Operational Gamiing - Board or Screen to Table

 Zach began -

I've been kicking around the idea of hiring an under-employed artist (easy to find in Oakland...) to paint me up some top-down generic terrain hexes.  These could be sold online as downloads.  You take them to Office Depot, print them off with the thickest lamination they have there (which come out like hard plastic) and then either glue them onto a firmer substrate or just place on top of a rubberized mat and pin into place.  Alternatively, I've always been a big fan of the "paper-terrain-under-glass" method.  In that, you place any map you have under plexiglass, then use a marker to trace the features that you want to have actual game-play effect.  So roads, rivers, hills, BUAs, etc.  This keeps the game from devolving into full-out real-world military IPB madness (which I've done in the military for real- not as much fun as it sounds...).  The paper map that you place beneath it could be a period map, or it could be a series of printed off hexes.

Other than zooming the scale way out, I haven't really hit on any good ideas for doing the operational-to-tactical thing either.  You can do either, but mixing the two is fairly difficult in an analog medium.  Computers obviously are a way out, but mixing computers and minis can be difficult, plus there are time/financial considerations when you start talking about programming a computer game as an aid to a miniatures war-game.

A definition of the word "operational level" might be in order as well, for conceptualizing the issues.  It's likely different from period to period.  For instance, was Lee's invasion of the North a campaign or an operation?  Playing the 1863 invasion of the North as a operation, if we use that term, would probably require an actual campaign book which guides the players through the action.  Then again, if we are only concerned with the day or two before the battle, then the battle itself, that might allow players to one-off it.

I think also, part of the trick is that you have to keep the ultimate goal for the players simple, no matter how large the scale of the game.  For a single battle, thats fairly easy.  Once you pull back to a situation where you could have potentially many battles, it becomes more difficult to control with a player v. player model.

That said, all those problems could be resolved very nicely by introducing role-play aspect to war-games, with a game master on one side and one or more players on the other.  If you allow one side to be privileged in information over the other, then 99% of the problems with operational war-games evaporate.  You could probably still keep the two-player element, if you're willing to adopt a red team/blue team model and allow the red team player more information than blue team.  This then creates something almost like a chess problem, where the blue team player has to figure it out.