Playing at War - Part 3 - Pieces of Cardboard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

Playing at War - Part 2 - The Ancient Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for a short anecdote. Ho hum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More soon....

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.