Tournament style play in no way resembles the nature of real war, with its myriad complexities and variability. Unpredictability is minimized as generalship is reduced down to calculating statistical probabilities and the idiosyncrasies of a particular rule set and its ever-changing revisions, rather than the laws of war as we know them, a phenomenon known as Mathhammer among Games Workshop’s joyless serfs. Players do not act like real commanders who must safeguard their precious resources for the next battle, but rather as baseball managers in the final innings of the Game 7 of the World Series, where every body and soul is expendable and the world will be reset by the next game. Very often, there is not even an attempt at explaining what is being fought over, or how the two armies came to meet in the first place: the most that is attempted is a poker chip here or there to represent an “objective”, utterly meaningless except to the arbitrary rules of the match. It is the death of imagination and of meaning.…