I thought that was clever - I confess I never used the full rules as written, because I found them tricky to get the hang of, and there were far too many lists and reaction tests for my liking. Anyway, since the spark had now glowed again, I thought I should make a more serious job of understanding them properly, so that I could maybe use the turn structure in my new game - I have to say that the WRG's rules sometimes rely heavily on your spotting the subjunctive verb in Paragraph 417 to appreciate the full beauty of the logic. [Also, over the years I have skipped past "jezails" in the combat factor lists more times than I could estimate, and I still don't know what a jezail is.]
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| This, of course, is a jezail |
In a recent email exchange with a fellow bloggist - a game designer of some repute, let it be said - he offered the view that the turn sequence has to be capable of being carried in your head - if you need a chart then there may be something seriously wrong. He is right - I guess I knew this, but I needed someone else to say it.
Lightbulb.
I have - all right, regretfully - dropped the WRG bits, and my new game is looking slimmer and more like my idea of a recreation immediately.
What is capable of being carried in the head, of course, also depends heavily on how the old head is performing, and I am aware that the passing years have made me less patient in this area, but I prefer to think that I have become more fussy about how a game should be, rather than simply more stupid. Other opinions probably abound.
I was joking about this with another friend (I am showing off here, since this means I must have at least two friends), and we agreed that a wallchart for the turn sequence in chess would be
(1) White moves
(2) Black moves
(3) go to (1)
I could probably post that as a download on boardgamegeek - now there's fame.
I prefer games where all the rules can be carried in my head. I played a game of Charge, with house modifications, with my son yesterday without a rule book or playsheet in sight.
ReplyDeleteAgreed! Committed to memory even. 'Complexity' does not necessarily equate with 'fun.'
DeleteBest Regards,
Stokes
I have about 95% of 'Hordes of the Things' in my head. There's a couple of obscure combat interactions I have to look up, but these days I only consult the book about one game in three, if that.
DeleteKaptain Kobold - when Commands & Colors: Napoleonics finally reached me after a period of being kept hostage by the UK Royal Mail, I had a limited time to get up to speed before I had to attempt a game with a friend (tense up). I did the logical thing, and read the booklet quickly, promising myself that I would skip the complicated bits that looked as though they would only come up very occasionally. Sound idea, except that every damned game I ever played has at least a few of these supposedly "rare" events, so I have to keep up to speed on the lot! Lesson: as soon as you assume there is such a thing as a rare event, it begins to appear more often. A touch of Quantum Physics?
DeleteA glimpse into Foy’s Principles of Wargame Design. I am somewhat surprised there is not one of your Laws in place to address the optimal Turn Sequence. We rules’ tinkers always have our favorites and I await seeing the unwrapping of yours.
ReplyDeleteGood stuff, Tony!
Glad to hear someone finally say this about the venerable WRG 1685-1845 ruleset. Some interesting ideas there, as you say, but I was never able to get the knack in practice way back in the dark ages of the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteBest Regards,
Stokes
Dammit. I am digging out the WRG rules as we speak ...unless La Duchesse has sold them on Amazon of course!
ReplyDeleteI have fond memories of WRG 1685-1845... they were one of the main rule sets when I was but a lad...
ReplyDeleteThe thing I remember most about them is indeed the amount of ‘tests’ you had to do...
roll a test to see if you can roll a test... now roll a test to see if you can pick up the dice... roll the dice... test to see if you can read the dice... etc etc.... :-)
Ah! Those were the days... but we had fun.... didn’t we...
All the best. Aly
Aly,
ReplyDeleteThose were the days indeed and to be honest I still use the WRG rules for my solo games because all those charts and tests 🤣 Make it quite useful and to be honest like a lot of rule sets the more youmplay ythe more you remember.
Tony I shall watch your progress with interest 😀
A couple of months ago, I picked up and played a game with WRG 1685-1845 for the first time in at least 33 years. Bar a quick skim through beforehand and the need to check the odd detail during the game, I played pretty much from memory and the use of the QRS.
ReplyDeleteMuscle memory I reckon. Must have played them scores of times at a time when I was trained to cram my brain with 'facts'. Howitzer firing Common Shell on Cover. 5 Fire, 6 Double Hit. (Quick check, I'm right).
Never learned the shooting table for Jezzails.
I too remember those rules quite fondly. They were much praised for their 'back to basics' simplicity, I seem to remember. Well, at least you didn't have to count up to 20 before removing a figure !
ReplyDeleteGentlemen - thanks for responses here. I've also been taken to task fairly seriously by Martin S, who says the WRG rules were (and by implication still are) the bees' knees.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. I think my gripe is that they were presented as a complete listing of everything the rules purported to cover, and the structure didn't guide the players very much. My cousin and I, and a couple of freinds including Allan Gallacher, used them for Napoleonics for a year or two, and after a while I wrote out my own edited version to omit all the periods, armies, weapons, options, etc etc, which didn't apply to us. The booklet which resulted was an awful lot smaller - even the QRS was a lot smaller. Maybe the rules attempted to cover too wide a range of periods, perhaps the opportunity to write huge lists of everything they knew was too strong to resist. I wouldn't know.
I spent a period of my professional life producing and editing technical documentation for some pretty complex computer systems. There were rules for structuring such things - the rules, sadly, used to change every time IBM tweaked the methodology, but the basic idea was that you structured indexes and content so that the general groupings were clear, the important things you needed to know were at a high level, and you could burrow down into the detail, with confidence that you were in the right area. Thus you would know pretty quickly when reading the stuff if the paragraph you had just lit upon was not relevant, and thus you would (a) not waste time reading it, (b) find the correct section quickly. I do not observe this in the WRG booklet. They set out everything in a pretty flat structure, and leave the readers to deduce how the important bits fit together. I also, in passing, have problems with authors who spend time telling us what shape hills and woods are allowed to be, but that's probably just me.
I did play these rules, but we cut them down a lot to what was relevant and what we wanted to use. That, of course, was a long time ago...
Anyway, I've just read them again. I even started thinking about editing them down to make them digestible - again - but I decided against it - anyway, I've been there before.
In the rules themselves, Death by Reaction Tests is the clincher, for me. I did like the 45H6HH tables after the book-keeping required for earlier versions, though, and I did like the "upside down" turn sequence (in reality a change in the point at which a turn ends). For my current purposes, the implications give too fussy a game, so I shall swerve this for now.