Hooptedoodle #9 - Commands & Colors: Napoleonics

A good friend has suggested that there is a certain irony in my posting a rant about over-communication, when my blog itself may offer a shining example of exactly that kind of superfluous blether. Further, he suggested that it might be a good strategy to reduce the output a little, in the interests of boosting the average quality of said output.

I value his feedback, as they used to say on management training courses. Undoubtedly he has a point, and I did think seriously about it for several seconds. On balance, however, I will stick with the old market-stall line, “Never mind the quality, feel the width!”.

Firstly, I am touched but faintly surprised to think that anyone would approach this blog with any expectation of quality. There is a lot of real knowledge out there on the Internet, and a lot of expertise which I have never felt qualified to add to in any serious way.

Secondly, there is a monstrous non sequitur in the assumption that a reduction of volume would in any way influence the value of the content. Let’s face it, it behoves the terminally verbose to see ourselves as we really are, and I freely admit that my need to press the PUBLISH button from time to time has nothing to do with strategy – it just feels appropriate at the time (though, as in other areas of my life, I sometimes wonder about it after the event).

I’ll persist with the same old approach – if someone finds at least some of this stuff worthwhile, then I am very pleased. If not? – well I guess I’ll just keep churning it out anyway – at least for a while!


So – today’s pointless ramble will be about GMT’s game Commands & Colors: Napoleonics, which has finally been released. This comes under the general heading of old news, probably, but there are a good many people very excited about this, and I include myself. I have previously identified the application of this new boardgame to miniatures battles as potentially a very important step in breaking down the traditional Napoleonic boardgamers vs toy soldiers divide (which is both sad and obstructive), and towards establishing a middle ground which embraces the best features of both worlds.

I already have a passing familiarity with the Commands & Colors: Ancients game and its expansion sets, and have read a fair amount about Battle Cry and other games authored by Richard Borg. My interest in the new game is not so that it may replace any of my existing games (although, of course, it might). At present I am aware of the lack in the GMT game of a few things I like to see on the tabletop – skirmishing being one – and I would like to know more about the implied scalability (to grand strategy level) which is hinted at in the rules.

However, having read what has been published to date, I realised that I had to give this a trial. I went through all sorts of stupid fantasies about contacting GMT to see if they would sell me just the Command cards and the bits for making up the battle dice, but realised that they would probably just tell me to go and play with my soldiers. After some fairly alarming ideas about producing a mock-up of the game – some of which would entail more cost and inconvenience than simply ordering the complete product from GMT – I eventually saw sense and placed my order like a good chap. I don’t know when it will actually arrive, and I promise not to say too much about it until I have something to say, but I am – how shall I put it? – cautiously expectant.

Playing at War - Part 4 - Hexes & Heresies

This will be the last in this mini-series of posts on my protracted ramble through the jungle of wargames rules. I intend to do something soon on my use of computers in miniatures wargaming - which may well alienate anyone who has not already taken exception to my use of hexes! - and I'll try to blog my progress with the development of the grand-tactical version of my game, which is in something like a beta-test state at present.

Hexes. Over the years I have often been surprised at the amount of adverse reaction they have generated. Not by people taking part in the games, more as a point of principle. I guess hexes may seem a little inconsistent with the otherwise Old School appearance of my battles, but in fact they are not that big a deal - the underlying game is still recognisable, though there are two important aspects which come directly from the use of the big hexes, which I shall attempt to describe. Bear in mind throughout this that I am always looking to fight pretty large battles - much of what follows would not make sense for a skirmish or very detailed tactical game.

If you are interested and you can get hold of a copy, I recommend you have a good look at Doc Monaghan's The Big Battalions Napoleonic rule book, which came out of the Guernsey Wargames Group. The rules are out of print now, I think - I have the 2nd edition, dated 2000. In parts they are themselves recognisably related to the TooFatLardies' Le Feu Sacré, which is no bad thing, but one central innovation (to me, at least) is the use of "Bands" to measure all distances. Bands can be changed to suit the size of figures, and also to suit the scale of the action. A band on the tabletop represents 250 paces - for 6mm-10mm figures, this is 3 inches; for 12mm-15mm it is 4 inches; for 20mm-25mm it is 6 inches. These measurements are all halved for very big battles. The bands introduce a sort of granularity into all measurement in the game - everything is expressed in terms of bands, so ranges and moves are rounded to the nearer band. This is not really so revolutionary - your own tabletop games will have everything rounded to the centimetre or inch, so there is an implied granularity already. If you think about it, the further step of drawing formal hexagons around the band-sized spaces changes very little. Doc Monaghan's son, the historian Jason Monaghan, described Big Battalions to me as being "a hex game with invisible hexes".

One area in which boardgames score heavily is speed of play. I have seen too many tabletop games where the movement was so slow that the players could hardly remember where they were up to or what they had been intending to do. The time-and-motion realism nerds in the 1980s broke their games down into short turns (sometimes as little as 30-seconds of "clock" time), so 2cm moves were not unknown, and we had the slightly embarrassing conundrum that a complete evening of labouring away at Quatre Bras or similar might actually be found to have ground through a grand total of 10 minutes of real time. Now, apart from the fact that I find 2cm moves tedious in the extreme (and this is, you will recall, all just my personal view), most self-respecting wargamers of my acquaintance are likely to fudge the moves in their favour by a little, and this "scentific error" margin is likely to be of the order of 2cm anyway, so you'd better have an umpire and a team of checkers handy! My big hexes remove this problem immediately.

Next - in my game, the hexes are assumed to be 200 paces across. Since the maximum effective range of muskets was rather less than this (and since officers normally forbade long range fire as a wasteful and disruptive distraction), this means that infantry can only fire into the next hex, and not very far into it, either. In common with Big Battalions and Sam Mustafa's excellent Grande Armée (and its Fast Play Grande Armée variant), I have taken the heretical step of making volley fire part of the Close Combat phase of my game, so it does not appear as a separate element. Artillery can fire, as can skirmishers, but actual formed musket volleys are simply abstracted as one of the unpleasant things that formed bodies of troops could do to each other when they got close enough to fight (or run away, as they frequently did). Yes, this is boardgame-like, and does represent a total lack of respect for the traditional Move-Missiles-Melee framework that is central to the Old School approach, but it doesn't actually change the game very much, apart from speeding it up - oh, and also removing the problem of deciding exactly when and how often in a bound the troops can fire. The combat effectiveness of troop formations in my rules reflects the amount of fire they can bring to bear, so that, for example, a battalion in line gains an advantage in combat for its greater firepower (especially when it is defending) - an advantage which can be reduced dramatically in wet weather, by the way.

Having reached this topic of using a gridded terrain in a tabletop game, there is one important development which is coming soon and which I'd like to mention briefly. Part of the perceived resistance to hexagons in tabletop games comes, I think, because it blurs what has become a potentially emotive divide between boardgame players and miniatures enthusiasts. I don't see why there have to be camps, but camps there appear to be. GMT Games are very successful market leaders in board wargame publication, and one of their biggest selling games is Commands & Colors: Ancients, which has many enthusiastic fans. Because of the form of the game, quite a few people use miniatures instead of the supplied unit blocks. Now this is getting really blurred - so much so that one poor soul in one of the GMT fora said "blocks are elegant and miniatures are for children - if the game was sold with miniatures I wouldn't buy it". So there! - rather sweet, actually.

GMT have been threatening to launch Commands & Colors: Napoleonics for some time, against a background of considerable excitement - and quite rightly so - it will surely be a splendid game. I understand that they are now hoping to issue it in November. There will certainly be many who wish to use it with miniatures, and I believe that this could be a significant moment in the development of our hobby - invaluable cross-pollination between boardgames and tabletop games, and - maybe - the widespread adoption of a handsome, tick-tock, best-of-both-worlds game of exactly the type I have been promoting for years. There are a couple of nice recent postings on the forthcoming game in one of my favourite blogs, Joy and Forgetfulness, which set out what one miniatures wargamer expects it to be like.

So - before I end - don't be too fixed in your ideas about hexagon-gridded miniatures games - in a couple of months you may be the only kid on the block who doesn't have them!

Having reached this stage, I propose to slow down the rate of publishing of posts on this blog. In my enthusiasm to get the thing going, I have been keen to create a solid foundation of material for people to have a look at, and also to attempt to give an idea of the style and range of subjects I hope to cover. If you have read any or all of what I have done to date then I offer my best wishes - if you like any of it, or even if you disagree, please do drop me a comment - I am always delighted to get them. I will continue to introduce new posts, hopefully at a rate of one or two a week, rather than the faintly hysterical stream of consciousness which I've produced to date!

Playing at War - Part 3 - Pieces of Cardboard

I have always found it worthwhile to have an occasional sanity check. Not, you understand, because I have particular concerns about my sanity, but because it helps with understanding and prioritising things. If you take some everyday facet of your life from the shelf and have a look at it, and ask yourself "why do I do this?" then a couple of things may result - you may be comfortable with what you find, and you can gently dust it and put it back, or you may find something doesn't quite stack up, in which case you have learned something and you can decide what to do about it.

In the days when I was paid to work for someone else, there was a period when Time Management was the answer to everything. It didn't matter what the question was, the answer was probably Time Management. Like all panaceae exposed to too much light, it faded, once people realised that you can be as organised as you wish, but the rest of the world doesn't actually care what your priorities are - they expect you to answer the bloody phone when they choose to ring you. The theory is still sound, however.

One of the most interesting things that came out of the TM classes we used to run was the mismatch between what people spend their time and effort on and what they feel is important. Guys would regularly tell us that their families represented about 75% of everything that mattered to them, and yet they worked out that they spent less than 10% of their time on them. Without fail, attendees at the classes would be surprised at the analysis of their own lives, and would determine to do something about it - an intention which had normally been forgotten by the following week, by the way. Without any pretence at science or Great Wisdom, it can be instructive to use the same technique to look at (for example) what you get out of your hobby, whatever it might be, and try to attach some weights to the bits and pieces. The results will be very personal to you - a psychologist would have a field day with the results, no doubt, but that is not the point. You may then, if you wish, go on to make a list of things about the hobby which displease you, or which you would prefer not to have.

In my own pursuit of Napoleonic wargaming, I guess my personal breakdown is something like:

• Insight gained from tabletop battles, as an extension of my study of the period 26%
• Collecting, researching, painting & organising the armies 21%
• Writing & programming rules 12%
• The look of the thing - battles & collection 14%
• Setting up & running (experiencing?) the battles 17%
• The social side - battles & discussion 8%
• Winning & personal glory(!) 2%

The spurious accuracy in the numbers is just because I felt obliged to ratio them down so they added up to 100! Things which I could do without include:

• The guilt (yes, I think it is guilt) resulting from always being behind with figure painting schedules
• Battles which run out of time before reaching a conclusion
• Rules which are fiddly, or don't work, or waste time, or give me a headache
• Clutter on the tabletop - spurious equipment and SHEETS OF PAPER (aargh)

From which I guess a profile emerges of a fairly solitary wargamer with anal tendencies. Your own numbers will probably be very different, that's fine - in my heart, I know that your numbers will somehow be better than mine...

When I first became aware of military boardgames, I guess I was faintly hostile, in an unspecific kind of way. There were Avalon Hill and SPI, and that was about it in those days. Here was I slaving away, tracking down unobtainable figures, painting them, and laboriously staging battles that didn't quite work, and there were people in the world who bought a complete game in a box - a game, moreover, with very little visual spectacle - and just played the thing without all the posturing and rigmarole which I was used to. What could possibly be the point of that? With my prejudices a little better focused, I avoided the whole subject. No way, thanks. Not for me. Maybe - at a pinch - a boardgame might allow a campaign to be managed, but the actual combat would have to be toy soldiers. Absolutely.

Eventually, someone invited me to his house to play an ACW board game he had obtained and wanted to try out. I think it was Chancellorsville, and I think it may have been issued with a copy of Avalon Hill's house magazine, "The General". Anyway, it was a game of relatively modest size and complexity and, a bit hesitantly, I went along to see how awful it was.

Well now. It did not offer the same visual pleasures as the miniatures stuff, and I wasn't too impressed with the badly punched counters or the rather flimsy paper map (for God's sake, don't sneeze), but the game itself was an eye-opener. The rules were straightforward and unambiguous, they used alternate moves, but you could see the movement and the strategic development right in front of your eyes, and all the things you had to remember to do had a little dedicated track on the board - the game ran like - like - like clockwork - yes, that was it. Like chess. The size and effect of terrain was obvious and intuitive. The game was capable of being completed in an hour, even if you were a novice.

I went home with my values shaken up and my mind whirling. If you could somehow develop the beautiful miniatures game so that it ran with the logic and the precision of the boardgame then you had the best of all worlds. Tick-tock, tick-tock. I think I have spent the subsequent 30 years or so with pretty much the same objective, and I still know that I am right. I looked at the gridded miniatures game of Joe Morschauser, which previously I had seen illustrated in Featherstone's books almost as an eccentricity, a fringe area. The game was interesting, but the appearance was too quirky, too chess-like, and in any case square cells are tricky. You can either ban diagonal movement, which seems a peculiar thing to do, or else you have to come to terms with old Pythagoras - diagonal distances are multiplied by the square root of two, which is not a handy thing to work around.


Boardgame style hexagonal cells seemed a much better way to go. Pythagoras was banished, and imposing a sort of crystalline structure on terrain did not seem to distort things very much - or at least the distortion introduced far more benefits than disadvantages. I painted hexes all over my tabletop (carefully preserving a plain side as a contingency!) and I was up and running. I chose 7-inches-across-the-flats, entirely because a based unit would fit comfortably into that. In fact 6 inches would have worked as well - sometime I may repaint the table with 6-inch cells (that's about 15cm), which will enable me to use commercially-produced scenic tiles and is generally more convenient. The disincentive is that I am stuck with a stock of hills and stuff to the current size, but they are probably due for renewal sometime anyway.


I was unaware of Jim Getz's "Napoleonique", which used hexes - if I had been aware of it, I would in any case have been put off by the clunkiest dice-rolling mechanism of all time. More recently, NapoleoN Miniatures produced their own rules, which use hexes, and which you can still download from their otherwise dormant website. Also, the little-known but interesting "Big Battalions" rules by Doc Monaghan, while there are no actual hexes, present all measurements in terms of "bands" (which vary according to your figure scale and the size of the battle), which is effectively the same thing as explicit hexes.

So that is why I use hexes. The implications for the game and its rules constitute a topic for another time.