ECW – The Battle of Netherfield (1644)

Good grief - Col Trevor's boys, who won the battle almost on their own

This was a bit of a spur of the moment – Nick and I set up the battlefield to have a quick playtest of the amended C&C_ECW rules (faster movement for foot units, if remote from the enemy) and to try a more open field than usual, better for cavalry.

Nick was the Royalist commander, and made his customary gung-ho start, with units of his “galloper” horse charging off on both flanks, with no attempt at either support or co-ordination. I smiled to myself and prepared to fight off these foolhardy diversions, thinking ahead to my inevitable push to victory in the centre.

It never happened. Nick’s right flank cavalry pinned my left flank in the corner of the table, and his left flank attack, notably Col Marcus Trevor’s Horse, with some support from Tyldesley’s regiment, somehow routed two of my veteran foot units in rapid succession, and then set about my militia foot, whom I had kept carefully out of harm’s way, but who now simply melted away. And so it continued - the rules for rolling cavalry melees worked to stunning effect. Normally they result in the cavalry overreaching themselves, but this time they just annihilated my right and centre. Admittedly there was an element of luck in the dice rolls, but I have not been so thoroughly trounced in a wargame for many a year – I lost 8-0 on Victory Counters in about 80 minutes total playing time. I have no idea what my Parliamentarian losses were – must have been thousands, and I lost a general – but I do know that the Royalists lost a grand total of 2 cavalry bases – which is approx. 200 killed and wounded. It was, in short, a whitewash, but such a glorious one that it was a privilege to be on the receiving end.

As usual, Nick did the photography.

Oh yes - the changes to the infantry movement rules seemed to work nicely, though the course of the battle was such that I almost forgot to notice such details.

Royalist light artillery - all the artillery was worse than useless

Artistic view of Lord Molyneux's horses' backsides

Downtown Netherfield, before the trouble started

General view - Royalists advancing from the right - in the centre of the picture
 you see Trevor's horse, on a very serious mission

…and, a bit later on, looking back the other way

The Parliamentarian left flank horse, pinned in a corner

Lord Byron's Foot recapture the village of Netherfield

Trevor's Horse, after a brief repulse, continue the rampage

This typifies the whole day - I presented my worthy opponent with a Hazzard a
Chaunce card, which should normally result in his troops all being struck
down with colic or worse, but on this occasion it merely resulted in Tyldesley's
Horse (as it turned out) becoming even more dangerous than before. On
the grounds that I can never be so unlucky again, I take all this in good spirit
(mumble, mumble…)

Just to make sure that the size of the victory did not go unnoticed, our
photographer wishes to emphasise that this is how many Victory Counters he got...

…and this is how many I got

Late Edit: Overnight I received a friendly email from Daniel, a regular correspondent, who points out in a jocular way that such a catastrophic defeat – especially at the hands of an 11-year-old opponent – suggests gross ineptitude in at least one of two areas: my generalship and my rule-writing. How, he asks, can I regard such a disaster as any kind of privilege? Where is my fighting spirit, my self-esteem?

I've been thinking about this.

I am happy to accept that he is probably correct, and go along with the humour of the situation, but I have played wargames for many years now – I’ve seen most things there are to see, within the scope of the periods and the types of games in which I have been involved. Though I have known underdeveloped rules to produce some silly results, only once before, in all those years, have I seen the chance element in a properly tested game take complete control of a cavalry attack and produce such an event. People can live their entire lives and never see a straight flush, an avalanche, a perfect storm, an alignment of the little planets of probability in such a way that normal logic and rational expectation are suspended.

We can – we probably will – play the same game again today, and it won’t play out the same way. It couldn’t possibly. Yesterday’s result was certainly a freak, but then all results of a game involving chance are freaks in their own way – this was notable only for its extreme degree. If the cavalry sweep the table in the replay then the rules are definitely crazy, but they won’t. The perfect storm of dice and cards comes along rarely enough to be memorable, and to be strangely thrilling, when it does, for the sad little, faintly autistic people like me who devote some of their precious time to watching for such things.

History is full of unexplained, almost miraculous events which decided battles. Maybe this story is a gentle argument in favour of keeping the chance element in rules fairly high. I can make excuses as much as I like, but historians will never know for sure what brought about the disintegration of my army at Netherfield(!), in the same way that they still argue about what exactly turned the real battles of Montgomery and Adwalton Moor, among numerous others, in the same war.

ECW Movement Rates and a Renaissance Joke

My early games with my ECW miniatures rules based on Commands and Colors have shown a common theme – a tendency for the cavalry to race around the place, wiping each other out, while the foot are pretty static in the centre – slow to get into action and ponderous once they get there.

This may well be an authentic representation of what 17^th Century warfare was like, but I have been giving some thought to making the foot a little more mobile – nothing outrageous, but a little more – how do you say? – oomph when deploying. For my next couple of games I propose to allow foot to fire only if they stand still, to move 1 hex and still have the capability to initiate a melee combat, or to move 2 hexes with no option to carry out any combat. This double move is not allowed to bring them nearer than 2 hexes (musket range) of any enemy, and must not compromise any terrain rules, so they may not make a 2-hex move if they are within 2 hexes of the enemy, and must stop when they get to 2 hexes from the enemy. I am doing some consistency checking to see how this sits with the terrain rules and the Command Cards.

This change may, of course, distort the entire game, but in principle it seems reasonable, so I propose to give it a trial.

Subject 2 – on my September trip to Bavaria and Austria, I saw the remarkable Glockenturmautomat in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna. This astonishing clockwork device was made in Augsburg in 1580. We did not get to see it working when we were there (it’s much too precious for that), but I have subsequently found a little film about it on YouTube (of course). It is an odd piece of whimsy – a tower with bell-ringers working away while some merrymakers are boozing on the balcony. The film shows that, in close up, the weathering of the drinkers makes them look a bit sinister, but it is a terrific piece of workmanship.

If you like a touch of Rabelais in your humour, watch to the end…

[Because Blogger's video linking tool isn't working properly, please click here]

ECW - Throwaway One-Liners...

One of the many sets of ECW rules I own is the Athena booklet, The English Civil Wars [&] The Thirty Years War, by Terry Wise, published 1982.

The rules are well set out and explained, but too tactically detailed for my taste, and written orders plus simultaneous movement is a no-no for me, especially since I need a solo capability. They are interesting and informative, though - as you might expect. The introduction makes reference to "subsequent rule books from Athena", but the tantalising bit is where it states:

A second set of rules exists for campaigning in the same period, and this set includes siege warfare.

And? - and…?

In context, I infer that this second set of rules would also, potentially, be an Athena product, authored by Terry, probably with Stuart Asquith. I've had a dig about, done much creative Googling and even asked a few people, but have come up with nothing.

Anyone know anything about this other set of ECW rules? - all clues would be most welcome.

ECW – The Arquebus Rules

So what are the Arquebus Rules, then, Foy?

Well, since you asked, I’ll tell you.

They are a hybrid, and an incomplete hybrid at the moment. Arquebus was my working title for the framework of a computer program I wrote last year to manage solo ECW games played under a set-of-rules-yet-to-be-defined. Initially, as you may have read here before, the idea was that the underlying rules were to be Clarence Harrison’s Victory without Quarter, which I liked the look of for a number of reasons, and which I had tried out during a visit to the Kingdom of Old John last year.

Whatever your thoughts on computers in wargames, one spin-off of automating the game management is that you soon become aware of gaps in the game logic if you try to put a set of wargames rules into a computer program. So let’s see – if the melee winners fail this morale test to control the pursuit – what happens? – oh – look at that – it doesn’t say. So what exactly do artillery do if someone charges them? – well – gosh – it doesn’t say. Etc.

One big advantage of using someone else’s rules is that they have been playtested before, and you have a good idea in advance whether they work or not. VwQ is a bit different – there are people who have played them and use them and like them, but there is also a fund of recommendations for adding the missing bits – including some from The Bold Clarence himself, who has never pretended that the rules were complete or anything other than a work in progress.

So I set about redrafting VwQ for my own purposes, to plug some gaps and fix some things I wasn’t comfortable with and then – since I’d started doing it this way – I took the opportunity to simplify a couple of fiddly bits, and amend a couple of the tables to suit my own ideas. The final straw was that I eventually replaced VwQ’s trademark, card based Activation system with something else – I discussed this in an earlier post.

At this point, though the game still employs some of the mechanisms from VwQ which I have liked from the outset, much of it is changed. The overall package is definitely not VwQ, and I decided it made more sense to make a clean break, and call my evolving rule set Arquebus, if only to keep my head straight – same as the program. I acknowledge my debt to some other games, but it is a hybrid.

Briefly, I adopted an alternative Command and Activation system which I found in some of Mr Featherstone’s recently-published rules – which may or may not have close relatives in Warhammer, Blitzkrieg Commander and Bloody Barons. It ticked a lot of boxes – intuitively, it seemed reasonable, it hung together well from a completeness point of view, and it was cute enough to borrow without shame.

Well, I’ve now tried it out, and it was tedious. Clever or not, it required extra work, and I found it to be mostly irritating – slowed the game down far more than it improved it. So I’ve replaced it with a much simpler, dice-based system which has close relatives in the Portable Wargame family, and in at least one iteration of Ross’s Hearts of Tin, and even in some earlier ideas of my own (surely not?). Since this is now Arquebus we are talking about, and thus mine own, I may well replace it yet again next week – I’ll see how I feel. I am giddy with the possibilities…

The rewritten rules for Arquebus are beginning to stabilize – I have now reached a stage where I am polishing the wording, checking that I have covered everything. Once the game works, I will continue with the computer program, but make no mistake – Arquebus first has to perform tidily as a dice-&-rulers game without a computer in sight, or I shall keep working on it until it does [famous last words]. Thus there is a latest-version rule booklet (I believe I’m on Version 0.21 – which is the first amendments to the substantially changed 2^nd edition) and I was thinking that I might make it available if anyone is interested – I’m still not sure about this – it is a tweaked version of VwQ, though the tweaks now outweigh the VwQ bits, and it is not really designed to cope with anything more than the way I like to play my wargames. I’m thinking about it. The world is full of half-baked rulesets that don’t quite work – why add to the heap?

He's what? - he's redrafted Table 3? - bloody hell...

Once I’m comfortable that it works – at least a bit – I’m happy to provide copies to anyone who wants one. Hang on a bit. If someone feels moved to ask me why I don’t just be a sensible fellow and use Forlorn Hope or similar, please don’t – we’ve done that bit already.

Righto, Foy – so what happened to your Commands & Colors based ECW game?

Nothing – I have been using it and it works pretty well. As I mentioned before, I also need a more tactical game for small actions – where the Commanders can amuse themselves forming column of march and carrying out flank attacks and all that – this is where Arquebus should come in.

And it’s guaranteed hex-free, in case you care.

My C&CN-based ECW Game - revised Quick Reference Sheet

Quick - grab his QRS...!

Following changes made for my recent Battle of Nantwich, I have put a revised version of the QRS onto Google Docs - the link in the upper right corner of the blog screen should get you there. Any problems, please let me know.

A couple of minor typos corrected, and Enclosures and Swamp added to the Terrain section. Everything should now be back in sync.

Activation – More Dithering

It often occurs to me that a blog can be kind of a mixed blessing. For example, if I really can’t make up my mind about some element of wargames rules, it would be more dignified – and I might well look a little less foolish – if I did my dithering and thinking aloud off-blog. On the other hand, I invariably get useful input via the Comments, and that more than makes up for the discomfort of being seen to blunder about in real time. People are very kind – maybe they take pity on me.

Having oscillated between hot and cold on the subject of the Victory without Quarter ECW rules for some time now, and having gone so far as to do a fair amount of amendment and rewriting of those rules, the announcement that once again I am not happy with some aspects of them might generate a range of reaction somewhere between mild eye-rolling and total indifference. So the fool can’t make up his mind – so what’s new? 

My concerns with VwQ are mainly about the activation rules. I’m really still not very happy with them – not even with my own revamped version – and they get a mixed press on TMP and elsewhere. Taking the core activation system out of VwQ might be likened to removing the nervous system from your favourite cat. The results are unpredictable. You might not like what you are left with. Might be better to think of something else to do instead.

As a last ditch effort to stop short of a completely fresh start, I’ve been doing a bit more reading about activation approaches, to see what else might just fit with the rest of VwQ. I have been revisiting all sorts of games. I liked the activation rules in the latest version of Ross’s Hearts of Tin rules, and these formed the basis of some further scribblings of my own, and I had an exchange of thoughts on this with Martin. As it happens, Martin recently purchased the John Curry reprint of Donald Featherstone’s Wargaming Pike and Shot (first published 1977), which is not the first place I would have thought of looking for ideas on activation. Martin’s enthusiasm encouraged me to buy my own copy, however. Well, well.

It's actually a pretty good book. The bulk of it consists of scenario descriptions of battles from the Renaissance and 30 Years' War period, but a new bit of this revised edition is a summary of some previously unpublished rules used by Don, and there is a discussion of turn sequences which uses a simple activation rule (or, as Don calls it, motivation – which I rather like) – it involves a fair amount of dice-rolling, so it might be a bit labour intensive for my taste, but it looks interesting. I haven’t tried it out yet. Naturally, I couldn’t just use it as published, so I’ve started by meddling with it and tweaking to fit with my own games better. What follows is not Don F’s rule, but it is influenced by it and is not unlike it.

Let's start with a slight detour. First thing you need for this is some easy way of identifying units which are part of the same formation, or which all report to the same commander. A while ago, when I was under the spell of Sam Mustafa’s Fast Play Grande Armée, I adopted a very handy idea of his, which was to put coloured markers on the bases of units which were brigaded together, so you could see the breadth of an individual general’s command at a single glance. Naturally, once again, I fiddled with the system until it looked like this:

This is a Napoleonic example – here you see some labels waiting to be cut out and attached to unit bases. This is a collection of leaders and units from Maucune’s Division, which you will see has the distinguishing colour of yellow. The brigades are identified by the colour of the inner square. Thus it is very easy to identify all Maucune’s units (yellow outer square), or all the units which report to General Montfort, who is one of Maucune’s brigade commanders (red within yellow). These labels are much smaller in reality than they appear here – I laminate them, cut them out and attach with a smear of BluTack. [OCD on the battlefield.]

Right, you may be thinking, this must be leading up to something. There is obviously some reason why we might wish to identify higher formations in this way. And you will be correct - at long last, we come to the ideas about activation.

1. A brigade should consist of between 3 and 8 units. If a higher level of organisation is suitable for your game, a division may comprise between 2 and 4 such brigades.

2. When the player takes his turn, he nominates one of his generals. In a big game, he may have a choice of nominating 1 of his division commanders or up to two of his brigade commanders – decide for yourself how this would work.

a. For the nominated general he now rolls 2D6 for each unit in that general’s command for which he wishes to issue an order – this is where the coloured labels come in handy, so you don’t miss any.

b. A natural roll of 9 or more activates the unit – give them a counter or something – they are under orders for this turn.

c. Otherwise, adjust the dice roll as follows:

i.          For a good general, add 1

ii.         For a poor general, deduct 1 – sort-of-OK generals require no adjustment

iii.        For a good unit, add 1

iv.        For a poor unit, or one with heavy losses (shaken, whatever...) deduct 1

v.         For each complete 6 inches (or whatever you fancy) that the unit is distant from the general, deduct 1 (for hexes, this would be “for each hex beyond the first...”)

d. If the result is 4 or more, the unit is under orders

e. This continues until all units under the general’s command are activated, or until one fails the test, in which case no more units are tested. This means that it is important to take care over the order in which units are tested for activation – go for the good guys who are near at hand first – one failure and that’s your lot for this general on this turn.

3. The activated units now move, fight and all that stuff, as you would expect. End of turn.

4. Then the opposing player nominates one (or maybe two) of his generals, and so on. And that’s it, really. It may involve too much dice throwing, I'm not sure, but it has a few ingredients which appeal:

a. It’s simple, and easy to understand

b. Restricting activation to a single general keeps the game focused and ensures a quick rotation of turns

c. The fact that you can choose the general gives more direct control – less of a random element than a card system, for example, but some bad luck with the dice can still make life difficult.

5. And, as an add-on, we propose that any general who is a casualty has to be replaced, but should be replaced by an officer who is one degree worse. 

                                                                     -ooOoo-

Re-reading this now, it seems to me that most of this is familiar anyway, and I’m not sure why it has taken Martin and me so much correspondence to get to this stage. I am not even sure that I shall go on to test it, though I have thoroughly enjoyed the development process. However, in a spirit of what I hope will charitably be taken as innocent enthusiasm, I offer it for your thoughts.

My C&CN-based ECW Game - new Rules Booklet

I have had a few expressions of interest in my ECW rules, and one of the more common suggestions has been something which I think makes a lot of sense. My game has always been an overt extension of the GMT Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (CCN) boardgame, adapted for miniatures and for the particular theatre of the British Isles in the 1640s. It has also been, very much, a project for my own use.

Thus my documentation has been minimalist. Anyone wishing to learn my game has had to download and learn the rules book for the original CCN game, and then incorporate the changes and extensions listed in my short summary note. That's a lot of work for someone with no previous experience of CCN, and work, moreover, which is required just to get to a starting position with the ECW variant (with no implied guarantee that it will be any good!).

Even I have found this inconvenient. If, during an ECW game, I wish to check on the details of Cavalry Breakthrough, for example, I have to find that section of the CCN booklet, read and understand it, and then check my extension summary sheets to remind myself what, if anything, I subsequently changed for the Civil War.

Not great. I was asked if it would be possible to produce a single document which set out the ECW variant as a standalone ruleset which did not require this kind of cross referencing, and the answer, of course, was no - it's a nice, logical idea, but a lot of work for something which is only a hobby project.

Well, as time passed I found the idea more and more sensible, so I have finally done it. There is now a first edition of a combined rule book available as a pdf - you'll find it listed in the available downloads in the top right of this screen. If you wish to download it, please do so. I would still recommend having the CCN booklet available as well as a back-up - the diagrams and examples are useful, for a start.

Some very quick (and obvious) caveats and qualifiers here, so there is no misunderstanding. My new booklet is a rewrite of the GMT CCN rules, incorporating my own alterations, and I claim no credit for the ideas or the wording which are GMT's. I don't believe there are copyright implications - the GMT rules are freely available as a download from their website (which is also linked from this screen), and I hope my booklet makes it clear that I am not attempting to parody CCN, nor pass off parts of it as my own work. The main elements of the game are now widely used in other of Richard Borg's games (and elsewhere) - just assume that anything in my booklet which works well is Mr Borg's, and any fluffs are down to me. Naturally I do not wish to get into any kind of customer support role here, but I would be grateful for warnings about any obvious howlers or imminent legal proceedings.

If you try the game, I hope very much that you enjoy it.

Also because I was asked about it, this is my adaptation of the CCN "Infantry in Square Track" for the ECW - here is the "Stand of Pikes Track", which is identical in just about every aspect of its use. Right-click on the image to get the full-size version, download it and print it on stiff card.

 

VwQ – Plus Point – Simple Treatment of Casualties

A running commentary on my growing collection of fixes and tweaks for the Victory without Quarter rules for ECW/30YW games may give the wrong overall impression of my opinion of them, so I thought I might offer a very brief moment of applause for a change, to balance things up.

In my previous post I made vague reference to a “list of likes and dislikes”, by which I judge wargames rules as they come along. One thing I am not fond of, my friends, is any form of separate, hand-written record of casualties – especially of the early WRG variety, where it is necessary to record losses as the fractional parts of a figure – i.e. in actual men. The great big chart tells you that 14 figures throwing bits of muck into the wind on a Thursday have disabled one twentieth of a figure. Result! - amend your roster sheet - where is it? - is that it over there? - no, on the bookcase, under your reading glasses?

Keep adding the bits up and – if you live long enough – in time this will accumulate to a complete figure, and you can remove him, and start to tally the fractions all over again. We shouldn’t make fun of this – it was (and may again become) the state of the art, but you can really see why WRG replaced it with the much preferable arrangement where a roll of 4 or a 5 might kill one figure (H) and a 6 might kill two (HH - YES!). Much more like the thing. More like a game, rather than a book-keeping exercise.

I do not care for anything which detracts from the immediacy of the wargame, or which takes the eye and the attention away from the action on the tabletop. I also very much dislike pieces of paper which clutter up the battlefield – why do we fight with miniatures if it is not for the spectacle? My late friend Alan Gallacher used to impose a spot fine of 1 non-staff figure – to be chosen by the opponent, for every offending piece of litter on the battlefield – you may regard this as extreme, but a good-humoured application of this house rule made a great difference once everyone got the hang of it. And litter, by the way, included reference sheets and rulers as well as plastic cups, beer mats, mobile phones and so on.

All this means that I really like the Victory without Quarter arrangement for calculating and tracking losses. A unit attacking another unit causes a number of “hits”, and 3 is the magic number. For every complete 3 hits caused in a single attack, the target is given one casualty marker, which they cart around with them thereafter. Any odd hits left over are ignored, insignificant, forgotten about and not carried forward. Which means that, quite often in VwQ, a sincere and wholeheartedly delivered attack may gain only one or two hits – nice try, but no marker. Perhaps next time? There is also a special rule for artillery - any hits by artillery, even if insignificant in the sense of not gaining a marker, will frighten the recipients sufficiently to require a morale check. Nasty stuff, artillery.

When the number of casualty markers for a unit becomes equal to the number of bases, the unit is eliminated. We do not care whether they are all dead, or disarmed or simply discouraged – they are no longer with us.

Just the sort of uncomplicated arrangement I like.

...so you lose eleven-twentieths of your bishop...

Topic B

On a completely different tack, I had a gentle rebuke from my new car yesterday. I am still getting the hang of what it will do. I recall that my relationship with my old truck was similar when it was new - I accumulated so many mental notes to sit down with the owner's manual and look up things that puzzled me that eventually I just did it, and I learned a lot. This was quite a good approach, I think, though "approach" might imply more formality than was really the case. If there had been any underlying reasoning - which I doubt - it might have included the following themes:

(1) Owner manuals are not the sort of thing you read right through for entertainment. Brain-death will certainly follow.

(2) The manual will often refer to a whole range of models, plus variants, and thus tends to be a bit on the generic side - after you have read the 25 pages on the optional in-car entertainment system you find that you don't actually have it.

(3) These cars are invented by clever people - they must be pretty intuitive to drive, right?

(4) ...right?

(5) Real men do not read instructions before they act. In the noble tradition of (I think) Bugs Bunny, it is not actually necessary to learn how to land your aeroplane until after you have taken off.

(6) Etc.

And so, encouraged by my previous success with this so-called approach, I have gone about things in the same way this time. I've had the new vehicle for some 4 months now, and I still don't know why the heater will suddenly blow hot air at me when the outside temperature is 25 deg C, or what that weird orange dashboard light that looks like a pineapple means, or why quite a lot of people flash their headlights at me at night. Must check that, I keep saying to myself.

One of the reasons I behave like this, I am beginning to suspect, is fear. A primitive, superstitious fear of something which is cleverer than I am, and which - unlike me - is getting cleverer every day. The new buggy is the first one I have owned which will automatically switch on lights or wipers when it thinks you need them. It's quite fun, actually - feels like something of a luxury - but my initial reaction, before I became accustomed to the idea and forgot about it, was to wonder what particular problem this was solving. It is not difficult to switch on your own lights, as I recall, though on occasions you might forget to do so. Is the sensor which now makes the decision on my behalf just one more thing to go wrong? What if I get used to having my lights look after themselves and one day drive a vehicle which doesn't do this? Ultimately, am I more or less of a potential danger on the road? Hmmm.

I'm still a bit dubious about cleverness for its own sake. I embrace the ancient urban legends about an automatic emergency brake which, allegedly, was fitted to Mercedes' E-Class, and would occasionally decide arbitrarily that someone was having an emergency when in fact he was driving at 110 kph along the autobahn, chatting to his wife about the neighbours' new gazebo. And then there was the nameless experimental audio system which was designed to turn up the volume when it sensed that the background noise in the car had increased, which - again, reputedly - in some of its early versions became dangerously confused when passengers began to shout to make themselves heard above the music, and cranked the level even higher...

Yesterday my car played a joke on me. I believe it has recognised my basic insecurity. As I was driving home from visiting my mother, enjoying a rare moment of fine weather, it suddenly began making a chiming noise at me - very like the noise you might sometimes hear at an old-fashioned railway crossing when the gates are closed. No warning lights, no apparent problems, just this noise - and, since these things are built by clever people, you just know that this is not likely to be good news. Has the oil pressure zeroed? Has something awful happened to the hydraulics? Has the lambda probe (or some other dread gizmo) gone faulty, and the engine is about to shut down to protect itself? How much is this going to cost? Does the warranty cover labour charges? Is there, in fact, a train coming?

I got home without incident, though with further intermittent chimes, and was sitting in the car, worrying about it, when my wife arrived. She knew instantly what the problem was - her Volkswagen does the same thing. The car had sensed the parcel I had placed on the passenger seat, and when I went around corners it complained that this passenger it had identified was not wearing a seat-belt.

So that's all right then - but it might have given me some visual clue, you would think. The point is made - I shall show more respect in future. It is watching me.

What?

   

Degrees of Abstraction

Proper Old School - the early pioneers were all different sizes, as you see

One of the characteristics of Old School wargaming, as we grew up with it, was that everything appeared on the table. You want skirmishers? – no problem – there they are (mind you, the rules don’t work too well for them, and it takes so much time to manoeuvre them that we normally ignore/forget them after Bound 4). You want a honking great model of La Haye Sainte on the battlefield? – there it is (yes – agreed – it takes up the same space as the city of Brussels on the tabletop, but just look at it, and you can get an entire Division in the farmyard, too).

As we all got more and more enthusiastic about reflecting every known (or suspected) aspect of warfare in the game (mostly Napoleonic in my case, and the words National Characteristics still cause me to shudder), so we found it harder and harder to finish any of our games. Speaking for myself, my growing interest in looking for new approaches and greater pragmatism came from my frustration at finding that the widely accepted, latest forms of my hobby didn’t actually work very well. I remember being embarrassingly close to tears trying to get to grips with the latest version of Halsall & Roth’s rules (as used in the national championships – I only bought the very best...). I realised that this was no longer fun – at least not to me. I became very interested in the reasons why board war games seemed to work better, without people coming to blows, or taking their troops home in disgust.

Many years later, after my wargaming sabbatical, I got myself involved with more modern rulesets, and a lot of what I read made a whole lot of sense. Dr Mustafa said that in a big wargame it was impracticable to fuss about with skirmishers, for example – it was a distraction, something which in any case would be beneath the attention of an army commander. In his Grande Armée rules, the idea was that, surrounding the main columns and other formations on the tabletop, there were invisible little clouds of light troops, scrapping away. They were abstracted – a new word for me in this context then – and only existed by implication. They appeared as adjustments in combat calculations, and as “SK” numbers associated with the parent units. This seemed a more businesslike approach, though I did have a few slight traditionalist pangs. Just a minute – I actually enjoy fiddling with skirmishers – and what about all those lovely voltigeurs and people I’ve painted and cherished? What are they going to do? There does seem to be a slight tension here – if we agree that a particular style of skirmishing was an important characteristic of the Napoleonic Era – something, in fact, which served to make it different from the Seven Years War – is it OK to remove Napoleonic skirmishers from the miniature battlefield?

Hmmm. This wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped.

Out of all the reading, scribbling and reconciling necessary compromises, I came to terms with the fact that I probably needed at least two sets of rules for each period. One was for big battles, where the emphasis was on speed of movement, simple-but-robust mechanisms and games which were capable of being played to a conclusion in a sensible amount of time. The other would be for smaller fights, where it was required to consider a more detailed level of tactical behaviour, where forming lines and wheeling and deploying skirmish troops were still appropriate, and even necessary.

My decision to start dallying with the English Civil War – something over a year ago – required a whole new dose of considering available rules. After a lot of reading and soliciting of advice, I plumped for Victory without Quarter as my main rules. The game scale and general philosophy fitted well with the list of personal likes and dislikes which I had built up over the years. Having reached the point of actually playing some games, I now find I have the familiar two-level situation – I have a home-brewed adaptation of Commands & Colors to handle the bigger battles, and I have VwQ for the smaller stuff – my proposed provincial, North-country ECW campaigns will certainly throw up games for which C&C is too blunt a tool, and for which it becomes necessary to worry about which direction units are facing, how they are formed up, the advantages of march columns on roads, the exact point in a charge where the defenders got off a volley and all that.

My relationship with VwQ is still evolving. The only time I have used the rules in anger (grrrr!) was when I visited Old John in North Wales last year. We found that the game was fun, but there were some chunks missing (dragoons didn’t work properly, no advantage for a flank or rear attack, no explanation of how artillery should be treated in a melee, for a start). Concentrating on positives, I spent some time adding extensions to the rules – suggestions came from various sources, including Harry Pearson, even some ideas from Clarence Harrison himself (the originator) - and I have reached a fairly robust version for playtesting.

The one area which still bothers me about this game is Activation. Broadly speaking, the game uses cards to activate units – there is a card for each, and there is also a card for each commander at brigade level or higher. Drawing an officer’s card allows orders to be given to any of his subordinate units which are within shouting distance, which allows some decent progress to be made when moving troops about. Last year, Old John and I found that – as often as not – drawing a card for a single unit would produce no effect at all, certainly no movement, since advancing a single unit without the rest of its brigade was usually not a great idea. I’m still tinkering with this, which remains the one weak spot. I have even given thought to having cards only for brigades and higher formations – single unit cards being dropped. John and I had certainly deduced that any group of units which was expected to move anywhere had to be provided with an on-table brigadier.

I hope I’m not anywhere close to going back to the research phase. VwQ is designed to support the smaller type of game which I expect to feature a lot in my campaigns – my commitment to these rules, albeit expanded and tweaked, is such that I have based my troops to suit (which is not a problem – whatever rules I use can handle these bases) and have even produced (and now tested, honest, Clive...) a computer-managed version to facilitate solo play. Maybe copious provision of generals is the answer, maybe the single-unit activation cards are a bad idea, but – whatever the answer might be – I have a faintly worrying recollection of our game in Wales, during which there were lengthy periods when some parts of the armies were left stranded by the original card drawing system.

Anschluss - More Ebb and Flow

Following on from my recent mention of Anschluss Publishing, I've now bumped into them again - twice, in fact, in quick succession - which usually means - well, something or other.

Firstly, one of my foreign spies sent me the booklet for The Ebb and Flow of Battle - Module 1: The 1809 Campaign, published 1988, which includes rules and notes on the historical campaign and OOBs. Interesting - pretty good, in fact, though I would not care to use the rules for a game. Some nice ideas in there, to be sure, but written orders, which is a screaming NO for me, and some surprisingly detailed tactical manoeuvring for a 6mm Grand Tactical game designed to handle army-level battles. No dice - all situation/table driven. He who knows the rules best shall win, a doctrine which is normally paraphrased as rewarding generalship.

I am also, most unreasonably, prejudiced a little against any rule set which claims to have captured the "true flavour" of the period, though - since I am patently not a real general - I would not claim to have any level of expertise in the true flavour. I am not really offering serious criticism of Ebb & Flow here - I'm sure it gives a good game. On a fairly gentle reading it does not look like my sort of thing, but that is hardly the authors' problem. I do like the idea of fighting battles using armies which are historically correct, rather than based on balanced points totals, and I also am comfortable with the fact that this means that sometimes one side will have no chance of winning, but will require to demonstrate its generalship by losing as well as they can!

Anyway, Histogaming has arrived, it says on the cover, though it took 25 years to reach me.

Anschluss also came up in the context of the scoping and planning for my proposed trip to the Danube in September. John C has very kindly lent me - among a pile of other useful stuff - Peter Heath's little booklet on Wagram, which has some tidy maps along with the narrative, though the OOBs are presented in wargame form. This booklet predates the Ebb & Flow one by some 3 years, and recommends the use of rules which are accurate yet fast in use - in particular WRG's 1685-1845 set.

There is/was a whole set of these booklets - several sets, in fact, since they covered 1809, 1813, 1814 and there are also Franco-Prussian titles (I think). They are not easy to get hold of - I found some secondhand copies at Abebooks and elsewhere, and they were certainly not cheap. I have managed to track down a copy of the booklet for the Battle of Thann, but there are also, for this campaign, a number of other titles in this Great Battles of History Refought series for 1809 I would like to have a look at.

Book 3 - The Battle of Abensberg
Book 4 - The Battle of Echmuhl [sic]
Book 5 - The Battle of Ebelsburg
Book 7 - The Battle of Aspern-Essling
Book 8 - The Battle of Raab

If anyone has a copy of any of these they would be prepared to lend me for a week or two (I only need them to take some notes for my initial planning) or sell to me (not too expensive - I don't need them that badly, and would be planning to re-sell fairly quickly!), please do get in touch.