Tactics II

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Tactics II arrived in 1958 as the work of Charles S. Roberts, a man who had already changed what people did on a Saturday afternoon with a cardboard map and a box of counters. Roberts had founded the Avalon Hill game company that very year specifically to bring this game to the public. The questions worth asking about Tactics II are not whether it succeeded, but what it was for, who it angered, and why it lasted as long as it did despite being called, in plain print, unplayable.

• 2. Roberts and Avalon Hill

  ›

  Charles S. Roberts had already proven the market with his first game, Tactics, before he turned to its successor. Tactics II was his second major design, and to publish it he built an institution: Avalon Hill, the game company that would become central to the wargame hobby. Roberts revised the original Tactics map slightly and gave the new edition more detailed unit counters. The result was nearly identical to its predecessor in almost every other respect, which would later become a point of criticism as the hobby grew more demanding.

• 3. A Game Reborn Three Times

  ›

  Avalon Hill reissued Tactics II in 1961, then again in 1972, the game ran into the economics of the era: rising production costs forced Avalon Hill to discontinue it. A year later, in 1973, the company redesigned the game with cheaper components and repositioned it as a loss leader, an entry point meant to draw new players into the hobby rather than satisfy veterans. The strategy of using a decades-old design as an introductory product said something about the game's perceived simplicity. In 1983, Avalon Hill marked its 25th anniversary not with a new edition of Tactics II but with a new edition of the original Tactics, complete with a different map.

• 4. What the Critics Said

  ›

  Nicholas Palmer, writing in his 1977 book The Comprehensive Guide to Board Wargaming, offered a measured verdict: Tactics II was a "Respectable but dull abstract introductory game." He suggested that readers wanting an easy first wargame would probably enjoy something based on an actual historical battle more than this abstract exercise. Three years later, game designer Jon Freeman took a sharper tone in The Complete Book of Wargames, published in 1980. Freeman called the then-22-year-old game unplayable, writing that aside from its historical importance, the game had "no redeeming qualities." His specific complaint was structural: he argued that the geography of the map combined to produce an inevitable stalemate directly across the center of the board, making victory against a competent opponent impossible. Freeman's Overall Evaluation was a single word: "Poor." He closed by writing that "Tactics II is overdue for retirement."