Real Tabletop Housewives
A new series on how to get the lady in your life wargaming.
I have been one of those elusive girls with an interest in primarily masculine things all my life. As a young girl, I liked the Spider-Man, Dungeons & Dragons, and Dinosaucers cartoons far, far more than any girly property. From age 10 on, I was an avid American comic book reader. Not Dazzler or Elfquest or Spider-Man and Mary Jane, mind you. Mainstream comics written and drawn by men, made for teenaged boys.
I know there are many women who do enjoy board games, video games, and tabletop role-playing games, yet never cross that invisible barrier into war game territory. I was one of them. I definitely needed a man to take me by the hand and lead the way.
I had formed many preconceptions of why I wouldn't like wargaming. I'm not that into history or statistics. I'm bad at math without scratch paper. There's too many kinds of dice, and I hate not knowing what to roll. Why is there a 200-page book of rules for every game? I don't understand the difference between most vehicles on the road today, let alone the difference between tanks, their armor, speed, and firepower. And on and on.
These were all issues I have overcome, often without realizing I had overcome them. In hindsight, I can identify when each objection was eliminated, and it was rarely because someone explained something to me.
Now, in my 40s, I find myself slowly being turned into a woman who plays wargames. This is perhaps the rarest of the male hobbies that women participate in, although I can see how it would be highly desirable for a man to get his wife onboard with him spending hours a week and "I don't want to know how many" dollars buying, assembling, and painting tiny soldiers to play on the six-foot-by-four-foot construction site that has become... well, I imagine in some houses it's the dining room table.
I'm not a wargamer, properly understood. This is probably not a hobby I'd engage in if I wasn't married to a wargamer. But my husband has friends over to game at least once a month -- sometimes every week -- and sometimes I play, too. And I'm surprised to say I'm starting to enjoy it. Perhaps you want to lead the lady in your life down the same path.
But how?!
This post is the first in a series of things my husband did that worked on me. I'm sure some of them he did unconsciously and didn't realize were affecting me. Note that these are based solely on the small test case of "what worked for my husband." And they were done over a period of seven years in irregular intervals.
So grab some training wheels for your lady, and here we go.
Articles in the series so far (updated regularly):
The Joy of Losing
Pick a game that is as fun to lose at as it is to win.
The Joy of Losing
(This is part of an ongoing series written by the editor-in-chief's wife, Shell Presto DiBaggio, on what worked to get her not only playing, but enjoying, war games.)
(Shell “Presto” DiBaggio is usually writing with her husband, Michael, and drawing over at Heroic Adventure Fiction.)
I'm looking forward to this series.
I've had success using co-op miniatures games to bring my wife into the fold as well. I created a Harry Potter game using some mechanics from Insurgent Earth and others, and got her and her friends really enjoying themselves on the table!