The essence of miniatures

I guess I should explain a little more.

Again, this is an opinion piece.

IMHO, simply having miniatures does not a miniatures game make.
Others, I know, have far more relaxed view of things...

You could put a finely painted Gordon Gecko on the table, but it would
have no real effect on the Stock Trading Game. How close to the coffee
machine was he when United Humbug fell? Who cares? 

Take the carrier example: All the interesting choices the ships can make
(where to search, how much CAP, what to launch etc.) have absolutely no
bearing with the miniatures on the table. And when the strike comes,
your
30 knots vs. their 300 makes you a sitting duck. Your choices are to
fire
AA guns, or perhaps you could fire AAA. Hey, how about firing some
flak instead? Reaaaaaally interesting decision making there...

Mind, you could make a fine miniatures game out of the *air-to-air*
combat
-- it's just that the strategic hide'n'seek isn't really evident from
the
airman's point of view. Thus you'd PSB the search stage away and just
assume there's a strike coming in (otherwise, it's not much of a game
eh?)

The function of the miniature is to show the exact position of a game
unit
in relation to its environment and other units.

The whole point of hide'n'seek games is that you DON'T know the exact
position of an enemy unit in relation to its environment and your units.

Having miniatures in a hide'n'seek game is like giving a blind man
(sorry,
sight-impaired) a VCR. Sure, he can listen to the soundtrack, but who'd
venture to say he got the same value out of it as the rest of us?

You could, ofcourse, play out the hide'n'seek stage IN SOME OTHER WAY,
and
THEN transfer to miniatures game. But that doesn't make the hide'n'seek
stage a miniatures game. And even then in some extreme examples
one-sided
detection pretty much means game over anyway, degrading the miniatures
battle into an excercise in futile dice-rolling.

I hope I made my point clear.

P.S. If you haven't read Greg Kostikyan's piece "I Have No Words & I
Must
Design", do so. It can be found at
http://www.crossover.com/~costik/nowords.html

-- 
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