Wargames To Go

For a couple reasons, this episode has been my white whale, almost taking me down. I would certainly understand if any of my listeners gave up on me along the way, thinking the podcast had faded away entirely, or that I wasn't interested in wargaming any more. Not true! Listeners of my other podcast--the longstanding BoardgamesToGo about family strategy boardgames--know that I've still been active. I've even kept the flame of wargaming alive, playing a title here & there, reading history, watching films, and dabbling in online communities like Twitter and Discord. I even spent a weekend with wargame designer David Thompson where he beat me in a hex & counter wargame (not normally his thing, but mine!), showed me the brand-new Resist! game, and I also visited the nearby National Museum of the USAF.

So what was it? What has kept me from closing out this wargame topic for so many months? The first is the topic itself. What started out as a little exploration of a lesser-known, short war with Teddy Roosevelt and his charge up San Juan Hill ballooned into a wider study of America's pivot to overseas colonialism and empire. It involves US national policy, ethical debates over the nature of democracy, a technological leap in naval power, islands in multiple oceans, and millions of other peoples who were fighting for their own American-style independence from foreign empires. That's a BIG topic, and it was the inspiration for my featured interview contained in this episode.

The second reason was simply personal. I've spent most of the last year thinking I was going to be making a big change in my life, relocating overseas to Europe. I put a lot of things "on hold" while I worked on that, but it has ultimately not panned out. Ok, time to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again. Except that it's not really "starting all over," because I've still got my good family, home, job...and wargame podcast.

To a large extent, I simply need to get this episode behind me, which will close out this topic and let me move on to the next. The nature and history of American imperialism is such an enormous topic that I'll never do it justice. It has been fascinating and important for me to learn more about this subject--one of the great joys of my wargaming hobby is how it repeatedly opens up new understandings of history. I'm just going to do the best I can to wrap this up and then get energized all over again by the next topic.

Books
• The War Lovers, by Evan Thomas
• The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, by Clay Risen
• Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, by Stephen Kinzer
• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr

Films
• Rough Riders
• Heneral Luna
• Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War

Jason Perez

(Popesixtus)

In addition to my closing comments about the games, books, and films I encountered for this episode, I was motivated to reach out to Jason "Shelf Stories" Perez for a featured interview. Over the summer, as I was thinking about the breadth of this topic, Jason popped onto my radar screen for his work with the thoughtful retheming of the classic eurogame Puerto Rico for its 20th anniversary into Puerto Rico 1897, which keeps the award-winning gameplay but fixes the cultural ignorance of the original. Though obviously not a wargame, it IS more aware of this history into which it is set, something eurogames have not usually done well. Picking the year 1897 reveals a significance to the Sp-Am War that was just around the corner, too. Then I noticed Jason had posted some other interesting videos about the cultural awareness (or not) of wargames. I knew I wanted to interview him for this episode.

As you'll hear, Jason does consider himself a wargamer, but he does call himself a fan of "history games." He's passionate about history, especially the history of peoples, and proudly identifies himself with historian/political scientist Howard Zinn and his People's History of the United States. I suspect that point-of-view isn't for everybody, but it's exactly what I wanted to hear about for this podcast. Think about it and make up your own mind.

-Mark

P.S. I'm not 100% certain what my next topic will be, but I think it has to be a revisit of Gettysburg...since I literally revisited the battlefield this summer with a friend and listener of this podcast! Tom took me to Gettysburg which we'd both seen before, and later I started listening to Stephen Sears' book about the campaign. I'm thinking an interesting angle is to focus on the cavalry actions of Gettysburg campaign, from Brandy Station to the screened army marches to the cav-vs-cav skirmish east of the town itself. Hmmm...