    In AH DUNE[Bookshelf[1979] ] There is an initial draw of Cards and each turn there is the available set for bid. Each player house has opportunity and strengths based on their  character.. The'powers' of individual players can be offset by cards and strategy. While luck and cards both are involved  there are no Dice throws.  Opportunity lost or taken are errors of judgement and experience.  Good Luck

Answer 4

Diplomacy, the era leading up to WWI.

Answer 5

A game that I like a lot is Axis and Allies. It is based partially on luck being that you roll dice, but it has a lot of different pieces that attack differently based on if it is on offensive or defensive. This game can be very fast or slow depending on the skill of each player.

Ive had games go for like 20 hours before, we played for days on end, and ive also had games last like 1 hour, because the person was dominated.

Answer 6

Combat Commander - see http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/21050 has no dice but it uses cards - i would recommend this for a war game that avoids dice.

Diplomacy is a classic cut-throat negotiation game more than a true wargame - that said it lacks dice but is more about bargaining than war: see http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/483

For other games without dice also see Imperial: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/24181 and Antike: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/19600 but these are not strictly wargames.

Answer 7

The previous answer is just spam.

You might like to consider Diplomacy, which has no dice throwing/luck in the traditional sense.  It's set just before WW1, see the wiki for more details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(...

It often involves lots of alliances and bargaining, so it's not true that the most strategic player will necessarily win, the most popular player also has an advantage!

Answer 8

Try to get fire in the east by gdw. The scenario is operation barbarossa in ww2 and there are other sets in the series to actually play the whole 2nd world war. It uses a bit of luck in that you have to roll dice when attacking, but the roles are heavily modified by the position of the troops and stuff like that so it really isn't luck who wins this one and the sheer size of the game adds to ruling out luck. The main drawback is the overall scale of the game imo as you need a table about the size of a ping pong table for the board and you really can't play it in one evening, better think in terms of days to weeks depending on your leisure.  Also its no eye teaser (ok that depends on what you like, i actually think it's how it should be) as the board is just a map of russia and eastern europe with a hex grid imprinted and the units are simple markers with the military designation on em.

For smaller scale engagements i always liked the games by international team, especially norge was always nice to play. Those are doable in one evening but you may have trouble getting them because they were published in the early to mid 80's and are now hard to get i assume alternatively gdw has also published some smaller scale games, but i never played any of those and hence can't make recommendations but i assume they should be good as well.

I personally never liked the avalon hill games as they lacked depth imo and thus won't recommend them though afrika korps might be a good beginners game.

www links to the games i mentioned:

fire in the east: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/8993

norge: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/6054

afrika korps: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/2259