The rules are pretty elegant and fun, and are quick to teach and play. A game usually runs 30 minutes to an hour. Miniature wargaming is always going to be a bigger investment in money and effort than a board game, but DBA is pretty easy to get into: you only need a couple dozen figurines for an army, and a playing surface of about two or three feet square.
The central conceit of the rules is that the important thing is modeling a unit's role on the battlefield, and the rest can be abstracted away. So for example a unit of pikemen is a unit of pikemen, whether they're a Macedonian phalanx or a Swiss landsknecht. This lets the same set of rules support battles from the bronze age to the renaissance.
The rules are pretty elegant and fun, and are quick to teach and play. A game usually runs 30 minutes to an hour. Miniature wargaming is always going to be a bigger investment in money and effort than a board game, but DBA is pretty easy to get into: you only need a couple dozen figurines for an army, and a playing surface of about two or three feet square.
The central conceit of the rules is that the important thing is modeling a unit's role on the battlefield, and the rest can be abstracted away. So for example a unit of pikemen is a unit of pikemen, whether they're a Macedonian phalanx or a Swiss landsknecht. This lets the same set of rules support battles from the bronze age to the renaissance.