Worlds of If
Hot Wars That Weren't
The futility of designing a serious game about nuclear warfare seems obvious. Cold War-era game designers generally assumed that any war between East and West would be fought only with conventional forces. The rules for the game NATO: Operational Combat in Europe in the 1970s captured this attitude in graphic fashion. “To simulate the use of strategic nuclear weapons, simply soak the map with lighter fluid and apply a flame.” Everybody loses. No replays.
The classic 1965 card game Nuclear War took a satirical approach, egging players to put together enough warheads, missiles and planes to slaughter their opponents’ populations by the millions.
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Players collected cards, mostly warheads of 10 - 100 megatons that would kill 2 25 million people, and missiles and planes to deliver them. A spinner in the box then determined possible changes to the base kill result.
There were also "Secret" cards that took effect instantly. These ranged from a "Super Germ" that killed 25 million of the drawing player's own people to "2 MILLION of your highly moral little old ladies rebel against your country's military policies and disgustedly drive off in their electric cars to the enemy's country."
Even a silly game about a world where countries chucked nukes around with abandon had an ultimate armageddon. A note on the board warns that if the biggest (100 Megaton) bomb hits a nuclear stockpile (a spinner possibility), "a super chain reaction starts which destroys all countries, the Earth itself and the entire Solar System. Everybody lost."
SPI published a much more serious game in 1977, After the Holocaust. This is set in North America in 2002, said to be 20 years after a strategic nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The game postulates a Soviet attack just hours before a new American antimissile system was to come on line. The satellite-based lasers in this storyline predate by six years the Strategic Defense Initiative announced in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan.
The US population has been reduced to 40 million people and the country is split into four power blocs.
It is very much an economic game, with players allocating labor and resources to boost their standard of living and expand their influence. Fighting remains a (usually counter-productive) option. The rules make it difficult for players to survive to the end of the game, much less win.
Most game designers instead focused on what might happen if East and West collided in Europe or around the world. Because the Cold War never went hot on a grand scale, the battles were hypothetical but based on the latest available information about evolving weapons and doctrines.
Only a few looked at the potential for modern global war, with World War 3 being the main example. Rather, game developers focused mostly on the potential for conflict within Europe.
The opponents were obvious, and the main land border between East and West ran through Germany. Games set in this arena were published on every conceivable scale, from grand strategy to individual tank duels.
The aforementioned NATO was published in 1973 with a map that covers all of Northern Europe. The same theatre, with varying map boundaries, was featured in Warsaw Pact (1976), The Next War: Modern Conflict in Europe (1978), NATO: The Next War in Europe (1983), The Red Storm (1983), and Red Storm Rising (1989). Berlin ’85 looked at a smaller operation focused on the divided German capital. All of these had unit tokens that mostly represented division-size forces.
Other games focused on smaller units. Fulda Gap: First Battle of the Next War (1977) sees regimental and brigade-sized units fighting at the most likely invasion point for Warsaw Pact forces. Bundeswehr (1977) looks at North Germany at the battalion level. Fifth Corps (1980), Hof Gap (1980), BAOR (1981) and North German Plain (1988) use company as well as battalion and regimental counters.
At the lowest end of the scale were tactical games. Red Star/White Star (1972) ranged from battalions down to companies and even platoons. Rapid Deployment Force (1983) and Team Yankee (1987) involve fighting between platoons and squads. Leopard II involves combat between individual tanks. Air Cav (1985) features the role of helicopters in modern tactical ground combat. Other tactical titles included Assault: Tactical Combat in Europe 1985 (published in 1983) and another game called Bundeswehr (1986).
The larger-scale operational level games generally included the effects of air and naval power in an abstract way. Other games looked specifically at air and naval combat.
Most naval games looked at conflict within large regions. For example, Sixth Fleet (1985) covers the potential struggle for dominance of the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, 7th Fleet (1987) and 5th Fleet (1989) cover the Pacific and Indian Ocean theatres. There also were some games addressing modern naval tactics, such as SSN (1975) and Harpoon (1985).
Games dedicated to modern aerial combat are almost all tactical. Examples include Jump Jet (1970), Foxbat & Phantom: Tactical Aerial Combat in the 1970’s (1973), Air War: Modern Tactical Air Combat (1977), Top Gun (1986), Tac-Air (1987) and Air Superiority (1987).
Game designers published hypothetical games with other premises too. Revolt in the East (1986) involves conflict between Soviet forces and those of the Warsaw Pact countries in the event that the latter got fed up with Communism and tried to break away. The East is Red: The Sino-Soviet War and The China War: Sino-Soviet Conflict in the 1980s both addressed the potential for a Russian invasion of northern China. (While the two Communist powers did have their disagreements, it never actually went beyond border skirmishes around the Amur River.)
Most speculative were a pair of huge games positing the downfall of the United States and Soviet Union respectively. In Invasion: America, the U.S. mainland is invaded from the west by the Pan Asiatic League, from the south by the South American Union and from the east by the European Socialist Coalition.
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Objective: Moscow includes a set of regional scenarios but the full game involves an all-out invasion from all sides by the United States, a United Europe, China, Iran and a host of smaller countries.
In the real world, the Berlin Wall was brought down in 1989 by humble hammers while men with guns stood by and watched. The Cold War was over. A whole new set of challenges awaited both national leaders and military commanders.
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