One of the things that fills an inordinant amount of my conscious thought is miniature wargaming.  Not actually playing them, or even collecting/painting the miniatures.  It's the rules that get me.

The way my brain works, it likes to be fed a steady diet of conceptual frameworks.  That's one of the reasons I'm a programmer.  I like forcing my mind into a constrained situation and then trying to solve problems within those constraints or even find ways to get "outside the box", so to speak.

Combine that love with my interest in ancient and military history, and it starts to become clear why I like miniature wargaming.  It's fascinating to me to see how other people have attempted to conceptualize and "Game-ify" combat.  Some games are just a mish-mash of "roll X to hit" sorts of mechanics, and others are subtle interactions of intertwining mechanism that together yield a simulation of some aspect of combat's vagueries.

As an aside, the term "wargame" isn't really accurate, though I'm going to continue using it since it's become a sort of industry standard.  Most so-called wargames are not games of war, but games of battle.  Real "War" games are Risk or Axis and Allies, where you care more about production, logistics, and politics than you do about what batallion goes where on the battlefield.  The sorts of wargames I play are really battle games, where you arrive on the field with an army attempt to defeat an enemy force.  How did that army get raised?  Don't care.  How do you feed them?  Don't care, unless the baggage train can be captured for a battle objective.  Why are you fighting?  Because that's why the figures were painted up.

Another aside - I prefer miniature wargames to more deterministic games like Chess.  Partly it's because I'm not very smart, and partly it's because I like the "gambling" aspect of miniature wargames.  Almost all of them use dice to resolve different aspects of the game, so even the best plans can go awry, and the worst can succeed.  That gives me an ego-save when I lose :-), but mostly I just like the excitement of seeing if my gamble will pay off.  I do have almost legendarily bad luck, but hey, it's still fun.

There are basically two schools of thought on wargames rules.

1. Make a core set of rules that can play a generic game, and then let each army "break" certain rules to add "flavor".  For example, maybe well disciplined Romans don't need to check their morale after a bad round of combat like everyone else does.  This sort of game can lead to "cheezy armies" with overly powerful abilities, but it's also the most flexible sort of rule framework, since (hopefully) the game is designed with many corners that can "break" in interesting but fair ways.
2. Make a core set of rules that handles all eventualties you want to model in your game.  Army lists are just collections of troops, and no armies get to "break" any rules, since the rules can handle whatever special cases are needed.  This sort of game can seem a little bland if not done right, but many people feel this is a more proper way of doing rules.

The games I play span both schools of thought.  My favorite "full battle" game is De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA), which is a very high level Type 2 game.  The systems is very generic, but exceedingly subtle and fast enough to make for really fun games.  The armies only need 40 figures (often 15mm sized) or so grouped into 12 rectangular stands, so they're not expensive or time consuming to build.  Stands represent hundreds of men in DBA, and you (as the general) really only get a statistical view of the battle, such as where your knights are and roughtly what chance they have of being successful.  So you focus almost entirely on controlling the battle and let the dice tell you how things turn out in a very abstract way.

I also play Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB), which is sort of the polar opposite of DBA.  Armies are 100-200 figures, usually 28mm in size, and are grouped into units of 20 or so figures.  Each figure represents a small number of "real" men (around 20 or so, but there's no fixed scale), so the game is a little abstract, but not so much as you'd notice in general.  But WAB battles are much more visceral than DBA, as you watch men get ground together in melee or picked off by missile fire.  Lots of dice rolling, and very "toy soldier", but not so subtle.  It's a Type 1 game for sure, and so far they've avoided most of the pitfalls of that type.  It's expensive to get in to, and you won't learn too much about historical combat, but it's fun in a very Hollywood sort of way.  In other words, use WAB for "Braveheart" or "Gladiator" games, DBA for the Second Punic Wars.

I'm also getting in to "skirmish" gaming, where each figure represents one man.  "Chain Reaction" is my favorite game right now because it's simple, fast, and seems to reward using real-world military tactics.  Unlike DBA and WAB, CR is a modern to future sort of setting, where semiautomatic weapons rule.  I've also played Star Wars with CR, and that works very well also.  CR's mechanism is a unique set of "reaction tables" combined with a single "reputation" stat for each figure.  Characters test their reputations when, for example, they see an enemy to determine who gets the first shot, what the character does if the shot misses (fire, duck back, run away), etc.  The game is hard to explain without showing, but it's easy and fast to play, and a heck of a lot of fun.  It's nominally a Type 2 game, but they've built in an optional "rules breaking" mechanism that allows the game to become Type 1 if you want it to.  Very clever design, very fun to play.

Whew, that took longer than I was expecting to.  Now that I have the ground work out of the way, I'll start going in to new territory next time.  I'm slightly dissatisfied with how my favorite games handle the Late Bronze Age (i.e., Ancient Egypt, Babylon, etc.), and I think I might know why.