The best selling wargaming book of all time
is Donald Featherstone’s War Games. At 30-40,000 copies sold it remains at the
top of the wargaming book charts. Its key advantage was being the first book
which helped launch modern wargaming.
The second book is probably Peter Perla’s
Art of Wargaming. It related the development of the hobby to professional
wargaming and contained many insights into how to use wargames for operational
analysis and training. It managed to reach a staggering 15,000 copies by being
a recommended text book on various American military training programs.
It is very difficult to work out what is
going to catch the wargaming book market’s attention in the future, but the popularity
of two titles has surprised me. Paddy Griffith’s Sprawling Wargames is a ‘mish
mash’ of a book, a key part of which is describing some very large mega-games
for World War II. Paddy Griffith’s work seems to be having resurgence in the US
at the moment and the book is being used for undergraduate history classes.
They use it as an example to show the different perspectives of each side in
war and lecturers are handing out rolls to various students, getting them to
make a plan and then the lecturer arbitrates the final result. A sort of one
turn free kriegspiel. Must be better than the standard history PowerPoint
lecture.
The other book is the Fletcher Pratt Naval
Wargame. My wild guess is perhaps there are 5,000 regular naval wargamers in
the English speaking world, but many non-naval wargames are buying it. The game
is a lot of fun, suitable for multi-player games and speeds along nicely. The
value of the game as a model of big gun naval warfare is a hotly contested
subject between those who say it is a model of fleet combat v those who point
out the million simplifications that went into the standard rules we can now
play. I rarely have a week without an email (or more) about the Pratt game.
My current thinking is the Pratt book sells
as it is a narrative of a game being popular, being lost and now being found again.
The controversy over the value of the game seems to be one many wargamers are
happy to venture an opinion on. Wargamers like to superimpose a narrative on
the sequence of events in their games, to make a chaotic event on the table top
into a coherent account, perhaps the Pratt book sells because it is a just a
good story and wargamers like a good story.
My best guess is the Pratt book will, over
time, outsell all other wargaming books. Of course, tomorrow a new book might
arrive that will take the wargaming world by storm and I will be completely
wrong.
I asked some younger wargamers at my local
club for their thoughts on the best wargaming book of all time. They answered
it was obviously The Lord of Rings,
it is full of Warhammer [Fantasy] battles and had some fantastic Dungeon and
Dragons adventures in it. Perhaps they were right.
They're fine books - but they're no Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun!
ReplyDeleteAny idea how many copies GW have shifted over the years? TBH I don't really class the GW 'hobby' as being part of wargaming 'proper' rather as parallel but separate....
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Pete.
Paddy Griffith's Napoleonic wargaming for Fun was a fine and original book, with many different ideas for simulating warfare. It is one of the best wargaming books of all time. I have started an Innovations in Wargaming Series of books, which Paddy had contributed several chapters to.
ReplyDeleteI have not yet heard how many copies of wargaming rules GW has sold, I only have figures for some wargaming books. I will find out the WRG sales if I can.
ReplyDeleteComment from Ross Maker Discovery Games
ReplyDeleteI think there are several reasons that the discussion hasn’t mentioned that Pratt’s Naval Wargame is such a big seller. I’ll list them from least to most important (in my opinion).
First, Pratt was a talented and entertaining writer and his prose reads well – much better than, say, Barker’s acronym-laden shorthand.
Second, there existed a large demand for these rules due to the fact that the Pratt Estate deliberately held them off the market for so long, a demand which the unsatisfying (and possibly illicit) Z&M edition did nothing to sate.
But the biggest factor, in my mind, is Pratt’s standing with both history buffs and, more importantly, science fiction fans. SF fans are collectors, especially of works by their favored authors. They tend to be completists, collecting even works from outside science fiction. I expect that a large proportion of the Naval Wargame sales are to SF fans who will never play the game, who own no ship models, who may, indeed look rather askance at the whole idea of wargaming. But it’s a Fletcher Pratt book they don’t already have on the shelf.
Keep up the good work. The whole hobby owes you a big round of thanks.
Ross W. Maker
Discovery Games