@@RipOffProductionsLLC I can one up that one: In german, the term "Männchen" or (in local dialect) "Manderl" is often use to describe any game piece that is vaguely humanoid shaped (like the conic ones) and roughly translates to man or men.
@@RipOffProductionsLLC Sure, calling troops "men" isn't weird (especially for such an old game) but calling the individual model a "man" kinda is. And then there's the robots who just aren't in either way.
@@ThranoThis is probably because the common root word began as a gender-neutral one; in old english "man/men" just meant "person/people" and there were other words to refer to specific genders, and then somewhere along the way "man" became specifically masculine and they had to add a prefix to differentiate "wo-man".
@@stephenbarrett8861 Then we don't have a Pat Mustard style event. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0LvFn5kSABA.htmlsi=h-Tu9rtrN6jtdoVf&t=85 The glory of Speed 3.
Episodes like this and Laserburn always get me dreaming of this long forgotten age of weird little wargames and their accompanying miniature ranges, that you only hear about in specialist magazines and word of mouth at the hobby shop. ...then I remember "oh yeah, that's just what wargaming is outside of Games Workshop", lol.
It bothers me to no end that in Kill Team they use a pentagon to represent a 6 inch move, a square for 3 inches, and a triangle for one inch. A continuation of a glorious tradition, I see.
Honestly these side trips into other games of the era are really interesting. I didn't really get into war games as a child so it's fascinating to see the evolution
You know, those Star Trek figures would look pretty spiffy with some paint on them. Shame nobody has made a proper in-depth video about them all just yet...
Great video. Never knew this existed. BTW "the men" is an older way to refer to soldiers or troops. It's not uncommon in that context, that's way you "man" a trench or position.
Unfortunately they obviously know this, since they mention and show (3:48) the historical games these rules were inspired by on and from which the terminology presumably originates, but they decided to lean into the "MEN!!" bit anyway... I'm a fan of progressive ideas, but not really a fan of that kind of culture war engagement-baiting.
@@rmsocarrollthat typo made me read it as "children were thorough back then!" which is a delightful notion. Back in my day we played the turn all the way to completion, lad, none of this phase skipping malarky you young people are so fond of!
Gotta say I really love the design for the Imperial Marines in Spacefarers. Would be cool if GW ever brought that look back sometimes, maybe as an Imperial Guard regiment.
I cannot express enough love for the fact that the bolt pistol is a Gyrojet! Also that the handgun is a C96 broomhandle Mauser! I mean I think that gun is awsome. But it tickles me that thousands of years in the future people are apparently still using a pistol from 1896!
gun nerd here, the image of a bolt pistol is based off of the real gyrojet handgun, which uses rocket propelled ammo, cool they were thinking about that this early
Always love seeing the type of game that I remember from being a young un. On a personal note (unlike the personal note that I wrote above already...) that Lego space set you showed was the first ever "big" set that I had. I have no idea how my mum afforded it for my Christmas (dirt poor would have been a step up for us) but I loved it and seeing it again her brought back enough memories to have a bit of a happy cry. ❤️
Ten seconds in, and I'm already laughing harder than many sitcom episodes or comedy movies have ever managed ... By the Hive Mind that secretly controls my every action on a subconscious level that I haven't actually realised yet, I love this series.
I actually owned a copy of this game - I found it in some random second-hand bookshop while on holiday in Cornwall back in the early '90s for pocket money, and bought it with the intention of trying to actually run it with my scattered collection of WH40K miniatures someday. Never got round to it, though, and it's now somewhere among the random stuff in my loft. I will say that the whole _"manly men men men"_ thing is more of a cultural difference over time than a pointed microaggression... I don't mean in terms of the "Oh, granddad's making racist jokes again" kind of difference where it was okay in olden days to make clearly-discriminatory othering comments because it was considered harmless by white people but rightfully upset minorities, but more a case of institutionalised education. I remember that the masculine form was considered to be the grammatically-correct pronoun for a plurality of mixed- or indeterminate-gender persons when I was learning English Language back in the dark days of the previous millennium - it was just easier than saying "men and women" every time. It's the reason we still say "mankind" as a catch-all term for humanity of all genders rather than "men-and-women-kind". Was that morally right, or justifiable in modern times? No, of course not - but in terms of how English was taught back then, it was _grammatically_ correct. It was what was drummed into us over years of school, it was the answer that would earn you a tick on your exam paper rather than a cross, and it was deeply-ingrained habit by the time you were let loose on the world. If you wrote "men" it was implicitly understood by the reader that the term didn't necessarily exclude other genders - "women" was only used when talking _specifically_ about women, but "men" was a catch-all umbrella term. The point I'm making is, while it probably does highlight the implicit low-grade institutionalised sexism baked into society back then, it would be unfair to suggest that this was an intentional shot fired in terms of exclusive gender politics when it's more likely that it's just how the writers had been taught to write at school. While this sort of thinking is clearly archaic to modern sensibilities, it's not like this is Victorian-age grammar - I'm 46, and this was still how I was being taught English when I was at school in the early '90s, so it's only one or two generations back that this was the _correct_ term to use. I can remember as a small child first finding out that the term "men" could include women but "women" couldn't include men, and asking my Mum why this was, and she just shrugged - she didn't have an answer, that was just how language worked back then. It never sat well with me, but if you're going to write something like a business letter or an essay which you wanted to be taken seriously (or, for that matter, a set of games rules), then you used the grammatically-accepted vernacular or risked being discounted as uneducated. I mean, why take what you have to say seriously if you can't even write words good...?
Good write-up! I also think Snipe and Wib obviously know this and were just making jokes about how cultural contexts shifts, where older contexts viewed in a modern one can give some funny results. :)
Originally mann referred to all humans in old English, with modifiers added to refer to people of a specific gender being wer- for men, and wif- for women. So you'd have mann for all humans, wermann for adult males, and wifmann for adult females. The term wer or wif were also used on their own some times as a shortened version. This died out sometime around the 1300s from memory.
Men is shorter and saves text, also it makes it clear that its about single entity's. Units and Troops have wargaming conation's of them being a group acting as one.
Stuff like this does really help contextualise elements that nowadays seem just intrinsically part of 40k, but when they were initially put in fit into a broader "nerds hopped up on Dune" milieu.
I dunno why force sword next to normal sword cracked me up. There's a few peices of artwork in rogue trader that feels like it could have been for spacefarers. Especially some Imperial army stuff, that look radically different from the models for that faction. It is one page 164-165 I spent way too much time tracking that down
With all the tables and modifiers, I can't imagine playing this game with more than 3 or 4 models. It would take forever remembering everything with 10 or 12 MEN in my group.
So glad I found this channel, so informative about the deep company and in-universe lore, and super friendly and warm atmosphere to each video! Definitely something valuable in the community, keep up the awesome work!! ❤️
The ‘men’ thing is still somehow better than the home brew D&D supplement I found which had an entire page at the beginning justifying its use of he/him pronouns including a line that said something like “Centuries of use have rendered this pronoun gender neutral” going on the explain how grammatically horrific constructs like ‘his/her’ and ‘theirs’ were.
Speaking as a person with a BA in History, I'm pretty confident that using "Men" wasn't actually a choice but rather mere habit. Especially given the origins of minis gaming in historical scenarios and the tendency of armies to refer to their non0comissioned-slash-enlisted members as "the men." Why am I saying this? Because while I'm very content - even happy - when someone point out how the use of language in an historical document isn't terribly appropriate today, it annoys me when they fail to acknowledge the *context* that document was written in. In the late 70s and early 80s, there was both an assumption that only boys and men would be playing this game and a habit that soldiers were referred to as "men." Calling this "aggressively gendered" implies a motivation that almost certainly didn't exist, and also suggests this was unusual for the time - which I can guarantee it was not. Presenting these rules means you're engaging in historical analysis, and a key principle of historical analysis is to determine and present the context of the document.
While its not atypical for the time, it does still have the effect of agressive gendering, imo, and that i think is worth remarking on. Furthermore, i suspect they find this notable because if im not mistaken the earlier game laserburn did NOT have this quirk, so there were games of the era that didn't express this kind of gendering. Considering how agressively gendered the hobby is even today, i think its worth understanding where and how the roots of that manifested, and this certainly seems one very minor way
Re: referring to actual and minifig armies as men: of course RL army brass referred to their troops that way, because for centuries they were just men. When this written, female combat duty military personnel were still pretty rare in most militaries. Even though Spacefarers was SF, it makes sense that this would still be thought as the norm in the future if the devs even actively thought about this. Nowadays, it would be a WTF if devs working on a SF wargame didn't ponder this. Back then, it just was not thought about, because of the history of wargames. Edit: just got curious, and looked this up. The US armed forces didn't fully allow women to serve in combat duty roles until the Obama Administration. The UK Royal Marines were the last ones to accept female recruits, and that was in the late 2010s. Honestly, kudos to the Laserburn devs for thinking out of the box, and it is extremely understandable why it probably didn't occur to the Spacefarers devs to think of more gender equality in a future military.
@@KamranMSHoule I agree that it's worth remarking on. And as a person who formed a lot of fundamental opinions about, well, everything, during the time these rules were written, I'd also say that it had consequences. I've had to do a lot of work to shed the assumptions I learnt about race and gender, and reading things similar to these rules as child and teen certainly helped set those assumptions. But the video explicitly calls out the gendered language as "a choice," and that implies the rules were engaged in specific sexism; that is, that the authors were deliberately trying to say "no girls allowed!" Whereas, in my opinion, this is an example of systemic sexism, where the authors simply didn't think about whether they were saying *anything* about girls, never mind what they were actually saying. In other words, it seems to me that the video is in fact obscuring the origin of the gender issues in wargaming today, by presenting these rules as if they were written in the same social context as the video was made in. That limits us to saying "gendered language is bad and exclusionary" (which is true) and prevents us from saying "this is *why* there was gendered language back in the day and, knowing that, we're now better equipped to try and change it."
I'm fairly sure they're aware of this and have chosen to sacrifice the opportunity to mention how soldiers are traditionally, coloquially referred to as "men" even in recent times for the 'aggressively masculine' gag. Which is just that, a gag. However relevant historical analysis is to this video, this is very clearly not an academic piece, and not beholden to the same rules and responsibilities. Yes it would be 'better' if they acknowledged it, but it wasn't _necessary_ by any reasonable metric.
@@davydatwood3158 i do think you are ascribing a lot of intent to what is more slang terminology today (specifically how they are using "a choice" which is more for comedic effect than anything else by my reading). Is that in and of itself perhaps problematic? Perhaps. I do wish there were more spaces to discuss the problematic and bigoted content that pervades the depths of this hobby, as i think there are very compelling, productive, and fun conversations to have in that space. But yeah i cant see the choices made by this video as particularly egregious
This game, Laserburn, and old school D&D reinforce in my mind that Game Design is a skill, and possibly a Science (or at least an Art). There are many ways to lay out the rules for a game, but some are less helpful than others. My rule of thumb is that if you're printing while matrices into your rules that players must check every two minutes, maybe you should rethink the game design to NOT include a matrix. Any player who isn't already very used to looking up huge tables like this is going to go cross-eyed. This is true of both children and most adults. This is why D&D eventually dropped their to-hit charts and went with THAC0, and then later dropped THAC0 in favor of a simple "roll higher to hit" style of Ascending Armor Class. Basically, a lot of 70s-80s tabletop game design could use an editor to cut down on needless complexity, and just enforce basic consistency. Simulationism is one thing, but most games of this era made even that granularity more complicated than required.
the thing about the solar power satellites actually *isnt* science fiction! its a real concept known as "space-based solar power" and its basically big solar panels in space which then transmit the electricity down in the form of microwaves or lasers to ground-based receivers. and if youre wondering what the advantages are, solar panels in space would generate more power (about 1.5x to 2x), they'd generate that power for a greater portion of the day (depending on orbit), you can rewire the power grid as need demands by aiming the satellites at different receivers
Regarding the 1cm=1m means the minis would scale to 2.5m tall thing; unless I'm mistaken, at this time, and for some time after, it was common for games to differentiate between 'figure scale' and 'ground scale', so figures would be disproportionately big compared to in game distances. As I understand it, this was largely used to explain why ranges for weapons were unrealistically short and why battlefields were vastly smaller than real life ones and why a six turn game would be able to represent a battle that lasts the better part of a day rather than maybe an hour like it would if everything was the same scale as the minis. I think its also related somewhat to how some people will look at a unit of, say, twenty goblin minis, and say it represents several hundred goblins.
I keep coming back to Heavy Metal... That aesthetic when all space sci-fi was generic and interchangeable, with the resulting worlds all feeling infinite and endless. I wish I could've been there for that.
I really like these videos on old GW systems I've never heard of. Its way more interesting to me seeing where everything started, rather than the popular stuff that there's already a lot of folk talking about!
I feel like if I ever fall into a terry davis level of madness, these heavily table based war games are the ones I’d play on an excel spreadsheet with chat gpt armed with a random number generator
There was something called "Havok", which came out in the 90s, and died pretty quickly. It's more like toys quality-wise, but still nice. I think I still have a set, somewhere...
Hey! Here's an idea: Get learned on WH Fantasy and do those great codex compliant for those codexes....BECAUSE YOU GUYS ROCK!!!! DO IT!!! YOU GOTS SKILL!! SKILL!!
Holy cow. I used to play games like Car Wars and Starfleet Battles and this really reminds me of those kinds of games with the fiddly and detailed rules.
i actually really love the whole modifiers changing the matrix you roll on thing. i'd hate to use it in anything more than a skirmish game, but i do like it all the same.
