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good game respects its medium. It recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of its embodiment, and works with them to produce harmonious results. Consider poker: we could use regular monetary denominations to place bets, or even just keep track of things on a piece of paper, and the game wouldn't fundamentally change. But the use of specialized poker chips heightens the experience dramatically -- it is fluid, intuitive, and lends a particular aesthetic to the game that it would otherwise be lacking. The game takes advantage of physicality to make the otherwise abstract game better. Online poker functions, in its essence, identically to real-life poker, but everyone knows that something is missing. The advantages of computers are not oriented well to the problems of poker.
There's a reason that so-called "tabletop games" have such a radically different character than video games. Role-playing games in the two mediums share some superficial commonalities, but in actual play could scarcely be less alike. Tabletop RPGs take advantage of the phenomenal associative and communcative power of the human mind in order to tell stories, at the expense of visual embodiment, while video game RPGs can crunch complicated numbers in milliseconds, convey elaborate visual effects, and maintain real-time interaction -- all at the expense of responsivity and agency, as offered by its tabletop brethren.
I'm designing a game right now, that is self-consciously in conversation with the monolithic miniature war game Warhammer 40,000. Warhammer's setting is unparalleled in science fiction, as far as I'm concerned, and the Games Workshop miniature lines for 40k are likewise absolutely top-notch. The actual game itself, however, I find at odds with itself. In the terms I've put forward above, Warhammer 40k does not understand its medium -- it neither plays to its strengths, not avoids its weaknesses.
I think that the miniature game of Warhammer 40k is bad. However, it's rules are not necessarily bad per se; they are mostly placed in a medium for which they are ill-suited.
The fundamental advantage of a physical wargame over a digital one is the delight of physicality, which brings with it the social aspect of sharing a space and a board with another person. Painting the models is rewarding work, and seeing your hard work displayed on massive scale is a wonderful feeling. However, this is just about the only advantage that these kinds of games have over computers. Their disadvantages are many: numerical computations are more difficult; keeping track of individual soldiers is more difficult; remembering rules and their interactions must be done by fallible humans instead of encyclopedic computers; everything is slower, as it must be done by hand; the list goes on and on.
Now, I happen to think that that core advantage actually is capable of outweighing the advantages of computers -- but a ruleset for miniature games should be highly aware of its limitations, and strive to overcome them as best as possible. Warhammer 40k, however, falls into basically every trap it could possibly set for itself. It requires familiarization, if not outright memorization, of enormous books full of rules; it requires measuring every single model individually when moving; every attack requires rolling piles dice at minimum three times; the game is broken into lengthy turns, in which one's opponent mostly has to sit around waiting; individual models will frequently have health levels that have to be tracked; statuses have to be remembered; measuring and re-measuring auras from important units is omnipresent; etc. Any of these issues are negligible for computers to handle, but for humans, every one of them is a source of cumulative friction, which leads to the canonical length of time for experienced players of Warhammer to play out a full game being in the neighborhood of two and a half to four hours! The game is known for being extremely intimidating at a rules-level for beginners, and for good reason. All this speaks of bad design.
A physical game needs to recognize its constraints. It should minimize measuring, minimize memorization, minimize dice rolling; not because hard things are bad, but because it is of the utmost importance to allow people to put their minds to work actually playing the game. Games like Warhammer simply place too much cognitive load on their players to, essentially, act like computers. I think this is an unacceptable attitude. It is incumbent upon game designers to make their rules facilitate direct play, in which a minimum of mental effort is used to "sustain" the game, and a maximum upon making the integral decisions that make up the game. I invite the reader to ask whether chess would be a better game if it were required that every piece be perfectly centered in its square to within 1/16 of an inch.