ACWGC UNION ARMY HEADQUARTERS FORUM

nelmsm wrote:I think it is also going to be a generational thing. Most of us grew up playing boardgames or even with army men on our floors or in our sandboxes and this led to our love of the history and then on to these games. The youngest generations are growing up on shooters on X-Box, Playstation, or Wii, and don't have introduction to a strategy type game that we play.

That is an aspect I had not thought of. We do get SOME younger players, but I imagine the median age is on the older side.

Yup! Mark's comment has a lot of truth associated with it. The newer crowd of wargamers, those "under 40," seem to be confused when you talk to them about turn-based, hex-oriented wargames! They've most all been captured by the extreme role-playing, shoot-em-up, high action, high graphics, glitz obsessed games! When I go out to recruit, I target those two groups that most likely share the same interest: Civil War re-enactors and Civil War Round Table groups. There's prabably another group out there that I've overlooked, but I'm hoping that we'll see some resurgence in the hobby when the 150th year commemoration begins.

Joe Meyer wrote:Yup! Mark's comment has a lot of truth associated with it. The newer crowd of wargamers, those "under 40," seem to be confused when you talk to them about turn-based, hex-oriented wargames!

Could we possibly make that "under 30" or so? Lest I'll feel marginalized ... I don't necessarily consider myself a "newer crowd".

Of course! "Under 30" might be the more appropriate age range here. I've always had trouble with the concept of age. It seems like only a few years ago that I and my brother sat at the kitchen table, opening up a brand new Avalon Hill Gettysburg game and punching out those rectangular counters. My younger brother always cheated, though...he kept claiming that if only a part of the counter sat upon a ridgetop that the entire unit must be considered as doubled in value for defense! And, of course, where the map square had two ridges coursing through it, the unit had to be qaudrupled in defense!!! We kept losing the die because we'd wind up throwing them at each other!

I became somewhat of a neat freak from playing Avalon Hill's Gettysburg because those that I played insisted that if just a piece of a corner of a rectangle was jutting out then they got a flank. Other than the warped personality that resulted, I did see some tangible benefits from the experience later on in life.

Our ACW Round Table has tripled in membership in the last year (now ballooned to well over 200 members) but it is mostly older folks like myself and I haven't found a single one of them YET that has an interest in this club (ACWGC) or what this club does. We talk a lot about the strategy leading up to battles as well as biographies and personal tales from the battles, but they don't want to discuss troop movements during a battle and any what ifs associated with how a battle was fought. The biggest crowd of the year was for a monthly presentation on how the women in this county endured the ACW as derived from diaries of some of the local residents.

I've seen arguments over line of sight lead to fights. Computerization has been a mixed blessing, mostly a blessing. I wonder how many people within an hour's drive have any idea what we do.