I mentioned before that one of my high school friends enjoyed realistic war games like Avalon Hill’s Tobruk and Squad Leader. Those are games with many numbers and complicated mechanics for building defense and attack strength. At least, they were complicated enough for me–a guy who tends to send one tank or team out to shoot up the enemy and takes too long to realize it’s a pretty dumb move.

That’s many steps away from games like Risk that just ask you to roll the dice to see how many enemies you kill. Risk limits your strategy options to piling up troops in Indonesia or North Africa to bottleneck incoming attacks. Squad Leader, according to BoardGameGeek, “utilizes programmed instruction to guide you through 12 scenarios of increasing realism and complexity. The scenarios run the gamut from street fighting in Stalingrad to armored advances across snow covered roads in the Ardennes.”

It’s not so much a game as it is “a game system which can be used to portray any WWII infantry action.” Measure the fun accordingly.

An advantage to board games, regardless the complexity, is the analog natural of the mechanics. You have a paper rulebook and cardboard pieces with numbers. There’s no programming to open the door to someone accusing you of fiddled with it to win, which is what happened to me while playing Lords of Conquest as a teenager on my Commodore 128.

Lords of Conquest was fairly simple. It allowed you to choose one of several world maps or create one of your own. You took turns selecting your territory or have the computer do it for you. Then you moved troops, controlled resources, and other things I no longer remember. The main thing I remember is the risk factor.

You could play with one of three levels of risk.

1. Low: An attacker with equal force to the defender will always win.
2. Medium: An attacker with greater force than the defender will always win. Maybe equal force would result in a draw without damage to either side.
3. High: All attacks were based on percentages. An attacker with equal force to the defender would have a 50 percent chance of winning.

Playing with high risk was the only fun way to play, and it helped me understand simple odds. If I had a 40 percent chance of winning without any risk of losing my own forces, then I might as well attack on my turn and see what comes of it. My smaller or equal forces conquered larger ones many times. That’s how I won and earned accusations of cheating via programming. I was simply willing to take the chance of winning. If losing an attack meant losing my own territory, it would have been different, though maybe you could draw an enemy power into a vulnerable position with a feinted loss.

People don’t understand simple odds like this. They think if a die rolled three, two, and three, then I must turn up five or six next. But each side as a 1/6 chance of being rolled. Sure, it’s unusual for the same number to be rolled four times, but each roll has the same odds. And in a game that only rewards you for getting the right number, there’s nothing to lose.