The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning

10. The War in Cardboard and Ink: Fifty Years of Civil War Board Games

175 10 The War in Cardboard and Ink Fifty Years of Civil War Board Games Alfred Wallace Michael C. C. Adams begins Echoes of War by listing some of the ways Americans enjoy military history: museums, reenactments, popular history books, television programs, movies. The popularity of these military entertainments is apparent from sales figures. For instance, Saving Private Ryan earned $224.7 million in gross ticket sales just a few years before Adams’s book was published, leading a large pack of blockbuster war movies.1 A year after Echoes of War was published in 2002, the first Call of Duty game was released. Even the game’s creators probably could not have imagined that its descendant, 2011’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, would gross more than $1 billion in just over two weeks. That figure is far larger than the total domestic gross of Gettysburg (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), Cold Mountain (2003), Gods and Generals (2003), Valkyrie (2008), and Inglourious Basterds (2009) combined. Games have taken their place alongside—or perhaps even ahead of—Adams’s list of popular military culture.2 At the time, Modern Warfare 3 was merely the most recent in a centurylong history of games of war. Before war games made their way to television screens, they were played on the floor and on the tabletop. The history of war games is a rich one, revealing changes influenced by both technology and taste. This essay focuses on one corner of the war-game world: tabletop games depicting (some would prefer “simulating”) the American Civil War on a strategic scale—that is, the entire war. This consists of some twenty games, 176 Alfred Wallace produced from the war’s centennial in 1961 up to 2010. Until the late 1990s, these games (not surprisingly) tended to focus on battles and leaders while largely ignoring of the causes of the war and its nonmilitary features. In recent years, however, these games have become more sophisticated, with slavery and emancipation and political and social events becoming much more prominent. This is one area of the Civil War in popular culture that has become deeper and more complex over its lifetime. This essay examines the evolution of that complexity. Games depicting war in highly abstract ways—like chess—have existed for millennia in many cultures, but the genesis of modern commercial war games is much more recent. Table exercises for military purposes date to the early modern period, but these never evolved into a civilian pastime. War gaming as a civilian hobby began in the early twentieth century. H. G. Wells took advantage of the new availability of mass-produced toy soldiers—and his own fertile imagination—to concoct a set of rules, called Little Wars, by which these toy soldiers played out imaginary battles. These rules were designed with boys (and “that more intelligent sort of girl”) in mind “from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty.”3 The successors of Little Wars, from more complex games for toy soldiers to Call of Duty, have attracted much the same audience: men and teenage boys. Miniatures games have retained a certain appeal over the years, but war games became more mainstream in the United States when the popularity of board games enjoyed a resurgence in the 1950s. The games under discussion here were born out of this efflorescence. During the era of their greatest popularity , these games could be found at Sears and other major U.S. retailers and sold more than 100,000 copies each. Such numbers may seem quaint today, but at the time, these games represented a distinct subculture of popular military history.4 Martin van Creveld devotes some space in The Culture of War to this kind of military consumer culture, but he declares that the board war game was “brought down” by computer games in the 1990s. This view is largely shared by Rex A. Martin, once a significant figure in the war-game publishing industry himself, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the “rise and fall” of the wargaming subculture. Although war gaming may not be as popular as it once was, it certainly survives and is producing many games—including those covering the Civil War.5 A great many games have been produced over the years that have martial The War in Cardboard and Ink 177 themes but would not be considered war...