My Wife, the Grognard

Just so you know, being named a Grognard is a good thing. I won't supply the definition here, you'll have to look it up for yourself. Suffice it to say, she has embraced the title.

Yesterday my wife's very own wargame arrived by mail: Rommel in the Desert, by Columbia Games. Depicting the German military armor genius during his North African campaign of early World War Two, the system uses wooden blocks for the units which are stood up on their side when in play, concealing their unit type in a "fog of war" aspect. Your opponent can see only the back of the block, not the unit identification symbol or its strength; only when attacking and going into combat are the units placed on their back revealing such crucial information. This was the game that fellow Geeks on BoardGameGeekdotcom suggested my wife should get for an introductory system that outstrips games like Axis & Allies or Memoir'44 in complexity.

So, she was nearly giddy when it arrived. She opened the game immediately, looked at all the cool parts, and then snagged the rulebook out. Later in the evening her and I sat down to apply the unit stickers to the blocks; the blocks are basically painted wooden pieces that you could make yourself with a 1"x1" length of wood and a saw. A sheet of stickers came with the game, each sticker representing some sort of military unit (ie-infantry, armor, artillery, etc.), and those stickers had to be removed from the sheet and placed on the individual blocks. There weren't that many blocks, maybe eighty? My Europe Engulfed game has nearly three hundred.

We then sat down at the kitchen table, after the boys were sleeping, and went through the first half of the rulebook. What a lot of rules the game has, too! Nonetheless, an hour later we had gone through a dozen pages, including the most crucial aspect of any wargame: combat. We seemed comfortable with what we had learned, so maybe tonight we'll finish the book and be able to play the game by the end of the week.

Yeah, my wife is a Grognard.