A Battling Weekend in Ireland

Got back today from a splendid trip to Northern Ireland to take part in some games, and gain experience of Field of Battle as played by people who know what they are doing.

The events are far better covered on the blogs of Sgt Steiner and Le Duc de Gobin, so this post is mostly to commemorate the fact that I wuz there, chaps, and to thank these gentlemen - and also the celebrated (and formidable) Stephen the Dice Demon - for their enthusiasm and energy and their ability to explain what was going on. Thanks also to my hosts and their families for the food and the crack and for a really great couple of days.

On Saturday there was a big Napoleonic fight at Steiner's - the Prussian attack at Lützen (1813) - played to FoB rules - something like 70 units of 15mm on the table. A true spectacle, for which you'll have to visit the host's blog (I managed to forget my camera for this session - duh). I enjoyed the game immensely; my head was spinning a bit by the end, but I was definitely understanding a lot more.

On Saturday evening I had a brief exposure to Maurice - just as a taster, since I've never tried it before. We played a game based on Germantown, from the AWI - we didn't get very far, and it wasn't awfully serious, but it served well to demonstrate how the game works. Interesting.

On Sunday there was another big FoB game - this time Neerwinden (1693) at Castle Gobin. Again, there were about 70 units on the table, but this time the figures were 28mm and the ground scale was much bigger, resulting in a game which had more rapid movement [bigger moves, like...]. I was appropriately employed as a subordinate commander to the Dice Demon, who kept things cracking along on our side. I had responsibility for the Allies' left flank - lots of blood and thunder, and one memorable feature was that my troops were driven out of the village of Rumsdorp, took it back again and then were kicked out more decisively. The French were just getting their very impressive cavalry properly into action when they failed an Army Morale test and it was all over. The game lasted less than two hours - it was pretty intense, but it really moved along. It is much easier to get the hang of an unfamiliar game in the presence of experienced players, and these three gentlemen did a terrific job to keep up the excitement and the action. The French suffered a remarkable number of casualties among the celebrity generals - this is described more colourfully on the other blogs.

Overview of Neerwinden at the start, Allies on the right of the picture

The cavalry battle that never quite developed

French dragoons chuck my lads out of Rumsdorp for the second time

I also enjoyed a visit to Carrickfergus Castle, which is a blast, and in the evening had a quick introductory game of Memoir 44, which was more familiar because of my C&C experience. Good game, I must say - especially for someone like me whose understanding of WW2 is mostly based on John Mills movies.

King John enthroned in Carrickfergus Castle, pondering
the marvels of the electric light

We thought this chap wasn't up to the job at all - in Field
of Battle terms, he's no better than D6 quality

Got home late this afternoon, still buzzing from the battles.

In passing, anyone know what, and where, this is? Something I saw on my
travels - emergency iPhone photo not great. In fact I do know what it is, but 
if you know something about it please give me a shout.

A Short Spell of Fiddling Around

I have figures to paint;  I have stuff to do. Hobby progress has been slow, in fact it would be easy to fail to detect any progress at all. I'm going away on Friday to sit in on some Field of Battle wargaming, which should be a valuable and worthwhile experience - not to say enjoyable. More of that another time.

Mostly, I seem to have been sidetracked into doing Real Life things. I guess that includes watching a lot of football, now I think about it - we may debate how real that is.

I have, after a lot of lamentable foot-dragging, made a start on playtesting my developing, homebrewed, grid-based, Napoleonic miniatures game, which has spent a very long time being redrafted over and over. My thanks, once again, to Jay for his patience and his invaluable input, and now my thanks are also due to Martin and Dan Sarrazin, in Australia, who have started doing some playtesting for me (using Commands & Colors kit in their case) and have shamed me into shaping up and getting on with it.

Anyway, I've had a few evenings lately of walking through the exact, detailed sequence of what happens when a unit breaks from a melee (for example), and how it is different when that unit was in square or in cover (for another example). Instructive. I always knew that this process was going to turn up the need for a lot more clarity, which is probably why I've been dragging my feet. I've got used to revisions of the rules becoming smaller as the draft stabilised. Getting the soldiers and the dice on the table is bound to reveal a mass of holes, but it's all good!

Unless the testing turns out to be a complete disaster (in which case the game may quietly fade away), I hope to be in a position to report on some actual battles using these rules fairly soon. As I keep reassuring people (including myself), the aim is not to replace Commands & Colors as my game of choice, but to provide a slightly less blunt instrument with which to fight smaller, more detailed actions. To get back just a little into the world of lines and columns, and all that, when it is appropriate to do so.

In the pursuit of more light on the tactical niceties, I was reminded that I really don't know how the British Army of Napoleon's day managed to operate without French-style attack columns, so I've gone back to some good old standby books to brush up a bit.

I've also been reading a new book - a sort of memoir of Franz Joseph Hausmann, of the Napoleonic Bavarian army. This was translated and annotated by Hausmann's greatgranddaughter, and edited by John H Gill. It's interesting, and does fill in a lot of the "what was it like?" aspects of service in that army. Franz was eventually a lieutenant in the 7th Line Infantry. From 1812 onwards he sent his father detailed letters of his experiences - his father was by this time invalided out of service in the same regiment, and was keen to follow the campaign in Russia. Prior to 1812, Franz's personal journals consisted simply of lists of each day's marches. Much of the interest derives from extra information provided by Gill, and from family stories supplied by the translator.

Anyway, it is interesting rather than spellbinding stuff, and it all adds some personality and context to my forthcoming Bavarian force.

Elsewhere - and this really is trivial - I finally tracked down a little portrait of General Anne-Francois-Charles Treillard, a French Peninsular War cavalry officer who commands a division in my collection of toys. Treillard is noted, among other things, for having an unusual number of alternative spellings of his surname (though "Anne" is consistent throughout all versions), and for being famously portrayed by Robert Stephens in my favourite movie, "The Duellists".

Gen Treillard

I know this is silly, but I do like to know the chaps in my little armies. I've got portraits of most of my French generals now - I didn't have Treillard, and I still don't have a picture of Maucune (the head-banger who largely screwed up Salamanca). Maucune (real name Antoine-Louis Popon, Baron Maucune) was eventually a rich and titled chap, and I can't believe he didn't have his portrait painted, though it is possible he may have been very hard to please in the portraiture department. If anyone knows of a painting of the Baron, or if you happen to live next door to the family, please give me a shout. All I have is some detail on the family coat of arms, and a photo of his tomb, at Père Lachaise.

Maucune's final rest

Field of Battle - Rules Try-Out

Today, Count Goya - having a rare day off-duty from running his mysterious empire - kindly visited Chateau Foy to help with a first attempt at playing with my new Piquet Field of Battle rules.

It all went pretty well, really - I have to say I've been doing a lot of homework in preparation. These days I find new rules quite daunting - especially a game as unusual in style and philosophy as FoB. We had a small trial action - about a dozen units a side on a very simple terrain.

Trying out rules requires a bit of mental adjustment - you have to forget about playing a game - and never mind at all about winning the thing - the trick is to try all sorts of suicidal cavalry charges against infantry lines and all that - to see what happens. That is the point of the exercise.

With hindsight, I'd have been better to follow Mark D's advice and start with a game where all the leaders and units were straight vanilla - as it was, I decided to follow the randomiser rules and create forces with units of varying quality, just to see how it went. This places a lot of reliance on the little stickers bearing the information for each unit, so it might have been a good idea also if I had made the labels big enough to read more easily(!), but no matter - it's all a learning process.

Simple, minimalist terrain featuring low-kudos cork table-mat hills. Small field (boards
plain side up - they really are hex-free on the reverse, you see).

1809 Spaniards vs French - usual stuff. The Spanish army was officially classified
as Abysmal, with Leadership ratings and Sequence Card deck to suit.

Smoke markers indicate units which cannot fire again until a Firepower card turns up

FoB Quick Reference Sheet - my edited version - with (optional) Ninky Nonk attached

A gizmo, but a useful one - an electric shuffling machine, which makes short (though
noisy) work of the task of shuffling the (sleeved) cards to the standard necessary to keep
the game working. As an aside, I note that this machine causes interference on
DAB radio - maybe we should have bought a more expensive one?

The game, it goes without saying, is intriguing, well thought out and, I believe, worthy of study. We were slow and halting today, as we had to discuss how the rules worked, and double-check just about everything (the rules manual is big and thorough, but it is not always easy to find the bit you are looking for among the numerous examples), so it was quite hard work, but we certainly knew a lot more about the game when we had finished. Familiarity will make it a lot more slick and straightforward, I am sure; my main problems today were to do with lack of facility in identifying and selecting the correct poly-dice (and stopping the damned things hiding in odd corners of the table), and with the fact that I'm really not used to a free-form (non-gridded) game these days - certainly not without a knowledgeable umpire to hold my hand. However you look at it, measuring everything is a bit of a pain in the wassname, and so much of the action today seemed to take place in odd angles between units, where the lack of space and the alignments never quite fitted comfortably with my limited understanding of how the rules work. Entirely my own problem, I appreciate. I would be very shame-faced to be starting thinking already about how the game might benefit from being placed on a gridded board, but it is hard not to!

I shall persevere, and I'm sure it will all seem more natural and feel smoother next time. We used a very basic terrain, so there's not a lot to look at here - the photos are really just to prove we got it on the table, and came out undismayed! I'm looking forward to trying again soon, but an early priority for me is to get a look at some more experienced players doing it properly, and I'm working on that, hoping to set something up.

My thanks to Goya for his company and help, and most especially to Darren for his commendable patience and sound guidance over the last few weeks.

Separate Topic - Nothing to do with anything: when I was checking out the Marston Moor battlefield a few months ago, it occurred to me that it would be rather droll to have the battlefield monument appearing on the tabletop for the miniature game. Doesn't seem so amusing now, I guess, but I was impressed enough with the idea to order a suitable specimen from a model railway supplier. In fact the item was out of stock, and the matter dragged on for long enough for me to become unsure whether I'd actually cancelled the order. Eventually I decided I had, and thought no more about it. Marston Moor came and went - twice, in fact, if you count the postponed attempt when we were snowed off. Long after everything was finished and put away and written up, I received an email this week to say that my monument was now in stock and had been posted, and it duly arrived this afternoon. It's quite a handsome item, I guess - it will have to appear in a battle somewhere or other soon, but in the meantime here is a picture, simply to commemorate the passing of a half-baked idea and the uncertainty of medium-term memory. Regard it as a memorial to all those good intentions that don't quite work out. I think it is probably generic enough to serve in a number of contexts and centuries, so no doubt we'll see it around.

Memorial to an unexceptional idea

Field of Battle - Nibbling Away

Things are a bit disrupted around here at present - as far as hobby stuff goes, the problem is time. It's not that I don't have any spare time, it's just that it's a bit unpredictable, and tends to become available in small amounts.

Thus for some weeks I haven't been doing any major painting work - it's all been short bursts of refurb work (which can produce finished figures quite quickly, if I do it right), poking at test figures for big batches to come, and reading in odd quiet moments.

I'm working away at getting up to speed on Field of Battle, the Piquet-produced game which has me quite excited at the moment. As with all new games, there is a lot to learn - philosophically as much as anything else - this game is unlike most of my previous wargaming experience. It has some similarities to the full Piquet rules - though it is not simply a "lite" version of Piquet.

I've been reading and studying the rules, and I now have a scenario book, which is very interesting indeed; I've invested in a couple of decks of the official cards, and I have finally sourced some sets of dice. Like Piquet (I think), Field of Battle requires the rolling of small numbers of dice - usually they are rolled singly or in twos - but they may be selected from a set (for each side) of one each of D4, D6, D8, D10, D12 and D20. Interesting challenge to get a completely satisfactory matched set - I had some problems finding D10s which were numbered 1-10 instead of 0-9. Managed it without too much hassle, so I'm all ready to get on with some trials now.

The intro to the rules recommends that the new reader should not be overcome by the length of the booklet, nor damage his health trying to memorise reams of tables. The recommended approach is to set up a smallish game (I'll make this a solo effort - about 10 units a side), and have a bash, taking note of how the cards work. The set-up requires a fair amount of work - it's necessary to determine the quality of the army, and of its leaders and units, make up an appropriate pack of cards for each army, and work out what "size" of die (D6, D8 etc) is to be used by each unit for combat and for defence.

This is not the place to attempt any kind of summary of how the game works, nor attempt any kind of critique - suffice to say that I am happily working away at getting up to speed, and I hope to play a solo trial game sometime in the next however-many weeks. This is not a blistering rate of progress, admittedly, but I am enjoying it. My thanks to Darren, for his kind help and guidance, and also to Brent Oman, the author and originator of the game, for his help and generosity in getting me off the ground.

In a perfect world, the next logical thing for me to do would be to attend someone else's game (as a spectator) to see how it swings and feels. I guess that is unlikely, but I'm open to invitations if anyone fancies it - especially in a warm country with liberal drink laws...

Rules - Allan Gallacher's "Ripples" Game

This follows from the brief discussion of Piquet in yesterday's post - as an example of a game which uses neither simultaneous activation nor conventional alternate turns - plus an email I got from Geoff P which reminded me of some other unorthodox approaches to wargames I had found interesting in the past.

This very nearly got classified as an off-topic Hooptedoodle. It is potentially going to be a rather irritating post, where I attempt to describe something that was so long ago I cannot remember it clearly, in the hope that someone recognises what I'm talking about and has some further thoughts on the matter. It is not, I emphasise, of any significance other than it will bother me a little if I can't remember!

A long time ago, in another century, I had a friend named Allan Gallacher, who was really the fellow who stoked up my enthusiasm for miniatures wargaming, and whose splendidly irreverent approach to the hobby probably gave me my grounding as the misfit I became. Allan's constant theme was that his games with toy soldiers were never as successful nor as enjoyable as he thought they ought to be, and that as time passed and rules were "improved" (including his own, to be fair) the situation became worse rather than better.

The particular period I am thinking of came after Allan had declared himself to be very fed up with miniatures games which "achieved very little over very long evenings". As I recall, he had recently experienced a club game in which a melee that would have lasted a very few minutes in reality had taken over an hour to come to a resolution. The thing about this which particularly annoyed him was that most of that hour had been taken up with much marching and countermarching by units who were a long way from any useful action.

This, of course, is recognisable as what we would now call activation - most rules of recent date contain systems which force the commanders to concentrate on the significant bits of the action, rather than being distracted by the lovely spectacle of all those regiments marching round in circles. Allan felt very strongly that some of the best fun he ever had with toy soldiers was as a kid, on his bedroom carpet, playing with Timpo and Britains cowboys and Indians (to use an old and politically insensitive term) - in these games, there was no strategic element at all. There would be a massive brawl going on between figures who were close enough to the action to be involved, and the rest of the figures would be dormant until either the brawl moved close enough for them to become embroiled in it, or until some kind of lull or stalemate forced a new initiative somewhere else. The point being that the game kind of "rippled" (to use Allan's word) out from identifiable hot-spots, and unengaged troops would remain unengaged until the hot spots moved or someone did something about  it.

Allan produced a sketch of a game which he code-named "Ripples", and I was involved in a couple of playtest games. I remember that we played at Allan's flat, in Great King Street in Edinburgh, and that Pat Timmins, Alan Low and John Ramsay were there at various times. The game - if it matters - was an ACW action - only time I ever saw Spencer Smith ACW soldiers up close.

I don't remember much detail of the game, but it had some interesting features - units could move, fire, charge etc automatically if they were in a position to do so - if they were within some defined "threat range"; this "threat" might be a threat from themselves against the enemy, or a threat from the enemy. If you fired at some unit or other, then the next thing that would happen would probably be that they would fire back, if they could, and this might alternate back and forth until there was an outcome of some sort. Combat did not get frozen until the next turn - it was followed through, so that there would be moments when different little bits of the same action would be at slightly different elapsed times from each other. Allan's justification for this was that the actual fighting time in a real battle was relatively brief compared with the standing waiting time, so that a bit of elasticity was OK. He also had a concept which used tokens he called "disrupters" - these were in short supply, and I remember we used some old, pre-decimal coins, though when they were issued or how they were replenished I don't recall. If you played a disrupter you could initiate some action by a unit which was not currently in threat range - to bring up a reserve, for example, might require the expenditure of a few disrupters.

It was crude - underdeveloped. Artillery was a major problem - since artillery could theoretically offer a threat to anyone within their range, the rules got a bit tricky to avoid artillery simply firing all the time, and - accordingly - someone fighting back. The game was eventually shelved as yet another daft idea, and yet...

The idea of allowing hot-spots to get ahead of the time frame in this way is interesting - it certainly makes things exciting, though you may simply end up in the game with the cowboys on the bedroom carpet. It obviously needed a lot of work, but it did demonstrate that you could limit the amount of pointless countermarching of remote units if you focused on units affected by the "ripples" from the hot-spots.

The only reason I mention this at all is that I am sure that Allan said that he had borrowed the idea from somewhere else - it may have been Morschauser, though I am not sure at all about that. Anyone recognise such an approach to miniatures gaming? In more recent years I was interested that the published Huzzah! rules focused on threats (i.e. implied threats as much as actual charges and ranged fire), which rang a few bells, and which sort of stood the normal game logic on its head - the Huzzah! game, to me, though, was disappointingly complicated.

Maybe Field of Battle does a bit of this - the possibility that it might is what reminded me of the long-defunct Ripples Experiment.

That's it, really. Just an old memory - as I say, I wonder if anyone recognises the concept of a game which "brews" around units who are engaged, and which requires some deliberate initiative to involve anyone else?

Sorry about this - duff post, probably...

Rules - Field of Battle

Since 1970 or thereabouts I guess I've read many hundreds of sets of wargames rules - the number expands rapidly if I include boardgames. The proportion of these which I've actually played is really so small that often I wonder why I've wasted so much time on my researches - what is it I've been looking for? Typically I don't finish a first reading - my initial interest will suddenly be frozen out by my dislike of the morale rules, or the activation rules, or the potential requirement to rebase everything - or something. My hit rate for eventual buy-in is pathetic. For a while, a couple of years ago, I thought I was going to really go for Lasalle, but I managed to find enough areas of discomfort to avoid making a commitment. [Phew - that was a close call...]

At present I am supposed to be working on an update to my (slowly developing) ECW siege game (Leaguer - yes, all right, all right...) and the development of a hex-gridded game for my Napoleonics which allows for more tactical manoeuvre than the Commands & Colors games which have become the house standard. Over both of these I am feeling rather guilty, since I have had a splendid amount of help from Mark and Jay, respectively, and I am keen not to leave everything hanging - it seems, at best, a bit impolite. Problem with the siege game has been that the discussion (which has been excellent, by the way) has turned up a few more questions than answers of late, so some heavyweight re-thinking is needed. Problem with the detailed hex Napoleonic game (for smaller actions, you understand) is that my original idea of simply sticking extra activities into C&C just produced a mess of a game - the tactical additions were compromised by the join with C&C, and the beauties (and they are considerable) of C&C were wrecked by the fiddly additions. Thus I started again - the new game has a proportion of Neil Thomas in it, but develops some of Neil's ideas quite a bit. I'd reached the point with this where the next thing to do was some serious playtesting, to enable me to produce a good, robust, working draft. So that's where I am: playtesting to be arranged as soon as is practicable.

There's a lot going on, and it doesn't seem too helpful if I find myself reading yet more rules which are not on the plan, but that's what I've been doing. I have suddenly become very interested in Field of Battle, from Brent Oman's Piquet product family. I have been very interested in Piquet for years - I have the base rules and the Grognards supplement, and have read them numerous times. Always with the same result - I really like a lot of the ideas in there, but there are a good few things which are - well - too fussy for my taste. I am unlikely to become a regular user.

Field of Battle is a relative of Piquet, involves some of the same principles and philosophies, but is a more straightforward game - or at least it seems so to me. My interest was sparked by the blogged activities of Le Duc de Gobin and Sgt Steiner - excellent fellows both. I am grateful to M Le Duc for explaining the nature of the game (left to myself, I find Piquet's product range, and the overlaps within it, bewildering), and for guiding me through some of the basic ideas. I have now read the booklet twice, and will start a third reading next week. I have found nothing that turns me off. The game is card driven, and lends itself very well to solo play (a big plus for me), the unit basing is almost identical to the way my armies have been set up since 1972 [If you build it, they will come - though it might take a while...], it all makes the most excellent sense. It looks very like what I thought Lasalle might offer, when I had the hots for that. It also offers a tweakable base set of rules which will lend themselves to a wide range of horse-&-musket wars. I have now gone so far as to invest in a proper set of the cards from the publisher - the US postal rates make this more of a serious investment than I had anticipated - and I hope to receive these shortly when new stocks come in.

As interruptions go, this promises to be a worthwhile one. I am gently enthusiastic about this - not to replace my existing rule systems, but to provide a rewarding alternative. Let's see how it goes.

If it all turns to rat droppings, you may hear no more about it, but I'm not approaching it with that expectation.

ECW Wargames Rules - Updated

With sincere and copious thanks to The Jolly Broom Man, for his time and commendable patience in sanity checking, commenting and proof-reading, I am pleased to announce that I now have an updated version of the Rules Booklet, the QRS, the Command Cards and the "Chaunce" Cards for my Commands & Colors based ECW game, which is now up to CC_ECW Ver 2.69, and may be downloaded via the link in the top right hand corner of this screen.

The main changes concern a simplification of the system by which "Rash" units of horse may run out of control. There are some additional cards, so if you already use my cards you may wish to update both sets.

Any problems with the rules, or if you can't get the downloads to work, please let me know. If you do not care for my rules then bless you - thank you for your interest. 

ECW - Rules Update

Further to previous - as from today, Version 2.68 of my CC_ECW rules is downloadable via this link. The link on the right hand top corner of the current screen should now also point to this latest version, and I believe all the documentation is consistent.

Revisions? Not so much, in the end - have gone back to Foot being able to move and still fire (a bit), have banned Stand of Pikes from being attempted in woods - in fact no pikes can fight in woods any more. Also another load of typos and dodgy wording smartened up.

If you can't get the links to work, I've probably screwed up the sharing rights - please shout. If you don't like the rules, that's perfectly OK - have a nice day.

My humble thanks to The Jolly Broom Man for his input and all his help.

ECW - We Like Our Musketry Explicit

The gentlemen of the Sealed Knot being unpleasant at close quarters

This is going to be one of my ruminating sessions, I think, so if you don't fancy the prospect you have at least been forewarned. In response to my post yesterday, David sent a comment that touches on some of the key issues in the problem of how we try to represent warfare as a game we can play on the kitchen table. [When pressed, ruminate. That is the house rule here.]

So David is my guest writer for the morning. His comment included the following:

"...it is fascinating to think about how they actually went about the business of organised combat in the pike and shot era. Now I admit I have not downloaded your rules, so you may rightly ignore all I say. But one thing that always strikes me is how short a range they would be firing their muskets at (ignoring ill-disciplined premature popping-off by inexperienced troops); I get the feeling this would often be 100 yards or less. Which must have been terrifying, by the way. Now this makes me wonder, what is the 'range' of musketry in C&C, in hexes? And what distance does a hex represent? And how does that relate to movement distances?

Another thing that only now strikes me is, if taking up a firing position at 100 yards from the enemy and then using 'fire by introduction', it can't take long to close the range quite considerably; how much discipline did it take to maintain that measured fire and reloading, and how tempting was it to just give all that up and get stuck in to a melee?..."

I'd like to take a couple of detours before attempting to respond to this.

This doesn't look like rolling fire to me - it looks like a big Salvee

Firstly, since we are all shaped by our experiences, and since this includes the development of my own views on war gaming, I'd like to share with you a tale of a game I was once involved in. I would say this was about 1974. [I used to keep a huge file with notes and jottings and OOBs from all my war games - going way back - but alas I lost it during a house move 19 years ago, so approximate memory will have to serve now]. The main things are that this game certainly wasn't yesterday, and that it was from a period when we were all striving to make our miniature battles as realistic as possible. That seems like a very sad joke now, but I was as keen as anyone else.

The event was a very large bash at Quatre Bras - lots of borrowed troops on display - I can't remember how many, but there were a lot, and we used the WRG rules of the day. There were a lot of people involved, though, since the game lasted all day Saturday, all day Sunday and some of Monday evening, players were coming in to relieve each other, so there was never a time when everyone was present together, and some of the visits were brief and intended to show willing rather than make any major contribution. I recall that Phil Maugham, Alan Low, Dave Hoskins, Allan Gallacher (our host), John Ramsay, Dave Thomson, Keith Spragg and Forbes Hannah were all present at some point - a true marathon relay effort. I am less clear about the outcome - I think it was a sort of draw, though the Allies claimed they were leading at the end - you may recognise that kind of conclusion. Another, rather darker recollection is that only about 3 of the assembly are still alive, which just goes to show something or other (it probably shows that I was one of the younger participants!).

It took a long time afterwards to clear up the mess and sort out the paperwork, and two big messages feature most strongly in my memory. Firstly, none of us ever wanted to do anything like that again - in fact this was around the time that I first started looking seriously at what could be learned from board games, and trying to find ways to simplify my own miniatures games. Secondly, we were horrified (not to say incredulous) to learn that the total elapsed "battle time" amounted to around 35 minutes - that's all. Something like 22 hours had been spent "fighting" a battle which must have lasted a few hours historically, and the mathematical basis of the game accounted for only 35 minutes. So what else was going on at Quatre Bras? Were our rules incompetent? - well, possibly, though, like the players, the rules were well-intentioned. Did battles involve a lot of other stuff - waiting around, perhaps - which padded out this skeletonic 35 minutes? Is there something else at work here?

I've thought about this problem, off and on, ever since. There was something else at work. For one thing, there is something strangely elastic and subjective about the passage of time - Einstein said something to the effect that an hour spent conversing with a pretty girl was but a fleeting instant, but a minute spent sitting on a very hot stove was a long time indeed (stovists please don't bother complaining - get in touch with Einstein) - this is not something you can measure on a clock. I have read about this, but don't have much of a handle on it. More importantly, there are huge problems with our assumptions of realism in any kind of stochastic simulation.

I wrote a rather lengthy post on the concept of ludic fallacies on this blog - it seems it was 6 and a bit years ago. Goodness me. I was a windbag even in those days. If you wish to risk that old post then good for you - it's here - I haven't changed my mind since then, and I doubt if I could express it better now (more concisely, maybe...). The idea is that any kind of mathematical model of a real system is fundamentally flawed, unless the system is itself very simple and mathematically based. Thus, for example, we can analyse fully a game based on rolling dice - provided, of course, that the dice are "honest dice" and that the players don't do anything underhand (and these may be significant doubts, if there's a lot of money at stake!). Anything more complex and we very quickly find that the elements we can measure and understand and estimate (or think we can) are swamped by the things we do not understand, the things we have not thought of, and the interactions between these. [The original target of ridicule for the ludic fallacy was the world of finance, in which fund management and investment strategies are driven by mathematical models which are not only unreliable but dangerous if they are trusted beyond the bounds of validity (please supply your own examples...)]

War games are less scary in their implications than fund management, but an example I used 6-and-a-half years ago was the way rules all over the planet were suddenly "improved" after the publication of Maj. Gen. BP Hughes' famous Firepower, a semi-scientific study of the power and effectiveness of weapons. Hughes himself was very sensible and forthright about the limitations of both the data and reasoning in his fascinating book, but the guys who adopted it for rule writing almost all missed the point by some miles. Idealised 19th Century experiments to measure the power and hitting capability of (for example) canister fire are interesting as an assessment of the weapons themselves, but the official-looking analysis tables from Hughes have as much to do with the likely results of these weapons' use in real battle conditions by real soldiers - with real emotions and limited training - as the proverbial price of onions, so basing a game on them was more than a little naive. Sorry, chaps.

One of the misunderstood charts from Firepower

I can't be bothered checking for actual references, but a few of the earlier war games writers - notably Peter Young and Paddy Griffith, I think - made the point that game scales and exact measurements were all very well, but the most important thing was to have a game which works. If rifles are supposed to fire a bit further than muskets, let them fire a bit further in your game - exactly how much further is less important, within the limits of commonsense; in truth, no-one really knows exactly how much further it should be, anyway. Same with march distances and all that. If anyone tells you differently then he's bluffing, or he hasn't thought about it. Or both. The 1970s push for time-and-motion-study re-engineering of war games produced very little improvement in the observed realism of outcomes, and, as far as I am concerned, produced a colossal reduction in the enjoyment of the games themselves.

It will rattle some teacups, but I would contend that one of the attractions of the newfangled, non-Old-School, board game-style Commands & Colors game is that it is closer in spirit to the creed of Messrs Young and Griffith than much of the pseudo-science and detail that we have seen in the time in between.

I impose a ground scale on C&C to make sense of modelling battlefields, and especially for setting out fortresses, but some of the equivalences don't stand up to close scrutiny. If I assume 200 paces for a hex, then a unit in a hex 2 hexes away is somewhere between 200 and 600 paces distant. 400 seems a logical figure to use. 400 paces as an effective musket range is pretty optimistic in the Napoleonic Wars - the captain would not be pleased if his chaps started firing at such a range - and is certainly just plain silly in the ECW. And yet I've adopted a 2-hex musket range for the ECW game - why?

Well, to be honest, I'd be more comfortable if musketry were not handled explicitly in these games. I've already abstracted cavalry firing their pistols into the bit of the game that comes under the heading Melee Combat. Pistol fire was just one of the unpleasant things that cavalry did to each other when they were in reasonably close contact. It would make sense to do the same with musket fire - simply regard it as a close-range matter, in terms of the ground scale, and include it into Melee, in the same way I've already done for the Horse.

This would certainly not be very revolutionary. Long before C&C appeared, I used home-brewed Napoleonic rules which were very influenced by Doc Monaghan's Big Battalions, which originated with the Guernsey Wargames Club. This was most definitely a miniatures game, but it used a very neat melee system, which was very clearly board game-like in style, and there was no musketry. What? That's right - cannons fired at people, and there was some skirmisher activity ("harassing fire") which was carried out around the same time as the "Bombardment Phase", but volleyed musketry by close-order infantry was something that happened in a close combat situation, so it was covered by the board game-style melee rules.

It worked nicely - it took a bit of getting used to, and it would certainly alienate the chaps who don't like C&C because it denies you the opportunity to form lines or columns, or fiddle with skirmishers. I think that if the game scale is big enough, abstracting musketry is logical and reasonable.

So why have I persisted with a distinct rule for musket fire for the ECW, which is, to say the least, not well supported by our understanding of the facts? Why not take the obvious step of making artillery fire the only kind of Ranged Combat permitted? Hmmm.

First thing to say is that musketry is kind of fun - the game would feel poorer without it, and in this game it is not very effective anyway. Next, the same arguments could be applied to the Napoleonic game - which is a board game, let us remember - yet the very experienced and knowledgeable authors of that game decided to feature it as part of ranged combat.

That whiff of board game is quite an important aspect of this. In a traditional board war game, cardboard counters move next to each other on the board, and bad things happen. It isn't a series of individual musket volleys or charges, it's almost like some kind of force-field thing - the units interact in some manner, and one of them prevails, or is eliminated, or whatever - as the game scale increases, our view of the details starts to disappear. It is the sort of thing that turns off the Old School enthusiasts.

Thus I have left musketry in my ECW game at present, because it feels more like a miniatures war game if it is left in, but my feelings on the matter are pretty marginal. There are strong arguments to make it part of the Melee, and the game would be tidier (and probably more correct) without it, but it would feel less like a "proper" war game. Peter Young would have been horrified not to get a chance to fire his muskets, so that'll do for the time being.