Expansion #5, and a Question of Tubes

Well, I've paid my ransom money of £17.76 to Royal Mail (that's £9.76 for UK Value Added Tax on an item imported from outside the EU, plus an £8 "handling charge", for the privilege of having my parcel delayed for 2 days at a detention camp in Berkshire), and have now received the promised Expansion #5 for Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - "Generals, Marshals & Tacticians" from GMT Games.

I haven't had a proper chance to check it all out yet. There is a reissue of the C&CN Command Cards pack (green backs instead of blue - some tidying up, plus a logical dovetailing with the new Tactician pack), plus the new, additional pack of Tactician Cards, the initial allocation of which at game start-up is based on the ability of the General. There is also a bunch of new scenarios, there are some new unit and terrain types, and there are sheets giving General Tactician ratings for all the past scenarios.

I have steered clear of the C&CN expansions prior to this point. Expansion #1 covered the Spanish Army, but by the time it appeared I had developed my own additional rules for the Spaniards, and I have stuck with them (they are very similar to GMT's, in fact). I have no miniatures for, or particular gaming interest in, Russia, Austria and Prussia, which were the subject matter of Expansions #2 through #4, but I have always thought the role of Leaders in the core game was a bit underwhelming, so I was keen to purchase this latest instalment.

Once again, the production standards are very high and GMT themselves are nice, organised people to deal with - the pre-publication (P500) price represents a good deal, even with the international shipping and RM's ransom demand, and I hope to get some decent value out of the extended rules - what GMT describe as "enhanced fun"!

I'll get the old reading specs on this evening, make some coffee and have a good study - with luck this should encourage me to get the table out for a game next week. Interesting now that I see the scope of what this expansion comprises - prior to this I had very little idea what it would be, so the reality is bound to be more restrictive than the unlimited scope of what it might have been (including all the things I never imagined, of course!).

Looks very good - I hope to say more about this sometime soon. I'm confident you'll find proper, informed reviews of the product all over the place, so I won't attempt anything of the sort, but the mere fact that I, who have scorned all the previous expansions, should have invested in this one is evidence of my devotion!

Separate topic - acrylic paints. When I first started painting again, maybe 12 years ago, after a lengthy sabbatical, with what to me were new-fangled acrylic paints, a friend talked me into using a starter set of acrylic artists colours, in tubes. It didn't go well - I had enough trouble just getting my eye in again with the brushes, and I couldn't get to grips with artists' paints at all - couldn't get the coverage I expected, had problems with mixing and the gloopy textures. I switched to pots of modellers' paints, and have continued thus, quite happily.

My paint collection must have reached a certain age - many of my pots are now turning into chewing gum, and there is a limit to how much reactivation you can do (not to mention the time and the hassle). A big blow during my recent Spanish Grenadiers effort was the demise of my beloved Revell Stahl silver (in a square pot) - it is now metallic chewing gum - visually spectacular but useless.

The time is coming when I'm going to have to replace quite a few of my paints. There is a local problem in that there is no shop selling Citadel or Foundry paints within 40 miles of here, and I don't like buying unfamiliar shades or makes online. There is a Hobbycraft store about 25 miles away, and they sell the DecoArt pots, including the rather excellent Americana series, but the stock is uncertain and there are often gaps on the shelves. None of this is insurmountable, but since I am in any case forced to review my paint preferences, I thought it was probably worth revisiting the topic of artists' acrylics. Again, a friend suggested that was the way to go, though he is not near enough (or supportive enough!) to talk me through this in detail.

So - the point of mentioning the subject - there are certainly a few art suppliers fairly close to here, so availability would be OK. Does anyone reading this have experience or opinions of (tubed) acrylic artists' colours for modelling? I hasten to add that I am not really interested in mixing my own colours, so would tend to use them straight from the tube. I feel it would be silly to overlook these if they would be useful, but even more silly if they were not going to be suitable for my rather childish painting style!

As is always the case with this humble blog, all advice and clues will be gratefully received!

White Mountain - 30 Years War Rules

Just a quickie (matron). This may all be well-known, but it is new to me. I came across a hex-&-command-card game for the 30 Years War (and, by implication, the English Civil War) called White Mountain. This is available for free download from Anubis Studios. It is very obviously a close relative of Commands & Colors, and appears to be played on a CCA board. The download includes rules (4 pages), QuickRef, text explanations of the cards (you have to make your own) and some pretty snazzy looking stickers to put on wooden blocks.

I had a quick squint last night - a little more of the philosophy behind the game would have helped, but there may be some of that on Anubis' pleasantly wacky website. At first glance, there are a number of interesting features in the game - units accumulate "disruption" points as well as losses, direction of facing is used to identify flank and rear attacks, command appears to be only at unit level. Some of it looks pretty clever, though it is possible that some of the simple elegance (elegant simplicity?) of C&C has been lost among the bells and whistles. The move sequence, for example, includes a number of options which I was still thinking about when I dozed off last night.

This has not compromised my devotion to Victory without Quarter, I hasten to add, but it is free(!), and may give an appetizer for Richard Borg's mooted prototype ECW Commands & Colors game, which I am definitely watching out for.

Having got a few decks clear, I hope to start painting my first ECW units this coming weekend, so am looking forward to that. A couple of fairly generic units of foot to start - one of Royalist blewcoats and some whitecoat Parliamentarians, I think. I have bought in a small stock of florist's wire for cheapo pikes, but I hear a rumour that they also make brown florist's wire, so am looking around for that. Painting wire is not hard, but it's dead boring.

Anyway - thought I'd mention White Mountain.

CCN - My Local Rules - (1) Peninsular War tweaks

I am very pleased with my experience to date of the application of the Commands & Colors:Napoleonics (CCN) rules to miniatures battles. It looks very promising indeed, and for the time being will form the basis of most of my wargaming.

I have made a conscious effort to leave the rules alone - as far as possible. This does not follow my instinct, nor the habit of constant tweaking which I have followed for many years. Leaving them alone has some worthwhile advantages - it keeps me on common ground with the many other users of CCN, it keeps me positioned to take advantage of subsequent extensions to the published game as they appear, and it avoids damaging a game system which works and has been extensively tested by people who know what they are doing and have a good track record of game design. However, there are a few issues to be resolved when applying CCN to my own games, so I've set out some thoughts and some possible modifications. I have numbered them just to impose some structure on this exercise, not to imply any priority ranking or reference to sections of the rules.

(1) CCN seems to work best for battles involving 20-30 units & leaders per side, which is a fair tabletop-full for my size of table. I am aware that the Grande Battle or Epic extension will appear in due course, but it appears that this will introduce a double-width table, probably using teams to handle the bigger commands. I still have a need to be able to fight big battles on a grand tactical level, with (preferably) units which correspond to brigades - this may still be 20-30 units, but the scale issues are different - I'll come back to this in the next instalment of this post.

(2) There is now an accepted web forum and an array of support tools to enable CCN players to develop their own scenarios. I have a slight suspicion of this being pursued, at least in part, to enhance the fame of the contributors, but the concept is good and is useful. However, I need to get beyond the idea of being limited to approved scenarios - even if there is a growing library of them - I need a more general approach where a one-off game, or a battle from a campaign, can be set up and fought using the CCN rules without the blessing of a GMT proprietary scenario. This is not likely to be a problem, but it presents the immediate issue of the need for some rules-of-thumb to determine, for any ad hoc action, the numbers of Command Cards allowed to each commander and the number of victory flags needed for a result. All this can be assessed on the spot, but I would be interested in views on this, authorised or not.

(3) Since I am fighting non-GMT battles using my own Peninsular War armies, I need to be able to cope with some nationalities and a few troop types which are outside the scope of the National Reference Cards as published to date. I've done a bit of work on this, which I'll describe in a moment, and I've produced an expanded version of my CCN crib sheet (player aid - my original version is here) to cover this. To cut down the bulk of the thing, I've also excluded troop types which I do not have (they can always be added back in when necessary). I've also changed the unit sizes a little where I felt strongly that they were inappropriate. Now I do realise that GMT will be releasing game expansions to cover more nations (the Spanish army is expected in August, I believe), so I look forward to seeing what the official versions are like - in the meantime, this is the revised crib sheet for my entirely unofficial version, for my own use.

Notes:

(a) French - I've dropped various troop types which I'm unlikely to have involved; I've fought against my instinct to make so-called Light Infantry into Line, and left them as was; since the French cavalry was critically short of horses and not very numerous for most of the Peninsular War, I've reduced cavalry unit strengths to 3 blocks/bases (same as the British, in fact)

(b) British - I've dropped the Guard Heavy Cavalry class, since as far as I can see they were the same as the non-Guard; I've reduced all Light & Rifle unit strengths to 3 blocks, and Guard Inf to 4

(c) Portuguese - as published, but I've omitted the non-existent Heavy Cav & Horse Art categories

(d) Italian & Confederation (German) Allies for the French - I've dropped redundant troop classes (for my purposes), otherwise they are like the French except (i) the infantry don't get the +1 dice bonus in melee vs infantry, and (ii) the "half-blocks" calculation is rounded down (like the Portuguese) for ranged combat when moving - this last bit may seem harsh, but I can't believe they were superior to the Portuguese in this theatre

(e) King Joseph's (JN) Spanish - the Guard & the artillery are the same as French Line troops; non-Guard troops get the half rounded down when firing while moving, and infantry & cavalry troops suffer double (x2) retreats. I justified this because I felt they would fight satisfactorily, but might tend to collapse if things went against them

(f) Nationalist Spanish - I am fighting 1811-12 period, so have not adopted a Guard category (they had nominal Guards units, but probably no better than Line troops); they are the same as JN's Spanish otherwise, including double retreat rule; militia are the same as Portuguese militia (incl 3x retreats); new categories are Guerrilleros - (i) Guerrilla Cavalry may not retire & reform, but otherwise fight as Lt Cav (ii) Guerrilla Infantry have max strength of 2 blocks, may not form square, may move freely through Forests & Towns/Mills, may move 2 hexes & still battle, fight like line infantry (sabres count as hits in melee) (iii) important rule for guerrillas of all types is that one (non-disregarded) retreat eliminates them

This is all provisional, "beta test" stuff while I try it out for a while. As and when GMT publish more nations and more game extensions, I'll be pleased to bring my own efforts into line with the authorised version as appropriate - this is all just to get me up and running!

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.

Playing at War - Part 2 - The Ancient Game

Like everyone, I try to learn from my mistakes. My earliest attempts to fight miniature battles were, at best, well intentioned. They were fun, surely, but quite a lot of the interest was in trying to fix the bits of the game that didn't work - not unlike Stone Age man attempting to build a pocket watch. I found very early that the simpler games were often a lot more fun than more complex ones, that the more detail you tried to introduce the more you got bogged down in trying to cope with someone who wanted to do something you hadn't allowed for in the rules, or who had found some loophole you had accidentally left open.

This is a general problem, both in historical warfare and its tabletop simulation. The literature of war, especially its fiction, is full of cunning and the unexpected - bold strokes of improvisation which left a more traditional opponent floundering. If there had been a rule book, then a loophole would be just the thing. Wargames replicate this, and the position is made many times more complex in competition games, or in situations where the participants are determined to win.

I would be struggling to put a date on the evolution of Competition Rules. Probably around 1978 I bought a new Napoleonic rule book (Halsall & Roth, I think) which had been used for the British championships, and found it far too dense to actually play. We tried these rules a couple of times, and then ran crying back to the bosom of our Charlie Wesencraft games for comfort and reassurance - and aspirin.

At the time, wargames magazines were full of alarming stories of people turning up for games with armies consisting entirely of artillery, or camels (or whatever) - they had found a loophole, and had used their army points allowance (or whatever) to field an army which could not be defeated, but which gave a historically nonsensical game.

And good for them, I suppose. If Frederick the Great had one day turned up with an army consisting entirely of camels and swept his opponents off the field, this would be commemorated as a great victory and a stroke of genius. Frederick, however, was only interested in winning - he would not have cared that it would make a stupid game, or that Halsall & Roth would have to produce a new edition to specifically outlaw this latest horror.

So part of this, from the wargame point of view, depends on why we are playing. If we are mostly interested in winning, then either the game mechanism has to be dead simple, like chess, so that it runs like clockwork and gives no scope for working outside the rules, or else we have to have an umpire.

I am really quite a fan of Howard Whitehouse. His "Science vs Pluck" Colonial game (which I have never played, by the way) has simplified rule sets for the players, who also have only as much information as they need to know. There is a much larger rule set for the umpire. Now that is interesting. Kriegsspiel operates in a similar way - the umpire's word is all. If you try fielding only camels then the umpire says "No, don't be silly" and that's an end to the matter.

So this is certainly a viable approach, but the snag is getting hold of a suitable umpire, or even having the manpower available to nominate one. What about the clockwork rule set, then - can we move in that direction as an alternative?

I am not really a chess player. I can play, but I do not - like the definition of a gentleman accordionist. I realise chess is clearly not a miniatures game as we know them, but they are related somewhere along the line, and I believe there are some aspects of chess that wargamers can learn a great deal from.

Time for a short anecdote. Ho hum.

A long, long time ago, when I was at university, I shared lodgings with a guy whom I shall call Andy, who was an excellent chess player. By any normal standards he was extraordinary. As a schoolboy he had been a national champion, and he now played first board for the university team. I went with him a few times when he did exhibition games at local schools. I once saw him play two simultaneous games - blindfolded. I can't recall if he won the games, but I have to lie down for a bit when I think about that.

At the time I was an enthusiastic, if unaccomplished, player, and was excited by the possibility of improving my own game (by osmosis, maybe?). Forget it. Despite his commendable patience and his attempts to coach me, our games were just humiliating, and they stopped quite quickly. Indeed, I have played very little ever since.

For chess is a beautiful game, with an ancient dignity, and elegant, perfect rules, but it is brutal, and it affords no hiding place. No-one ever lost at chess because he was unlucky. If you are beaten in a series of games, your opponent is better than you. You are a plonker - live with it.

Simplicity is the key. Apart from the playing surface and the pieces, and a clock, there is no kit. There are no tape measures, no casualty tables or order sheets, no shellburst templates, no command chits, no dice. No-one argues about how the rules are to be interpreted, no-one is in any doubt about where any of the pieces are standing, or how far they can move. The rule set is simple enough to be carried in the players' heads - quick reference sheets would be regarded as a source of hilarity. No-one has ever cheated in a chess match - it can't be done. Actually, come to think of it, I think my dad used to cheat when I started beating him, but in general, at any level, it is played absolutely straight, without ambiguity.

The rules have been fixed for longer than anyone can remember - I have never heard of anyone complaining about them, or asking for changes. No-one has ever attempted to field a King and 15 Queens. Obviously it is very stylised, and whatever form of conflict inspired it has been abstracted beyond immediate recognition. It has a gridded playing area and alternate moves, and pieces which are considerate enough to move one at a time. Real warfare isn't like that, but these mechanisms work tidily and efficiently, and they deliver a crisp, watertight game which is robust enough to withstand even extreme, high-adrenaline competition. World championships, no less.

I am not – repeat, not – claiming that miniatures wargames should be like chess, or even that they should be more like chess; I am merely observing that chess is impressively free from many of the problems which beset wargames (so is table-tennis, I hear you mutter), and that there may be some aspects of it which we can usefully borrow.

More soon....