Make Her an Ant!

Real Tabletop Housewives Part 2: Create a stripped-down microcosm of the game inside the game

(This is part of an ongoing series, Real Tabletop Housewives, written by the editor-in-chief's wife, Shell Presto DiBaggio, on what worked to get her not only playing, but enjoying, war games.)

“I told you to set the GPS to avoid roads with giant ants!”

The lone woman sitting at the wargame table, looking confused and out of place and struggling to keep up, is a common stereotype. But for me it was also 100% accurate.

Many women face a steep learning curve when they approach the table. I didn’t know the difference between various kinds of real-world guns, tanks, body armor, and weaponry, let alone fake ones. The rule books aren’t exactly gripping reading cover to cover (if you even have time for that!), and actually knowing what will be relevant to remember is hard.

Then there’s movement-over-terrain rules, weather rules, options for what you can do on your turn…

These are things best learned by observation, and men seem to be cool just drinking beer or soda and observing a wargame a time or two before they actually try to play, or reading through the game book. But to me, it was all Greek. And despite my love of Homer, I do not know Greek.

The first time I enjoyed playing a war game was when I was giant ants that would randomly pop up on the board in a Konflikt 47 scenario my husband created. There were playing cards, face-down, on the table (Editor’s Note: These were ‘blinds’ representing possible hidden units, hazards, or nothing at all) . They could be help (like a rocket launcher!) or a hindrance. In this case, the hindrance was a monstrous ant hill.

The ants would be an independent third party. My husband had the backup plan of using scatter dice to move the ants, but if there was another person to be the independent third party to play the chaotic insects, all the better.

The ants had two possible moves: move toward soldiers and attack. They did not have multiple attacks, they could not retreat, they had no morale, and they did not have a sense of self-preservation. If you were playing them, you were a suicidal eating machine, and that’s very easy to play.

But it also teaches you just a few Konflikt 47 move and attack options. You still get a little taste of how things work. And the ants only appear for a portion of the game. You control them once they appear, and maybe they last the entire game, but probably they die in a few turns. (It would be something else to win the game as the ants, though!)

“Did you remember the can-opener?” “You are the can-opener!”

You also don’t have to closely follow the game to play them well. You don’t have to understand anything on the board except where your next meal of Soldier du jour is located.

Maybe the lady in your life would be bored by this, but I was highly entertained and glad to be part of the action for the short amount of time that my ants survived. And I did pick up a couple of the other rules, observing the soldiers try to flee or blast my crunchy carapaces into oblivion.

In another Weird War scenario, Mike (my husband) had me play as a mummy with two attacks: a swarm of bugs that added cover or blocked line of sight and a life-draining touch that only worked in close combat.

So consider a little stripped down non-army to entice your lady to the table. Have a backup plan (like scatter dice) to control the third party creatures in case she decides she’s not having fun or has to leave the table. And add to the fun by not telling the players that she may be playing. Tell her to keep it a secret, and maybe only call her to the table when the candid creatures rear their ugly antennae.

(Shell “Presto” DiBaggio is usually writing with her husband, Michael, and drawing over at Heroic Adventure Fiction.)