Chess or Yahtzee

    I always felt that wargaming was about recreating battles and putting you in the
generals chair. Could you do better than Napoleon at Waterloo or Lee at Gettysburg?
Tactics it was all about tactics.
    Now I know that history is full of random events, that are beyond control
and in our games that aspect is covered by the random roll of the venerable d6.
(on an side note: I find all other poly dice cumbersome and tedious, but more on that in another lament)
We have all rolled box cars trying to rally that important unit or win a crucial melee and seen victory snatched from our hands. So yes there is some randomness in the game, but good tactics still are the dominating factor.
    These days it seems that it's all about luck. These Lion/Dragon Rampant games, roll to see if your Orcs feel like charging or your Elves are in the mood to shoot. Saga, roll the bones to see if your guys can figure out how to form a shieldwall. Black Powder and Hail Caeser, roll to activate your french brigade, you may get yahtzee and suddenly teleport to the other side of the table! "But it's fun and adds a lot of uncertainty to the game", is what people who like this style of play keep telling me.
Rubbish, I say!
    When a game allows some new punk kid to win because he can out roll his veteran opponent it becomes no more than a game of Yahtzee, fit only for kids.
When we use to play WRG Ancients it was the skilled player who knew his army and how to play them that almost always won. In Empire it was the correct use of tactics that won. For goodness sake, even in Warhammer 40,000 the veteran player is at an advantage against the newest pimple with his bare lead army!
    Tactics and homework on your army should nearly always win the day.
    Chess my friends not Yahtzee!