The Realism Paradox - a thought for today... and yesterday

In yesterday's post I made reference to some siege game rules which appear in Appendix 3 of Christopher Duffy's wonderful Fire & Stone - The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860 (Peters, Fraser & Dunlop - London, 1975). I've been re-reading this book recently, along with its "prequel" for the period 1494-1660, which was published some 4 years later.

At the beginning of this same Appendix 3 there is a paragraph which made me chuckle. Nowadays the views expressed would not be regarded as reactionary or even particularly controversial, but the loss of direction within the wargaming hobby which is described here has a lot to answer for - for me, certainly. In this paragraph is the very thing which forced me into a 10 year sabbatical, which explains my periodic ebb and flow of enthusiasm - maybe even why I have mostly done my wargaming on my own, away from fashions and from know-alls. I wish I'd read and understood this around the time it was published - I shall certainly keep it handy as a reminder now. All those games which would not and could not ever end - how much would you like the time back now?

The original, recreational spirit of wargaming is preserved among civilian and military enthusiasts who have devised rules which enable them to re-fight battles and campaigns of any period in the past. Unfortunately the codes of regulations even in the amateur game have become so elaborate that the participants spend more time in making their calculations and arguing among themselves than in moving their pieces. Thus a re-fought Waterloo or Gettysburg often proves to be hardly less acrimonious than the original version, and the sense of the rapid passage of time - one of the most vital elements of "realism" - is frequently lost altogether.

Christopher Duffy  1975

Wanted: Time Machine - a Whiff of Foy's 10th Law

Following on from yesterday's posting on the Solo Campaign, and with particular reference to the second week of my Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, I received a comment which bothered me a little more than I would have expected. For a start, it was something of a put-down - informative in a way which is clearly intended to demonstrate the superiority of the informer rather than to provide help. For another thing, it was anonymous, which I don't care for either, so I didn't publish it. So there.

I am reminded of my old Hooptedoodle note about Foy's Tenth Law, which you can find here if you are interested.

To clarify a point, I am aware that a siege was a complicated process, involving a series of formal, defined steps, a lot of science and received methodology, a load of back-breaking labour and in incredible amount of bravery. I'm certainly not an expert, but I've read enough to understand roughly how it worked. My nameless correspondent felt that my reducing something as "immense" as a siege to a series of "stupid dice rolls and a look-up table" was trivialising an "important and dingified" [sic?] aspect of warfare in a way which he considered to be pathetic. My own irritation is probably at least partly due to my recognising some truth in this(!), but sadly he did not go on to explain how I could have done a more satisfactory job of fitting open-ended sieges into a map campaign with a weekly order-cycle. If you're still out there, my friend, I'd be pleased to hear more.

All wargames are by definition artificial and unrealistic to an extent - a favourite hobbyhorse of mine - otherwise we would not survive them. What we really need, for complete realism, is to be transported back to the actual event and take part in it. I haven't any good ideas how to do that, either, but if Mr Anonymous has, I hope he will take the trouble to stand right on the top of the Great Breach during the height of the action.  

Compromise in Wargames - (3a) Probability: an Afterthought

This follows from yesterday's post, and the comments on it. I had intended to make this a comment, which is maybe all it merits, but realised that no-one might read it if I did.

The suggestion was made that the figures "laid down" after a volley are not simply killed and wounded, but represent the number who are no longer available to fight back, for whatever reason, and that morale-type considerations will be a large part of this. I'm not talking about Charge! here, but I may well be talking about games of the same general style (and vintage?) as Charge! - if the "casualty" figures are really the overall reduction in combat effectiveness, as discussed, then they represent a nice get-out for those of us who find separate morale testing a tedious overhead.

Further - and this is where we get to this morning's wacky idea - this implies that your Old Guard should be harder to "kill". If they can fight on longer than lesser beings, then the proportional fall-off in CE should be slower in the same situation. It is a commonplace to allow good quality troops to shoot/fight better, and give them an extra dice (or something), but I do not recall ever seeing rules which gave an extra firing dice because the target unit were shaky. Maybe I should have? It would work, I think.

Compromise in Wargames - (3) Probability: the Ludic Fallacy and Other Stuff

This is the last of my three posts considering the basic assumptions on which wargames depend, and the need for a commonsense approach when applying them. This one will concern itself with the gamer’s need for convenient mechanisms to simulate chance events, or events which are subject to the laws of probability. The obvious areas of focus – maybe the only important ones, are casualty rates and the maintenance of some measure of combat effectiveness during a battle. To protect my sanity a little, and save some typing, let’s call this effectiveness CE, for short, and let’s not fuss too much about how it is assessed – let’s just assume that there is such a thing.

I don’t know what the Very Beginning is, in absolute terms, but Young & Lawford’s excellent Charge! seems a Very Good Place to Start. In the opening chapter, the authors discuss the introduction of random events into wargames, mentioning topics such as Military Chess, a variant of the noble game in which a determined pawn may occasionally fight off an attack from a knight, for example. Random events – simulators of battlefield probabilities – are introduced as a characteristic of wargames.

In the basic game of Charge!, infantry fire requires the player to throw 1 normal dice for every 8 figures firing. The score on the dice gives the basic number of hits. For long range (over 3”) halve the dice score. For incomplete volleys (4 to 7 odd men), halve the dice score. Hits on gunners, cavalry are halved; for troops in cover, hits are halved. All these halves are cumulative, and adjusted hits less than ½ a man are ignored.

This is a practical, standard approach to the problem – some contemporary rule writers allowed saving throws in addition, but this was the state of the art in the 1960s. The implied theory is fine – circumstances which reduce the probability of a hit (range, cover, type of target, etc) are allowed for by reducing the number of hits. Whether the numbers which result are reasonable or correct might be a very subjective judgement – we could compare the results with known recorded events from history, but the main criteria are whether the game works, and whether the players are happy with it. Charge! gives a good, rollicking game which is easy to understand, though the arithmetic can still become troublesome at 2am after a bottle of wine.

Possibly as a reaction to what had become the establishment method, some dissatisfaction began to appear among gamers who felt this was too crude, that it was not “scientific” enough. Charge! uses large units – about 60 figures to a battalion, so the relatively large numbers of dice in use would cause some averaging of the results, but people with 20-man units would be throwing 2 or 3 dice, which gives greater volatility. I can imagine some disgruntled player whose grenadier battalion had just rolled two 1s at long range, feeling this was unreasonable, that he had been cheated by the rules. He might point out that the 20 figures represent 750-odd men, who could get off something like 1500 shots in a 1 minute bound. If we know the probability of a single shot finding its target, we should really be throwing 1500 dice (or similar), which would give a much more predictable, much more even result. I would be prepared to bet that some hero, somewhere, did attempt to throw a dice for each musket shot. However, “if we know the probability” is the key phrase – in fact we don’t really, but we’ll come back to this point later.

The Wargames Research Group produced their famous table – you worked out the combat factor for the kind of weapon and the circumstances, threw a dice or two, and looked up the table, and it would tell you that the target unit had lost, say, 27 men (not figures) which at 20:1 figure scale meant you’d lost 1 figure plus 7/20 of a figure. You kept a note of all the bits, and removed complete figures when appropriate, and this was widely accepted as a step forward – it was now pretty much impossible for your grenadiers to miss – they just hit very small parts of a figure, which would eventually accumulate to something which represented discernible damage. There were those of us, admittedly, who considered the extra record-keeping something of a nuisance, but progress can often have a small cost.

Combat losses still had some variability, but using this approach they were generally closer to expectation. An extreme case of this was developed in Arthur Taylor’s Rules for War Gaming, published by Shire Publications in 1971, which set out diceless rules; in a given situation, the casualties inflicted are always the same. I am not proposing to dismiss this approach – it was regarded as returning something of a chess-like precision and dignity to the wargames, but in its way it is just as daft as completely random results. [I used to have this book, but don’t seem to have it now – entirely out of idle curiosity, did anyone ever fight battles using Taylor’s rules?]

A big problem is that we do not actually know what the probability of a hit is – we do not know what it is in general terms, and we certainly do not understand the variations from man to man, from moment to moment. I remember that, like a lot of other gamers, I used to search for some clues which might give some evidence of what hit rates really were in history – just something factual to hang a hat on.

Contemporary diarists like George Simmons (95th Rifles) would occasionally give a tantalising glimpse of the reality – he might say that in a smart skirmish with the French outposts his company lost, say, 5 men wounded and 1 killed, which was considered light in view of the severity of the fighting. Very clearly, Simmons had some view of what sort of casualties you might suffer on such an occasion – it would not be a probability calculation or a dice throw, it would be what his experience led him to expect, and he probably could not tell you what the expected number was, just when it seemed heavy or light to him. That’s entirely subjective, but at least he knew what he was talking about, which most of us patently do not.

I was thrilled to bits when Bill Leeson translated and published Von Reisswitz’ Kriegspiel in the early 1980s. I was fascinated by a number of aspects of the game and the book, but in particular I spent many hours poring over the tables – here, at last, was something entirely relevant to horse and musket warfare, written by serving soldiers in the Prussian Army, no less – guys who would certainly know what was what. I confess I was surprised that the hit rates were so high – I would be reluctant to say I viewed them with suspicion, but Kriegspiel was bloodier than I had expected. That was when I first started to have doubts about how helpful actual casualty returns are when constructing wargame rules. [It’s appropriate to remind ourselves that Kriegspiel is alive and well, and nurtured these days by the splendid chaps at TooFatLardies.]

Let’s go back to my nice new CE acronym – if I find that the 50th Foot have a casualty return of 74 all ranks at some battle or other, out of a morning strength of 428, does that mean that their CE was reduced to 82.7% of what they started with? Well, 74 and 428 are definitely real, official looking numbers, and it’s tempting to use them in this way, but it doesn’t seem very likely, does it? We’ve had some discussion of this in this blog before – when a unit is fired on, over and above the initial problem that we don’t fully understand the maths which would give us the likely number of hits, what happens to the target’s CE, as I have chosen to call it? Some of the men will be physically disabled – some permanently – and some slightly hurt; some of them will be shocked into a state of reduced capability, some will be discouraged – some may even be discouraged enough to seek a change of location to somewhere less stressful. A unit of Prussian guard might be so outraged by the insult that their performance is actually enhanced; a unit of Napoleon’s 16-year-old Marie-Louises might suffer no loss at all, but be so upset by being fired at that they take no further part. Almost anything is possible – as we have discussed before, the concept of morale is central to this, the level of optimism in the army, the fact that they may be fighting on home soil for their liberty, the inspirational qualities of their leaders, the level of training and experience of the troops, their physical state, the weather (probably) – and so on.

So if Von Reisswitz reckons that a combat will result in a number of losses, probably what he means – or should mean – is that the effect of the combat is a reduction in CE equivalent to the loss of this number of men. Whether or not this number of men actually make it into the casualty returns is of no interest at all until we work out strengths at the end of the day to feed back into our campaign. Separate issue.

To those of us who have ever felt a temptation to snort at Little Wars’ simple blood-bath melees, in which equal sized units simply eliminate each other, just think – what are the chances of an evenly matched melee leaving the winners in a position to do much else for the remainder of the day? They are not dead, they are merely resting.

The big godsend to everyone with this sort of appetite for numbers was Maj-Gen BP Hughes’ Firepower, which was published in 1974. The timing was spot-on, and it presented a lot of fascinating and authoritative material in a readable and understandable way. I still think this is a great book, though I am a little saddened by the fact that some writers have used it subsequently to justify some pretty crazy extrapolations from the factual bits.

Hughes describes field trials of artillery pieces, and I would love to see contemporary pictures of the trials being carried out. Case shot, for example, was fired at a number of ranges at a large (battalion-sized) canvas screen, to estimate numbers of hits at various ranges. Brilliant. I have a lovely vision of gentlemen with large moustaches, solemnly marking off the holes in the sheet with the official crayon, to avoid double counting, and presenting a double-checked return to the officer in charge (lots of saluting and stamping boots). The Army would be in its element, ordering some poor grunt to count holes.

Hughes reports similar trials with various kinds of artillery projectile and small arms volleys, and painstakingly tabulates and explains the results. He also spends some time discussing the shortcomings of the data, and he examines Albuera, Talavera and a couple of other battles by analysing losses and the estimated effect of fire. Excellent.

One of the parts which most of the wilder enthusiasts did not read was Chapter 3 – Inefficiencies of the battlefield. In this he points out that the trials were designed to examine the optimal capabilities of the weapons, not to estimate their effectiveness in battle. The test circumstances were abstract, artificial, calm. Everyone would be on his best behaviour, the best gunners would be selected, all distractions would be eliminated, and anything which did not work would, presumably, be repeated. In a real battle, Hughes says, other elements would come into play which would change the situation out of all recognition:

1. The “animate” target – not only would they be moving and taking shelter, but the beggars might even shoot back

2. Technical failures – this includes routine misfires as well as more dramatic failures

3. Human error – now you’re talking – the sergeant can try to make you fire, but he can’t make you hit anything

4. The nature of the ground – unfavourable slopes, hidden areas, cover, variable bounce

5. Ammunition – the need to conserve it, and the variable quality of its manufacture and condition

6. Smoke – we think they’re out there somewhere...

What relevance do the battlefield trials have when applied to actual battle experience, then? Probably not very much, in truth.

While we are on this topic of the hopelessness of estimating probabilities of a hit, it seems appropriate to introduce a gentleman named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He is a writer, quite a celebrity, in fact, and variously regarded as anything from a guru to one of the most irritating men around. I cannot claim to be an expert on his work, though what I know of him suggests that he has the rare gift of being able to present a limited number of important ideas in sufficient different ways, with different wording, to allow him to publish a surprising number of books featuring them. I recall that Edward De Bono used to be adept at the same strategy, but that was some years ago, and is, in any case, a digression. This is not to say, of course, that the ideas are incorrect – merely that over-exposure does not seem to improve their level of general acceptance.

In his The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin, 2008), Mr Taleb makes the important point that mathematical models do not work, and are unreliable for anything other than artificially simple games of chance and similar. Basically, what he says is correct, which is faintly disappointing for sad souls like me who spent years working with models to perform stochastic testing on populations, funds, stock markets and the like. He coins the expression Ludic Fallacy to describe what he sees as a practice which is inaccurate and even dangerously misleading – his main target is the world of finance. He identifies that economists, fund managers and investment analysts who grow to trust computer models set themselves up for catastrophic disillusionment and failure, since the model will not cover everything.

The world, says Taleb, is a dirty place, in which the things we do not know, or cannot measure, or (most importantly) just haven’t thought about will swamp the things which we can actually calculate. Tinkering with the decimal places of how many canister balls hit the canvas screen is worse than pointless when trying to simulate real battle action, when the numbers will be changed out of recognition by a whole raft of interacting intangibles, most of which we cannot predict or even fully understand. We may be doing our best with what we can actually get a numerical handle on, but we are – to quote my grandmother yet again – whistling into a gale.

Even the simple world of games is not clean. The odds of a head (or an eagle, or a zarg, or whatever) when tossing a coin is one half – 50% - every schoolboy knows this. If a coin turns up four tails in a row, what is the chance of a head? Again, the theory says it is still 50% - in an infinite series of tosses of our coin, we would expect 50% of the results to be heads, but 4-on-the-trot is a very small sample, and not significant. OK then – what about 99 tails in a row? What then? Well, 99-on-the-trot is not very likely, but it can happen, and the theory reassures us that there is still a 50% chance of a head on the next toss. However, at this point, you or I – or even a statistician – would start to suspect that the coin is dodgy, and tend to bet on another tail next time.

So where does that leave us? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I was brought up to trust in the purity of mathematics, but I can appreciate that calculating, for example, the effect on a raw battalion of a single volley is beset with all sorts of unknowns and things that can vary wildly from instance to instance. The WRG might expect them to lose an average of 4 figures plus 11/20 of a figure, give or take a few; even Rifles officer Simmons would have had some kind of expectation of that sort, but I suspect the fact of the matter is that a volley of 300 muskets in clear conditions at 100 paces might be expected to injure about 80 men (say), but the standard deviation is high, because of the unstable nature of the underlying probabilities, and the mixture which they present. It was not unknown for such a volley to hit no-one at all, and there must be a very slight chance that 200 men could be laid low.

We need mechanisms which give results which can be seen to be reasonable over extended experience of their use in gaming. The mechanisms should be simple to use, and they should allow a fair amount of variance – maybe more than the scientific wargamers would have claimed. We should give due weight to factors like first volley of the action (perfect loading under the NCO’s eye), and the steadiness and calibre of troops, but what exactly is due weight? Maj-Gen Hughes and our new friend Mr Taleb would agree that the things for which we cannot come up with exact numbers probably overwhelm the things for which we can.

You know what? The game is the most important thing - paramount. The more I think about this, the more attractive are the rules in Charge!, which seems a Very Good Place to End.

Compromise in Wargames - (1) Space, and Very Small Houses

Two beautiful examples of the accepted appearance of a Napoleonic wargame – and very nice too

So I’m just starting to get my ideas sorted out – my milk bottles in a row, as my grandmother used to say – when De Vries emails me and disrupts everything. Milk bottles all over the place. No, he says, you can’t classify everything under the three headings – Space, Time and Probability – because this skips over the most fundamental factor of all, the figures-to-men ratio in the game.

Well, I had intended to include this (let’s call it the “figure ratio”) in the Space section, for two main reasons. Firstly, the “look of the thing” (which, for me, is very important) requires that figure ratio and ground scale in the game are sensibly related, so I have great difficulty separating them and, secondly, I spent quite a lot of time considering the distortions that figure ratio can produce in my discussion of Grand Tactical wargames, and I felt I didn’t have a lot more to say.

De Vries being the man he is, our exchange of ideas got briefly into the realms of Monty Python, but I believe we both think we won the argument. I agreed to spend more time on figure ratio, but I’m going to include it under the heading of Space anyway. Fifteen all.

The Pythonesque bit might as well feature very early in our trilogy – regard it, if you will, as a preliminary cartoon. One approach to fighting a battle for which you haven’t got enough soldiers or enough table area is to fight a much smaller battle – less units on a scaled-down but representative battlefield - and use your usual rules. I’ve done it myself – it can give an enjoyable game, but it will lose something of the original. That may not be a problem, but it should be borne in mind. If your cut-down Waterloo gives the French one regiment of cuirassiers and one battery and a few infantry battalions, it becomes tricky to decide just how to use them. You can certainly play the game, but – apart from certain identifiable bits of terrain – the game has less and less to do with Waterloo as you decrease the numbers of units.

The alternative might be to try to keep the numbers of units up, but have, say, in extremis, one figure in each, and do drastic things to the ground scale. In my view this works rather better, but it looks pretty silly – at this point there’s no point having the soldiers at all; since they are simply representative tokens, cardboard counters would be just as good, and might even look less embarrassing. Devotees of Risk and Campaign and maybe of Battle Cry may be growling at this point.

Now for the cartoon. We debated fighting Waterloo at a 1:100,000 figure scale, with a ground scale of about 1 foot equals 4 miles. Naturally, at this scale terrain features and buildings could be ignored, and each army would consist of a single figure. 3” alternate moves, and if they get within 1” of each other you roll 1 dice each. Highest wins. If it’s a tie, roll again. Loser buys the beers. De Vries was quite proud of this – the game may be adapted to any period or size of action you wish, it does away with the need to do all that painting and so on. He also claims it is extremely portable, though I’m not sure what he means by this. To keep him happy, I promised to include a picture. The point of this, apart from a bit of a giggle, is that extreme distortions of scale change the game beyond recognition. Now perhaps we can get on.

Waterloo at 1:100,000

There’s a vague crossover point between diorama and wargame. The look of the thing versus the playability of the game – where and how do you compromise these? The ultimate diorama, for me, is the model railway – everything is faithfully reproduced, on a 1:1 figure ratio (as it were), at very strict constant scale (HO, N), and it is forever June 1954 (or whatever). The trains do move around, and in real time, though the cars and pedestrians are definitely frozen (once again, note that this means that a still photo will be much more convincing than a movie). I did once visit a wonderful exhibition of an N-gauge West Highland Line (that’s Scotland), in which they had taken some liberties with the length of the runs between stations, but in general it’s all faithful, constant scale.

What about wargames? Childhood games, crawling around the carpet with Herald and Timpo soldiers (in my case), were definitely 1:1 skirmishes. The individual soldiers usually had names, and the game was greatly enhanced by the addition of the odd hedge or corn-stook from my farm set. At one point, I reluctantly had to give up an ancient carpet with a floral border which had been very useful as a jungle – probably for quite a few generations. In its innocent way, this was role-play. It’s intuitively natural to do it that way, I think. Left to myself, I doubt if I would ever have thought of having a figure ratio other than unity, or a ground scale different from the 1/32 or whatever it was that was implied by the figures themselves, and the fact that Crescent Toys’ 1/32 scale 25 pounder did not sit well with the 1/50 or so Dinky tanks I had was only a small cause for regret.

Even for adults, including normal, non-wargaming adults, visualising anything beyond a limited action with a small number of named individuals and the odd Johilco tree is tricky. Look at the Sharpe stories and films – look at just about any war narrative you can think of, and you see that same comfort zone. If you are going to portray the Battle of Talavera or the D-Day landings in a novel or a film, make the battle itself a background, and zoom in on the actions of the key individuals – it’s easier to get involved with individuals. Anything else and it starts to become a documentary, not to mention prohibitively expensive. The look of the thing is still very important, as anyone who watched the old BBC “War and Peace” series, with Borodino acted out by 12 men and a cannon, will be aware.

Over the years, I have come to accept that a rectangular group of two dozen painted model soldiers looks like a battalion. It doesn’t, of course, but the wargames I was raised on made that convenient assumption, and I’ve become brainwashed. It occurs to me as I write this that maybe there’s a distinction there – subconsciously I have tried to make my battles look, not like real battles, but like Charles Grant’s battle games from 40 years ago. I hadn’t thought of that before, but that is maybe as real as it gets.

I’ve absorbed the 1:33 figure ratio, 20 yards to the inch (1 pace = 1 mm) standard-issue game to the extent that I now regard it as normal. It’s a package, and the choice of that package is dictated by how much room we have available, how many figures we have, and how it looks. There it is again – how it looks. Although a 24-man battalion is blatantly unrealistic anyway, we get strangely agitated if, having got the frontage of our bases correct, we feel the figures are standing too far apart to conform to the regulations and tactics of the day. The look of the thing – that’s absolutely central to all of this. Probably, if we were not constrained to fit in with extant rule sets, the sensible approach would be to do this back-to-front – work out your ground scale for reasons of practicality, decide the size of the figures you wish to use, decide aesthetically how closely you wish to group them on correct-frontage bases, and then work out the de facto figure ratio as a last step. To complete the loop, you are probably then committed to basing your rules on the unit rather than the individual, which gets us a bit away from Charge! and similar games. It’s a constant source of surprise to me that all these factors dovetail into such a tight set.

I have no experience of proper skirmish gaming – I should probably have a go sometime. I have a faint (and very unreasonable) feeling that it’s a bit too closely related to my crawling-round-the-carpet days – something I prefer to think I have grown out of, or – literally – risen above, but I’m sure I would find it enjoyable, maybe even liberating!

Around 1977 I spent some time helping dear old Peter Gouldesbrough to perfect his Napoleonic game using the new-fangled 5mm troop-blocks from Minifigs. When I first saw these, and understood what Peter was trying to do, I was really quite excited – the battles looked like 19th Century prints, or would have done if it wasn’t for Peter’s horrible Plasticene hills, and it was like a skirmish game on a vast scale. At an intuitive level, this potentially felt like the right way to do things. That was still early enough in my own wargaming career for me to be able to start all over again with the blocks, and I did consider it briefly, but decided against it for a number of reasons, any or all of which may not stand up to scrutiny (with hindsight):

(1) Already in 1977 the moulds were starting to break up, and I was very nervous about being dependant on the continued production of a single range from a single manufacturer. Makers come and go like the flowers of Spring, and fashions in figure sizes were changing rapidly at that time. I think Heroics or someone had already started producing 1/300 or 6mm figures, which worked out dearer than buying the blocks, and (more seriously) were not really compatible by size.

(2) The little figures were a bitch to paint convincingly. Peter’s figures were not very well painted, and that didn’t enhance the game.

(3) The small size had a lot of advantages, but there were also some very real visibility issues, some of which were a source of much hilarity. It was very easy to lose some of your troops. On a number of occasions one of us would overlook an entire brigade of dark blue troops on Peter’s dark green table. It puts a new dimension into Command Activation. To get round this, the brigades would be accompanied by coloured labels which helped the game but pretty much destroyed the spectacle.

(4) This probably has a lot to do with Peter’s areas of interest, but the blocks lent themselves well – probably too well – to formational micro-management – a lot of time was spent checking for correct intervals in a column of march and so on, and tracking the movement of individual companies with a ruler. To make this easier, of course, we also had 30-second bounds, but that is a topic for the next instalment. Let’s just say that the games were not rivetingly fast.

Having said all of this, I look wistfully now at pictures of 6mm set-ups like Fabrizio’s Torgau Project and I can see the very strong appeal of such an approach. Even 2mm is interesting...

On rare occasions I have seen big dioramic displays of battles in museums – hordes of tiny figures on a realistic battlefield. I have not yet managed to see Siborne’s masterwork in London (are there two of them?), but it’s on my list of things to do before I snuff it. I find these things just wonderful – to simply stand and stare and think “Wow!” for a very long time is guaranteed to make me into a 10-year-old for the duration (though no-one, of course, may be able to tell the difference).

I’m not going to get sidetracked into a repeat discussion of base sizes or frontages, other than to mention – yet again – that one issue with big figure ratios is that the unit depths tend to get out of whack with the ground scale. If you group your figures so that the frontages and the unit sizes are correct then you are likely to find that you have to produce a cover story about the need to allow for intervals and manoeuvre space to justify the unit depths. Maybe this is a big argument in favour of the back-to-front calculation method I mentioned earlier?

One area that has intrigued me for years is the effect of the ground scale on scenery. Again, this is all obvious, but we tend to overlook it. I was brought up (so to speak) on photos of wonders like Peter Gilder’s Waterloo terrain, and such things add greatly to the enjoyment of a game, but we run into a problem as a result of the mismatch of the vertical and horizontal scales. If I have 1 inch tall men (near enough 2 yds = 1 inch) and a 20 yds = 1 inch ground scale then the ground scale is 10 times the vertical – your figures are 1/72, and your horizontal scale is 1/720, which is less than half as big as 1/300. This means that Hougoumont should really look like this:

At 20 yds to the inch, the fact that a division of the Old Guard could comfortably stand in the orchard of Gilder’s La Haye Sainte is a problem. The fact that our innocent little farm building with the detachable roof, which is a satisfying visual match for the figures, occupies the same area as Candlestick Park, or that the beautiful 28mm scale village we bought from In the Grand Manner is as big as Sheffield on the ground plan – these are distortions. Such scenic items are perfect for skirmishes and dioramas, but beyond that we have to be careful.

My personal compromise for this is to use 15mm buildings with my 20-25mm figures. They are still too big, but it’s better (and they’re cheaper!). I’ve thought of using 10mm buildings, but at this point it becomes obvious that the men could not crawl in through the doorways, and a cavalryman is as tall as a church, which is a major offence against the look-of-the-thing criterion. This all makes a lot more sense to me now than it did only 3 years ago, when I was proposing to move to 15mm buildings, and was busy asking people if they thought it would look stupid. I can hardly believe how much I worried about this, but it was a big change for me.

My compromise – these men would be cramped in the 15mm houses

The approach, as suggested by Charles Grant and Charles Wesencraft all those years ago, is that a small cluster of buildings on the battlefield is intended to denote an unspecific built-up area occupying the same space. Unless it is a skirmish, the buildings can be moved around a little to make room for the action, and there is no question of arguing about exactly how many men can occupy a particular building (unless, of course, it is historically necessary). The men are either in a village or not in a village. How they deploy to occupy it is beneath the resolution level of the game.

Compromise in Wargames - Adventures in Space, Time and Probability

This post is the preface to what, with a bit of luck, should turn out be a trilogy.

I did consider doing another off-topic post - I am about to defragment the hard drives on my main computer, so I could talk you through that, or I could describe some problems I've been having with my truck, which might be more exciting. On balance, I thought it was probably time to do something a bit more relevant to wargames, so I'm going to attempt to organise some rambling thoughts into proper, joined-up ideas. If they end up still looking like rambling thoughts then you may imagine their state when they started out.

In recent weeks there have been some good-going comments here on the subject of realism in wargames, and I thought that might still be worth some more attention. So I had a go at standing back a little and focusing on what the problems are, and how we got here. It seems to be much easier to detect that something is wrong than to identify just what it is, or why.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the challenge of playing and devising games (especially sports games) which simulate reality - originally with matchboxes and dice and bits of string, later with mathematical models running on computers. The most obvious, most definite thing I have learned is that there are very clear limits to how closely you can make a game reflect the real world - you always end up making compromises. One of the challenges is to identify where the compromises are necessary - your game, after all, has to be capable of being played, yet the experience is going to be impaired - the game may even be pointless - if the results are blatantly silly. I also learned that the more you change the scale of the thing, the more carefully you have to look at this area.

This scaling problem crops up in all sorts of places. I remember, when I was about 7, watching some epic British film about a disaster at sea, and realising that something wasn't quite right. In the action scenes, a brilliantly executed miniature ship would be wreathed in fake mist and cleverly lit, and in a still photo it would have looked brilliant, but in a movie it didn't work. It was something about the appearance and the behaviour of the water - any fool could tell that this was a toy boat in someone's bathtub, even though we might be pushed to explain just what was wrong. The problem, of course, is that mucking around with the scale of something, reducing it to a miniature version of itself, for example, introduces some nippy little paradoxes. If you reduce the size, you may have to do some other things as well - in the case of the sinking ship, slowing the film down might have helped the little waves look more convincing. As soon as you start reproducing space and time (and a cinema film gets you into time issues), modelling and simulation have to be thought through. I admit I may have been a rather odd child.

Later on - I'm 12 and I'm back at the movies. I took some comfort from the fact that the monster spider in some horror show of the day was impossible. OK - the story was clearly fantasy anyway - even to a child - but I knew that mathematically the thing couldn't exist. The back-projected, blown-up footage of a normal-sized spider which obviously terrified the cast would not be able to move if it were real. This is school maths, it may even be primary school maths nowadays, and I apologise for setting out what is well known and otherwise obvious: if you multiply the linear dimensions of a spider by a factor of, say, a hundred, so that a 1-inch spider is now 8-feet-something across (which is, I admit, a horrifying idea), then - if everything remains in exact proportion - its weight will go up by a factor of one million, but the structural strength of its legs (for example) will go up by only ten thousand times, since this must be related to the cross-sectional area of the components in its legs. So the load on its legs, proportionally, will be a hundred times as great as the original. Its legs could not bear its weight. OK - this does not mean that you cannot have a spider which is 8 feet across (in theory), but it does mean that such a spider would not look like a big version of a small one. This is why elephants do not look like ants.

If you are nervously looking for a means of escape as you wait for a point of some sort to emerge from this - here is the point: changing the scale of something will change its properties and its behaviour unless you do some other stuff as well. I'd like to have a look at a number of aspects of this in the context of wargames - Space (size, ground scale), Time (converting a continuous action into a series of jerky moves - maybe even alternate moves) and Probability (the use of numerical data to produce a "realistic" game). These things are not entirely independent, but it suits me to divide the subject into parts, so I'll address it under these three headings.

Accordingly, the first instalment will be about Space...

Hooptedoodle #21 - Demons Revisited

In a fairly lengthy and very busy life, I have been told many things by many people, some in person, some through the medium of the written or broadcast word. This, I suppose, is how we all acquire wisdom, but there seems to be a quirk in my own particular wiring diagram which means that the things I have learned are not necessarily stored in any sort of useful priority order. The things which are most readily retrieved are such treasures as odd football results from English League Division Two in 1960, or some stupid proverb a long-dead relative used to misquote when the weather was cold, or a radio advertising jingle which annoyed the bejesus out of me when I was nine. There is some useful stuff in there as well, I suppose, but it seems to be buried somewhere in the gaps.

Here's an example of a memorable-but-not-very-useful thing I have stored away. Someone - can't remember who - once said to me, "If you loved a place, you must never go back there, because the magic will be lost, but if there is a place you fear then you must revisit it, to lay the demon to rest". Of course, I have never really had the faintest idea what it means, though I can appreciate that it sounds kind of wise in a folksy sort of way. I sometimes feel that I have almost understood it, but then it slips away again.

Well, I have had a very busy week - that old Real Life thing has really been playing up again, and my priorities all got skewed. However, I did manage to get some units cleaned up and shipped off to the painter. Some more Spanish militia and irregulars, and some more of my mythical Pommeranians. I am saddened to have to report that two of the Pommeranian battalions were pulled out of the shipment, old Scruby figures - I found (when I got close up to them with a razor saw and some needle files) that the castings were so poor that I shall have to make arrangements to get replacement figures of appropriate Old School style. What a pity that L S Lowry never turned his hand to sculpting 20mm wargame figures, come to think of it.

And then, this morning, the postie brought me a personal demon. I have managed to obtain a slightly battered copy of George W Jeffrey's The Napoleonic Wargame, and I am pleased to have it. It surprises me to find that I should have come to be interested in such a thing, and it gives some satisfaction to note that I can now read it without becoming depressed. I must have moved on. It is, moreover, a proper, archetypal wargames book, with a picture of the classic OPC Hinton Hunt lancers on the front. Excellent. I am looking forward to reading George's book, after all these years, just for a glimpse through someone else's windows.

At this point I should carefully point out that I once knew GWJ - he was not a close friend, but he was a personable enough fellow, if rather intimidating, and I knew him through his activities with my local wargaming club. I should also point out that, as is right and proper, I cherish the fact that wargamers can each pursue the hobby in their own way, so that they get what they want from it. The breadth of the church is all part of the richness of the tradition. I also have no wish whatsoever to be disrespectful or to rattle any cages, but in my view GWJ was one of a select number of individuals who came close to killing off the hobby of miniatures gaming. I don't just mean that they alienated me - I mean that they developed a school of thought within the hobby which ultimately threatened to make the games unplayable, and probably drove a lot of enthusiasts away from historical gaming (or into fantasy gaming, which is sort of the same thing). I am referring to the dreaded Myth of Realism. That is the demon. I never had a particular problem with George, but in his day he was one of the high priests of realism.

The first and most important point about realism is the obvious one that, since we do not normally play these games up to our necks in freezing mud, suffering from dysentery and festering bullet wounds, there is some major gap in the realism thing. The second point which occurs to me is that a sense of proportion is essential. George's book is a goldmine of facts - it tells you, for example, the exact dimensions of a deployed French horse artillery battery, in 5mm, 15mm or 25mm figure scales, and he goes on at considerable length about the use of templates to get the distance travelled by the outer edges of a wheeling unit. This is familiar - George was always a stickler for wheeling distances - he was obsessed by π.

I have always been a fan of the commonsense approach which I found in the writings of Paddy Griffith and Charlie Wesencraft, in which it was suggested that if (for example) rifles could shoot further than muskets, and if it mattered (i.e. if it affected anything), then it was a good idea to make the rules give the rifles a slight edge, but it didn't matter exactly how much, as long as it gave reasonable results. Because, to tell the truth, chaps, no-one actually knows exactly how much the advantage was. There are people who will claim to know, but that is mainly because they are too obtuse to perceive the shortcomings of the scientific data. I used to read regularly how such-and-such a set of rules had revamped their fire effect in line with Maj.Gen B P Hughes' (excellent) Firepower, omitting to notice that Hughes was mainly writing about test firings under experimental conditions, which have as much relevance in a true battlefield situation - especially with conscripted troops - as the price of onions.

I have witnessed, with my own ears, a lengthy argument at one of George's wargames about exactly how many rounds the Imperial Guard could fire before they needed to be resupplied from the caissons. The argument then moved on to the capacity of the caissons. The battle did not finish. I never saw a big Napoleonic battle finish at that club. There were holes in the melee rules that you could have driven, well, a caisson through, yet they argued about marching distances and the capacity of a cartridge pouch. George also used to be very interested in which particular figures in a unit were hit, though I never really understood why.

He is regarded as the inventor of Variable-Length Bounds, or VLB as the initiated call it. A great idea, in principle, to facilitate those dead periods at the start of a battle when not much happens. Advancing an entire army 2 kilometres in 30-second bounds is a certain cure for insomnia, in my experience. I've had several goes at reading about VLB, and I still can't understand it. Perhaps some worthy soul will respond to this post to sort me out. I read somewhere that George had a lot of good ideas, which were hamstrung by the fact that his approach was bottom-up - too many musket ball counts and not enough strategic movement.

I would like to stress that this was never intended to be any kind of personal attack on George Jeffrey, though I'm sure that someone will see it as such. George's book dates from 1974, which is three years before the appearance of another classic for detailed realism disciples, Bruce Quarrie's Napoleon's Campaigns in Miniature. I am very fond of this - it is packed full of so much extrapolated trivia that it is a book which had to be written. I believe George would have liked to have written a book like this. It is absolutely full of numbers - some of them numbers about things which you wouldn't think you could measure - and is an interesting read, if you do it in very short bursts. I'm confident that most readers of this blog will be familiar with Quarrie's masterpiece, but here is a section from one of my favourite bits, as a sampler.

And if that doesn't get you rushing to rewrite your in-house wargame rules then you should be ashamed.

The Grand Tactical Game - Clever but Not Useful

There is an ancient Scottish joke about James Watt (of steam engine fame). I apologise in advance if you have heard it before, or if it isn't amusing, or if you are American and believe that Edison invented the steam engine. It seems that young James had an astonishingly enquiring mind when he was a young man. One morning, so the story goes, he was so fascinated watching the kettle boiling that he missed his train to work.

That's it. It's quite a short joke - maybe that's all it has in its favour. However, it strikes a chord with me - it is very easy to hide yourself away in a cave somewhere and brilliantly deduce stuff that everyone knows already because their granny told them.

Since the topic will become a requirement for my Grand Tactical rules in the near future, I wanted to spend a little blog space considering the merits and pitfalls of Command rules. It's been done before, but I want to have another go at thinking this through from basic principles - this may be entirely for my own amusement...

To start with, a cautionary tale. There have been times when I've realised that my wargames are missing something important. A few years ago I was watching the Sergei Bondarchuk Waterloo film for the umpteenth time (isn't it great?) when I realised that my battles would be improved enormously if I had some way of allowing cavalry to get out of control and charge for the horizon. So I did some fairly extensive reading, both of history and of rule sets, and I decided the rules which handled the matter best were (you maybe guessed) The Big Battalions. Since my main wargame rules are computerised, it took a fair amount of grunt to build “recklessness” into the game, but I was pleased with the way it played out in testing. For the next year I had a pretty sophisticated set of monitoring logic in there which checked all cavalry actions, and which (I assume) continued to give reasonable results, and you know what? In a year, not a single cavalry unit ever got out of control. Not once. Every time I fought a battle, all cavalry combat was beset with questions about whether they had a general with them (and the aggressiveness/restraint of each general was well known, as was the quality of the units), and the benefit to the game, as it turned out, was not worth all the bloody effort. The rule was clever enough, was intended to simulate something which appeared to be historically valid, and yet in the long run it wasted a lot of time with scarcely any effect at all. Readers who have seen Foy's Fifth Law will know what I think of that sort of thing.

And there have been other examples. One, for which I have tried very hard not to fall down the same trapdoor, is the nippy matter of Command rules.

So what's all that about? Well, I think it's an attempt to stop wargame generals having a level of control which is completely out of whack with what would have been possible on a real historical battlefield. As the cliché explanation goes, there were no radios, no helicopters - precious little visibility at all, sometimes. Big armies with many layers of commanders, some of them lost, some of them stupid, all of them under unimaginable pressure and constrained to communicate by means of written notes carried around Hell by the idiot sons of the nobility (in the British case, at least). It is little wonder that the 2-evening refight of Ligny seems to boil down to half-an hour's concentrated action, if you analyse it just by theoretical rates of march - the real guys at real Ligny certainly spent most of their time waiting for instructions, wondering what the blazes was going on, or advancing towards a cloud of smoke, or all of these. I guess they did not spend many periods of time advancing 12 inches in column minus 3 inches for crossing a wall.

Chaos, my friends. Chaos. That's where the Command rules come in - anything which gets us away from the idea of a perfectly choreographed, all-pieces-move-at-once game of chequers has to be good. However, it is impossible to simulate all that vagueness in an exactly realistic manner, and most of the rules which are in vogue appear to address it by introducing an element of disruption in various ingenious ways.

The most common approach seems to be the use of a Command Radius - a general of a given calibre can immediately influence units within a certain distance of where he is, and that distance is big if he is Davout, and is small if he is Cuesta. OK - it must work quite nicely, because lots of people do this, but realistic? There is an implication of telepathic or force-of-will communication in there. If Davout really can influence subordinates 35 inches away this move, then the only way this could happen would be by sending an ADC, and it would take that fellow a little while to get there - maybe 35 x 20 paces divided by the light cavalry charge move (etc etc), and that is ignoring the need to write something and read it at the two ends of the journey, not to mention the probability that the ADC wrote down the wrong message, or doesn't find the recipient, or does find a cannonball. However you work this, the reality is that it would not be instantaneous, yet the delay is not explicitly built into Command Radius rules. That's OK - this is just a device to introduce imperfection into the control exercised by the C-in-C, and it has a lot of merit as a practical solution, but please don't get snooty about realism.

Or we might have Command Chits, or CPs or whatever you choose to call them. Depending on an individual general's supposed ability, plus maybe a couple of dice throws, that general will be able to spin a certain number of plates at the same time. OK - I can see that - I have used rules like this myself, and it works. Sometimes the Chits and the Command Radius co-exist in the same set of rules.


And then there's cards - I have used cards, there's something nice and Waddington-like about cards - you know you're in a proper game. I've used Piquet cards, and derivatives of Battle Cry cards and various others, including my own. It's comfortable to have a hand of cards you can develop secretly and play when the moment is right. However, I am not comfortable at all when the card restricts me to control of a formation on the left flank, or of a unit which is arbitrarily classified as "Red" (as in Grognards & Grenadiers) - this is so obviously an artificial, randomly-generated hassle that it can be mostly just frustrating.


Because I do a lot of solo gaming, cards and chits do not work so well for me, and look at the mess they make of the battlefield! So I became very interested in the dice-driven Command system in Fast Play Grande Armee, it is simple in operation, and does not require any special kit or record keeping, though it does require each commander to be allocated a stash of Command Dice each bound, which he may use in various ways, from assisting his subordinates to comply with his wishes to generating re-rolls for poor artillery fire. I implemented a cut-down version of this in my own game, and it worked really well. The bad news, of course, was that it added a huge time and effort overhead to the game.


Not outfaced, I modified it so that only troops and officers within a certain distance of the enemy needed Command actions. It still took a while, but it was better. The fiddly overhead came down but – guess what? That’s right – I was back to the out-of-control cavalry effect – the occasions on which a commander was unable to correct a non-standard Command result, where it actually affected the game, were so few that it really wasn’t worth the constant effort of checking. By default, the Command phase would be dropped from the game – I would just stop doing the testing when fatigue set in.


All this negativity is not leading up to the conclusion that Command rules are a bad idea – I think they are an excellent idea, but they can also get your battles bogged down worse than anything in the entire history of wargaming. I have developed a minimalist set of Command rules, which I’ll explain in a future posting, at the time when I start adding a Command section to the draft.

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....

Playing at War - Part 1 - The Brethren

I am certainly not going to claim that “Old Trousers” is an accurate simulation of Napoleonic warfare, since the game offers very little chance of players being ripped apart by canister fire or drowning in swollen torrents. Those games that do make this kind of claim don't seem to feature these opportunities either.

Howard Whitehouse


The sniper in the tower of the ruined church tried to ignore the discomfort from his cramped legs, as he took precise aim, watching for his moment. Two hundred yards away, a German officer walked into the village square, close to the fountain, a pistol in his gloved hand.

I was an eye-witness to this actual event.

As you will have guessed, it was a WW2 skirmish game. It was one of the featured demos at a pay-at-the-door public exhibition put on by my local wargames club, on a damp Saturday sometime in the early 1970s. I was a new and very enthusiastic wargamer, and this was the first skirmish I had seen. I was really quite excited. There were about 2 dozen guests in the hall, and the game looked spectacular – like a movie. 54mm figures, and a complete French village in perfect detail.

The four club members who were running the demonstration game now proceeded to measure things and leaf through a hefty, typed sheaf of rules, and to argue animatedly about which of the many possible adjustments to the dice throw were needed, to determine whether the sniper hit his man. This required a lot of sarcastic banter, a lot of rather nervous giggling, a lot of comments that started with “I think you’ll find that...” – the guys were having a whale of a time. Because I was intrigued, I kept a note of the elapsed time. After seven minutes of this they had finally agreed that the dice throw needed to be 5 or higher. It was a 2. There was a roar of contempt from the “German” player, and the surprising amount of echo drew my attention to the fact that by this time I was the only spectator left in the room. Everyone else had moved off to watch the medieval battle in the next hall, or possibly to try to arrange a quick dental appointment, or just anything, really, to get out of there.

Because I was the last to leave, I was spotted by the team.

“You got a problem?” I was asked by a stout fellow in a black tee-shirt, camo trousers and Doc Martens.

I mumbled something fairly lame about being surprised that something as commonplace as a single rifle shot required this amount of debate. The expert sneered.

“If you are going to do this, you have to do it right. I don’t imagine you know much about wargaming, then?”

And, of course, I didn’t. I saw this with absolute clarity. What’s more, I wasn’t sure that I ever wanted to.