Action at Vado del Caballero

Early birds - the first of St Paul's Italians arrive on the French right

Today’s post is about an actual wargame, not a dandelion extractor, nor the architectural integrity of Liverpool waterfront. I thought it was probably overdue.

My dear friend Chester visited yesterday. Chester and I have been fighting miniatures battles off and on for fully 30 years, but he has no previous experience of using the Commands & Colors rules, so a suitable Napoleonic episode was set up, and battle was duly joined.

To get us started, I reproduce here our context notes and OOBs, slightly edited to remove private jokes and similar.

Action at Vado del Caballero, Castilla Vieja, Feb 1812

As a result of an administrative error, a French supply convoy has been ordered along the wrong road, and is headed for an Allied controlled area. In fact the situation is worse than this for the French, since Wellington has ordered Maj.Gen Karl, Baron von Alten to probe this very region with the Light Division and a brigade of light cavalry.

Gen de Divn Darmagnac of the French Armée du Centre has been despatched from the Madrid region with a rather motley force, mostly Italians and afrancesado Spaniards, to get there quickly and secure the area around the key river crossing at Vado del Caballero.

This is basically an encounter battle – neither side is really aware that the other is there. The main objective for each force is to defeat the enemy and retain control of the area. The Allies have the additional support of a couple of small groups of guerrilleros – they should be used with discretion. The French have a good-quality battalion of dismounted dragoons – since this unit consists largely of men from the elite companies of the 19^th and 22^nd Dragoons, they count as grenadier infantry.

Forces engaged (including CCN categories and “block” strengths) are:

French Army – mostly detachments from the Armée du Centre – including the Toledo garrison

Genl de Divn Darmagnac

Genl de Bde Verbigier-St Paul – Italian brigade

2^nd Italian Light Infantry          [Italian LT – 4 blocks]

1/3^rd Italian Line Infantry        [Italian LI – 4]

2/3^rd Italian Line Infantry         [Italian LI – 4]

1/5^th Italian Line Infantry        [Italian LI – 4]

2/5^th Italian Line Infantry        [Italian LI – 4]

Regt “Dragoni Napoleone”      [Italian HC – 3]

7/1^st Regt Italian Ft Artillery     [Italian FA – 3]

Capt Genl Casapalacios – Spanish brigade

1/1^st (Castilla) Lt Infantry        [Spanish LT – 4]

1/2^nd (Toledo) Line Inf            [Spanish LI – 4]

2/2^nd (Toledo) Line Inf            [Spanish LI – 4]

1/Regt Royal-Etranger              [Spanish LI – 4]

Bn de Marche, Drag Provisoirs  [French GR – 4]

Col Vial – Light cavalry

13^th Chasseurs à Cheval           [French LC – 3]

22^nd Chasseurs à Cheval          [French LC – 3]

26^th Chasseurs à Cheval           [French LC – 3]

5/5^th Artillerie à Cheval            [French HA – 3]

Allied Army

Maj.Gen Karl, Baron von Alten

                Lt.Col Barnard – 1^st bde, Light Divn

                                1/43^rd Ft (Monmouth)              [British LT – 3]

                                1/95^th Rifles                             [British RL – 3]

                                3^rd Bn Ptgse Cacadores             [Portuguese LT – 3]

                Maj.Gen Vandeleur – 2^nd bde, Light Divn

                                1/52^nd Ft (Oxfordshire)            [British LT – 3]

                                2/95^th Rifles                             [British RL – 3]

                                1^st Bn Ptgse Cacadores           [Portuguese LT – 3]

                                Troop ‘I’, Royal Hse Art         [British HA – 3]

                Maj.Gen Geo Anson – light cavalry

                                11^th Lt Dgns                            [British LC – 3]

                                14^th Lt Dgns                            [British LC – 3]

                                16^th Lt Dgns                            [British LC – 3]

                                Troop ‘A’, Royal Hse Art        [British HA – 3]

                Unattached

                                1^st Cruzados de las Espinas     [Spanish GU – 2]

                                2^nd ditto                                 [Spanish GU – 2]

                                Avila Volunteer Artillery           [Spanish FA – 3]

Scenario – action commences at first light. Each side gets 5 Command Cards, French move first throughout, and victory requires 7 “banners”.

First move (French first) – place up to 4 units/leaders on the field, anywhere up to 5 hexes from your own baseline, but not within 2 hexes of the enemy.

Thereafter – units may only be brought onto the table as a result of activation by Command Card play. Leaders may not arrive already attached to a unit. Infantry may not arrive in square.

Special rules in addition to normal C&C N – the Rio Hediondo is fordable at all points, and has two formal bridges. Italian troops fight like Portuguese; Spanish line troops (incl the volunteer artillery) also fight like Portuguese, but suffer double retreats. There are special rules for guerrilleros – they may move 2 hexes and battle, they may pass freely through woods and built-up hexes; they fight like Portuguese line infantry, but a single retreat eliminates them. Guerrilla infantry may not form square.

The Action

Allied advanced guard looking for something to charge

General view of the French position around Turn 4, with the Italians at the far end

The terrain was fairly broken, with small, rocky hills and wooded areas. The Allies put light cavalry and a horse battery into the field early, to cover the arrival of the rest of the troops. Sadly (if predictably), these light dragoons were subsequently wasted in pointless skirmishes with their French light horse opponents.

Darmagnac (who was not physically on the field until the very end of the battle) had arranged for his Italian brigade to advance into the hilly area on his right flank, while the Spanish afrancesado Line troops approached rather more cautiously, along with Vial’s light cavalry, behind the river on his left.

The Spanish brigade missed a big opportunity very early in the day. The Regt Royal-Etranger, admittedly somewhat discouraged by artillery fire, allowed the British 43^rd Light Infantry to enter the nameless village in the centre of the field, a position which, vitally, they held with ease for the rest of the day. In general, the Allied light infantry made good use of their double-move capability throughout the action.

St Paul’s Italians made a concerted assault on the wooded hills on the right flank – at first this went very well, St Paul doing a fine job replacing fatigued units with fresh battalions, and, though the combat ebbed and flowed a bit in this area, it looked as though they must take this position, an impression which was heightened by the unaccountable rout of the 1^st Cacadores and the most regrettable wreck of the 2^nd Bn, 95^th Rifles (who, inexplicably, refused to form square when charged by the Italian dragoons – a decision which was still being agonised over in the Indian restaurant after the battle).

Never underestimate a guerrillero in a wood

Eventually St Paul ran out of luck and men, and failed. One of the big surprises of the day was the performance of the Spanish guerrilleros. Two small, informal “battalions” of the Cruzados de las Espinas were present – my first experience of trying out my extension to the CCN rules to cope with these irregulars. These “GU”-class troops have some definite strengths – especially in speed of manoeuvre and their ability to move through broken terrain – but they are brittle – a single retreat will eliminate them. The 1^st battalion were briefly exposed to long range cannon fire and, though they suffered no casualties, were shaken into a retreat, from which there could be no return. This was more than made up for by the outstanding valour of their colleagues in the 2^nd battalion, who successfully held a wood, under the personal direction of General Vandeleur, and managed to break the final assault of the Italians (partly thanks, I am reminded, to some very, very lucky dice-rolls).

Oops! - George Anson goes on a surprise holiday in Verdun

That did it - the 1st Castilla fail conspicuously to take the village

The battle was very finely balanced throughout – eventually, both sides had 6 victory banners, but the day was won when the Spanish Castilla Light Infantry rather rashly stormed the 43^rd in their village. The 43^rd played a FIRST STRIKE Command Card, and duly wiped out the men from Castile with a single roll of 3 dice. Game over. One very silly moment came when the Allied commander left the cavalry commander, General Anson, isolated - he did, admittedly, have depressingly few cavalry to command by this point - and he was promptly taken by the French - a very easy victory flag for them (as if things aren't hard enough...).

Command & Colors Notes

Not a lot to say, really. A RALLY card and some fortunate associated dice rolls allowed a rather battered British RHA battery to return to full strength in a key position at a critical point in the battle, which rather led us to wonder where the guys had been. That was an influential moment, but these things are always welcome anyway for generating excuses.

We took all day – probably 5-and-a-bit hours to play the game, which is very slow for CCN. That is partly due to having to consult the rules a lot, but mainly because of the difficulty of bringing forces on to the table as the Command Cards allowed. The encounter scenario worked very well, however, and this kind of set up brings a lot of interesting challenges.

And I did learn (the hard way, again) that a square is a dashed good idea in the face of cavalry.

Really enjoyed it. Still very happy with CCN, and even more motivated to get to a proper test of my Solo variant while the table is still set up.

RESULT!

Compromise in Wargames - (2) Time: Wellington, Wallace & Gromit

The more I thought about issues connected with time in wargames, the more I started to think that maybe there wasn’t much to say. There are some key decisions to be made when designing a game. Since it will not run, smoothly, by itself in real time (like a model railway), we have a practical need to replace continuous action/movement with a series of step turns, each representing an interval of time; perhaps these will be alternate turns, perhaps (if someone finds a way to do it) the intervals may be of varying length to suit the situation, the intensity of the action – however this is done, the compromise is similar. The shorter the intervals, the more closely we approximate to continuous action (like the stop-frame animation techniques used in Wallace & Gromit, my very favourite pieces of Plasticene). Very short turns will also reduce the problem of determining the exact timing of events (volleys etc) during the bound, but will also give a laborious, fiddly game. That is all pretty clear, but very short turns will also accentuate one of the great philosophical mysteries of wargaming – why doesn’t the real time represented by the elapsed turns add up to something realistic?

Here’s a quote from the Wargames Research Group’s then-shiny new Wargames Rules 1685-1845, published April 1977; bear in mind that these represented something of a change of direction for WRG, switching (correctly, in the cause of playability) to alternate turns, and abandoning their trend-setting combat factor table system:

Time Scale - Each bound can include action comparable with that possible in 80 seconds in real life. However, the bound overlaps both the preceding and succeeding enemy bounds, so that one friendly plus one enemy bound also equals 80 seconds. As this, multiplied by the likely number of double bounds in a game, gives an unrealistic duration for a real battle, we assume that each bound also includes a variable amount of delay. We therefore recommend assuming for campaign purposes that a pair of bounds represents half an hour.

Eh?

This, remember, is from game designers and rule writers who were not noted for ambiguity or mincing their words – the same booklet specifies exactly how big a marsh is allowed to be, for example. If the WRG, no less, were as woolly as this about how time elapsed adds up in the game, then this is very serious recognition that the matter is not straightforward.

I’ve referred to this before in this blog, and the discussion generated a comment from Ross Mac which has played on my mind ever since. With a grateful doff of the hat to Ross, and with my own rather clumsy paraphrasing super-imposed, the observation refers to the Battle of Waterloo: something like a quarter of a million men spent a long summer’s day within a few miles of each other; any one of the infantry units could have marched right across the field in a couple of hours – so what the blazes were they doing all day?

To an extent, this demonstrates how little intuitive understanding I have of what a real battle was like. The only reasonable answer is that, by and large, most of them must have spent most of the day hanging around, doing very little other than being in position, implying a threat. Very obviously, all over the field, lots was going on, but any one of the participants in the ranks must have spent most of the day waiting – waiting for the ground to dry, waiting for the other lot to do something, waiting for orders, just waiting.

Another thing which I find difficult to fathom – though I enjoy trying to unravel it – is the widespread disagreement we find in accounts of what happened, even to the extent of published exchanges of umbrella-rattling letters between colleagues who were within a few hundred yards of each other. I am writing about the Napoleonic Wars here, remember, one of the best documented periods of history – an astonishing proportion of the survivors left eye-witness accounts, and yet there is still huge debate about what order events occurred in, who did what, exactly where they were and so on. There must be many examples we could pick on, but one which has always intrigued me in particular is my old chum Marmont’s career-spoilingly bad afternoon at Salamanca on 22nd July 1812.

Realising that the brigades on his left have got themselves out of order and left some gaps, Marmont calls for his horse, with the intention of heading out there in person and sorting them out, when he is wounded by a shell, which spoils his concentration more than somewhat. In his memoirs, Marmont (who has a little dignified ass-covering to do on the subject of his performance that day) estimates it was 3pm when he was wounded. Foy, who was less than a mile away, estimates it was between 3 and 4. Wellington, however, is said to have spotted this over-extension of the French left while he was at lunch, around 1pm, and sent orders to Pakenham accordingly, which makes it unlikely that it would have taken Marmont a further two hours to spot the problem. Basically, we don’t know. This seems almost impossibly strange to a 21st Century reader – in a modern context the exact moment the C-in-C was struck down would be known without doubt – order sheets would all be headed up with the date and correct time, there would be a paper trail a mile wide from which to reconstruct events, if need be.

This was not the case then. There was no satellite transmission of accurate time, no time signal on the radio – the pocket watches of the day would also add a little inaccuracy. Most importantly, the mindset was different. People thought in terms of a day’s march, “about midday”, “late afternoon” – they would not have understood our modern-day obsession with spurious accuracy of time-keeping. So there is plenty of scope for disagreement between witnesses, in the midst of so much confusion. But there is something more – the confusion itself appears to be related to a certain subjectivity in people’s perception of the passage of time.

Here’s another, more famous quote:

The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.

Arthur, Duke of Wellington, from a letter to John Croker (8 August 1815), as quoted in The Waterloo Letters (1891) edited by H. T. Sibome

So what is he on about? Surely it is a straightforward matter to assemble an accurate account of a battle, even if it is complicated? There are a finite number of events, and each must have occurred at a known time. Time, very conveniently, travels only in one direction, there is only one of it, and it is the same for everyone. Is this true? [In what follows, I am not trying to labour a pun on the word “ball” – it’s just a coincidence!]

I had a long think about this. You can watch, or produce a decent written report of, a football match, for example, because there is only one ball, and the ball is the central point of focus of the game. If you asked each of the players involved to relate exactly what he had done during the match, none of the accounts would be the same as the report of the game, and this is because much of what they describe will have happened “off the ball” – running into spaces, making dummy runs, positioning themselves for a pass which did not come, and so on.

Further, the inter-relation between the individual events in these personal histories would be complex, and might only be apparent in retrospect. This is becoming more like a battle – radio commentators can make a very nice job of describing a live football match; commentating on a developing riot is a different challenge – it is impossible to identify the significant moments without knowing what is going to happen later – and there are too many balls in play at the same time.

Even if you can reconstruct everything that happened, and the timing, building a single, linear narrative of the whole thing is probably impossible, and we have already established that the individuals involved will have different recollections.

Considering my initial doubts, I seem – once again – to have expounded very little at great length. Last time we discussed this problem of tabletop time vs real time, we touched on the subject of Command Activation rules; one of the traditional things which go wrong in a wargame is that we waste an awful lot of time shunting all the units around, including the ones which aren’t actually doing anything. Activation rules are useful because they push you back to focusing on key areas, which removes a lot of the spaghetti from the Western.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waterloo at 1:100,000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compromise in Wargames - Adventures in Space, Time and Probability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commands & Colors - Keeping Things Nice

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I play a game in my head which I call "Memory Walks". In this game, you select a place you know fairly well - or, preferably, once knew well - and are comfortable with. I often use my grannie's house when I was a little boy - a house which, by the way, I haven't seen in 50 years. The technique is to move around the house in your imagination, remembering what was next to the fireplace in the kitchen, visualising the big clock next to the stairs, recalling the smell in the back kitchen (bacon and bleach), and so on. It gives the brain a low-stress workout, and it almost always gets me off to sleep by the second room or so.

The game also gives some insights into how times have changed, and things which were part of growing up and which I haven't thought about for a long time. In my grannie's house, the first door on the left inside the front door was almost always kept shut. It was The Parlour. Last bastion of working class gentility, it was only used at Christmas, or when someone very important visited (which, sadly, was a very short list - the man from Prudential Insurance, collecting his weekly pennies, maybe the occasional church minister). In theory, it was also available for laying out the deceased in times of family tragedy. I did go in there occasionally - probably when my grannie got tired of my prattling about nothing during the school holidays, and sent me to play the most out-of-tune piano I ever heard.

I was intrigued by the atmosphere of The Parlour - by the fact that the curtains were hung inside out so the neighbours could see the pattern, by the swordfish's nose on the wall (all Liverpool families had seafaring relatives), by the heavy-duty, embroidered antimacassars and arm protectors which covered the sofa and armchairs, and by the almost religious dedication to Keeping Things Nice. Nothing must be soiled, nothing must ever wear out or get broken.

Fast forward the film a couple of generations. That parlour sprung a far-flung family who still covered their best dining chairs with tea-towels, to stop them wearing, to Keep Them Nice. For what? For whom? What was the special occasion, who was the celebrity visitor they were being saved for? Did they ever arrive?

By this time we are no longer speaking of post-war austerity - this is just the way people were raised. I'm not in a position to mock, either - I am the man with a glass cupboard full of lovely soldiers which is fitted with blinds so that usually no-one can see them, in case the sun fades the flags.

Dice of Thunder - non-standard issue

And now my set of Commands and Colors has arrived, and of course I am pleased with it, yet slightly worried that some of the components may have a finite duty cycle. I have replaced the supplied dice with a better design, and varnished them carefully to preserve the surface of the stick-on symbols. I have now encased the playing cards (which are, to be honest, rather disappointingly flimsy) with clear plastic sleeves to protect them, and I am laughing out loud at myself. The cards are much tougher now, no doubt, and the sleeves are well made and exactly the correct size, but the cards are quite a lot thicker, and slippy, and handling them in bulk is a bit like trying to shuffle and deal After-Eight Mints. No doubt they will be fine, but I may just remove the sleeves again if I keep dropping the cards on the floor.

And all in the sacred cause of Keeping Things Nice, of making things last forever! At least Grannie would have been proud of me.

Change of subject. While we're on an OCD kick, I note that the rule book for Commands & Colors mentions that there will be a future expansion set to cover very large actions, to be titled La Grande Battle. Pardon? There it is again - the dreaded franglais étranglé. I keep coming across this in wargames. I guess it is because the history of warfare, by definition, keeps turning up the activities of nations who (rather inconveniently) did not speak English. It would be very easy to appear to be trying to be a smart-ass here, but if someone wishes to include some French to add authenticity, or even some romantic colour, it does seem worth the effort to get it right, or at least to avoid awkward mixtures.

I have long grown used to George Nafziger's reference to the 22nd Ligne and similar - in fact I probably do this myself - but what language, pray, is Guard du Corps? I'm also not completely comfortable with John C Candler's Miniature Wargames du Temps de Napoleon (though I am assured that the rules are excellent, and no disrespect to Mr Candler is intended). I recently obtained a copy of the 3rd edition of the Corps Command rules, and I find that one of the possible results of skirmish combat is termed Suave Que Puet. Why? - what's wrong with Run Away?

I can see there is a fair chance that someone will send a comment to take me down a peg or two, and I probably deserve it, but - come on, rule writers - Keep Things Nice!

Weather in Wargames

In my experience, weather is an important addition to wargames, but it is one of the most likely things to get forgotten about when you are trying to rally the troops one last time at about 2am, and it is certainly one of the most likely things to be dropped from the rules for big games.

Accordingly, I really only consider the weather in detail in computerised games – the old computer, he never forgets, he never gets tired. I’m sitting here this morning, happy that the last lot of snow has gone, but aware from the TV news that more is expected, so some mention of weather seems appropriate.

I have to apologise immediately for the fact that, since they are primarily intended for Summer campaigns in Spain, my weather rules, in their present form, do not cover snow or extreme temperature, neither do they allow for fog/mist (except by implication). Oh – and wind isn’t covered either. In fact, I’m becoming increasingly ashamed of the whole thing as I write.

So this is just an outline – food for thought, if you like. If you find the ideas interesting, I’m confident you can easily improve on what I do, or produce something more suitable for your own games. My weather rules are very much based in the scale and style of games I fight. For example, my main Napoleonic rules have 30-minute bounds and 200-pace hexes, and do not allow for formed musket volley fire – musketry is included in close combat, and the effect of weather on the combat rules reflects this. My MEP Grand Tactical variant will use the same set-up in its automated form, with some adjustment for the 1-hour bounds, the halved ground-scale and the simplified combat rules.

Although the implementation of these rules is on a computer, I shall attempt to illustrate them in the form of dice-throws.

My starting point is a simple, linear, numerical barometer which I think I originally adopted from Charlie Wesencraft (or it might have been Featherstone) about 40 years ago. You can use a cardboard track, or a homemade numbered pegboard – whatever you like. You start with a 2D6 throw to set the weather indicator (wr) – the detail of all this is set out in the attached note – 2 means that it’s fine, 12 that it’s bucketing down with rain.

There are 4 indicators, Weather, Visibility, Mud and Dampness. You’ll need to keep track of the time of day, and determine (at the outset) the official time of dusk, and you’ll need a pair of weather dice – just normal 6-sided dice, but different colours. I use a white one and a black – where necessary, the white counts as +ve and the black as –ve – in all that follows, w is the white dice score, and b the black one. At the end of each bound, roll the 2 weather dice once and adjust the indicators (note this is just a single roll of the 2 dice - eveything can be worked out from this one roll):

Weather (wr), which is the main sliding barometer – this is set initially by rolling the weather dice and adding them together (w + b) – thereafter it is moved up and down each bound – increase by 1 if w > b, decrease by 1 if w < b. If w = b then it stays the same.

Visibility (visi), is the number of hexagons at which units may be seen on the tabletop, and thus the limit of artillery fire. The distance at which Blinds may be spotted, and it which generals may influence the conduct and discipline of their troops is also limited by small values of visi. visi is calculated as (12 – wr), tweaked for the onset of dusk and given a minimum value of 1.

Mud (mud), which is another sliding scale, is initially set equal to b, and its subsequent change is driven by the current value of wr and the value of (w + b) each bound – progressively higher values of mud will limit artillery “bounce-through” for deep targets, prevent the use of movement bonuses, reduce movement rates for all troops, and ultimately prevent all movement of artillery and vehicles.

Dampness (damp) , is initially set to w, and subsequently changes in a manner very similar to mud. damp is a measure of the effect of wet weather on powder-dependent troops. At high values, it stops skirmish fire, reduces the combat effectiveness of infantry and, ultimately, also limits the effects of artillery fire.


At the outset, the start time is set, and the time of dusk (from a scenario, or whatever), and the initial values of wr, visi, mud and damp are set, as described. . If they agree to do so, the generals may request a re-throw, but they may only do this twice – after 2 recalculations they must accept the conditions as given.

The Grand Tactical Game - Clever but Not Useful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

The Grand Tactical Game - First Draft

With a bit of luck, you should find the first draft of MEP here.

If it looks surprisingly polished for a draft, that is illusory, and is entirely because it is a cut-&-stitch lash-up from the rules of my main game. This is very much "warts and all" at this stage - the Command section is missing, as are a few other bits and pieces - what is here is a collection of the main combat and morale mechanisms, plus movement rules.

In a few days I'll set out some examples of how combat and skirmishing work, with pictures, which should help things make a little more sense. Please bear in mind that this early version has not been written for publication - this is really just my own notes.

My PV points system gives a kind of amalgam of troop quality and numerical strength - it is, so to speak, an Effectiveness measure. When a Unit loses a point from its PV, it doesn't necessarily mean that a complete battalion has been wiped out, it just means that the Unit (brigade) is now a bit less effective than it was. If artillery fires on a Unit and does not cause any PV loss, it doesn't mean that they managed a complete miss - it simply means that the overall impact of the losses suffered and the loss of confidence has had very little effect.

If you do have a look at this lot, I hope you find it interesting, but please prepare to be underwhelmed at this stage. I will, of course, be pleased to receive any comments. In particular, if the download doesn't work, or you can't find or read the file, please let me know.

My intention is to update this draft as I incorporate changes and add missing bits, so the downloadable file will evolve with time (i.e. I'm not storing a version history online!).

The Grand Tactical Game - Ancestry

This started out as a reply to a comment from Pjotr, but there's enough in here to justify a separate entry, I think. This is just to try to explain what my kick-off point is, and what scope and limitations I wish to set myself. I find that if I think about something long enough then it becomes obvious to me what I'm talking about, and I find it surprising when everyone else just rolls their eyes - so maybe a brief scene-setting is a good idea!

The draft of my proposed "MEP" (grand tactical) rules is already pretty substantial, because I've been thinking about this for a while, but there are areas where the bits don't hang together too well yet. As a random example, it occurred to me just this morning that, since I am using alternate moves and the bounds are long (1 hour on the clock), I'd better have both sides firing artillery simultaneously at the end of each player's movement - similarly for skirmishers. This is different from my main Elan game, and comes about simply because, intuitively, an hour seems an awful long time for the non-moving side to sit without doing something hostile. That sort of thing keeps cropping up.

One big given is that, whatever I produce for MEP, it will have to fit with my existing Élan rules, and have to fit with them well enough to share army data on the computer and integrate with a single campaign system. This means that, to the guys who say to me, "Why are you messing around with your own rules? - you should just buy General de Brigade (or whatever)", I have to say that, in most cases, I have bought them. I buy rulesets regularly - mainly to borrow ideas. I haven't got enough time left to start all over again, and I am too old and sad to throw away the accumulated experience (and labour) of all those years. It doesn't mean these guys aren't right, of course!

I have read (though never played) the Polemos rules. Like most commercial sets, they are thorough - maybe too fiddly for me. The feeder games for my own rules are many and varied - I probably can't even remember where some bits come from! Most recent influences have been The Big Battalions (for combat mechanisms), Le Feu Sacre (mostly for the use of blinds and scouting), Grande Armee and it's Fast-Play offspring (for ideas on command rules and all sorts of things, but mainly for the realisation that rules don't have to be super-detailed to give sensible results) and, most recently, Howard Whitehouse's Old Trousers for general inspiration and for the elegant idea of having a single number associated with each unit which is used for everything. I have also, I must remember to mention, come up with the odd idea myself, but this collection and blending has been going on for so long that I now have difficulty sorting out where the ingredients came from.

It is possible that our favourite recipe for treacle scones is the one that Grandma got out of the Housewives' Friend in 1932, but it actually doesn't matter now - the recipe is just the one we use. This is too folksy to be one of Foy's formal laws, but it has the same sort of weary resonance!

In a week or so I'll start setting out some basic concepts and some of the mechanisms I have sketched out this far. I will - sincerely! - be very grateful for all views on them. If I can fathom how to use Google Docs without forcing everyone to have an account (or, alternatively, find some other file sharing service which will work reliably), I'll store the developing MEP draft in some form that you can download from the blog. As it shapes up, I hope it provides some interest and - at the very worst - it will give a collection of ideas that you might wish to avoid in your own games!

One final thought, before I forget - I am not a big fan of multiple morale tests, they can slow things down to a disastrous extent. I have a fond memory of my cousin (who, sadly, is no longer with us) one night at about 2am, after half a bottle of wine, slowly shaking a dice cup with a vacant grin on his face, trying vainly to remember which of the endless, bewildering stream of tests he had been about to carry out this time, and why. Having said this, I also must put in an apologetic reminder that the ultimate form of MEP is to be computerised, and the computer will happily slap a morale test on the end of any action you like, without any fatigue at all, though the players may get tired of being asked whether there is a general fighting with the unit, whether they are in cover, etc. The point is that sometimes a computerised game can handle stuff in the background which would be onerous otherwise.

The Grand Tactical Game - Preamble

The MEP Effect: a French brigade, with skirmishers, before and after Defence cuts.


I'm becoming conscious of the fact that this blog mostly consists of elderly reminiscences about how things were, or how I think they were, which is not necessarily the same thing. Since the subject matter is a hobby which I have been involved in for around 40 years, that is maybe understandable. However, I read many fine blogs which tell me what guys are thinking about this week, or doing at this actual moment (or, very commonly, not doing at this actual moment, and why). Intuitively, this seems more exciting - you know, reportage - I'm cutting the blue wire now - boom. Immediacy seems a natural state for a blog - sharing views, doing stuff. Right this minute.

Awesome.

Apart from oddities such as my fleeting views on bananas, there is not much of that in here. I feel that's a bit of a shortfall. I mean, it's not as if I'm not doing anything. So, if you can bear the excitement, I'd like to pull the wraps off something I'm working on at this very moment. Naturally I will be pleased to get advice and/or guidance - even abuse, if you must. I need to develop a decent grand-tactical variant of my in-house Napoleonic rules, to handle battles which are too big to work well with the current version. Then, once they are working and reliable, I need to get them (like the main game), programmed on to my computer, but the first step is to get them drafted out in a dice-&-paper version for play-testing.

That's it. If, at this point, you feel a little disappointed in my choice of exciting development, I can only say that it's the best I can do at the moment, and in any case I really do need these new rules, so there is an element of immediacy, if only by implication.

Foy's Fifth Law states:

If something bogs your battles down, then automate it or simplify it or get rid of it.

My rules are called Élan. They occasionally get a radical revision, but otherwise have been evolving for many years. The problem with Élan, the thing which gets me bogged down at present, is if the games get too big. This is a bit of a sore point, because the rules were specifically designed to work well with large battles. The use of the computer greatly eases the record keeping and keeps the turn sequence ticking along, and the game mechanisms have been tuned and rationalised to run quickly. There are two chief areas where the size problem shows up:

Firstly, and the less important one - the time taken to deploy and fight a unit may not be very much, but if there are a lot of units then it all adds up. You can have multiple players, which does help, but often my games are solo.

Far more seriously, on the current ground scale, unit frontages are correct, but the depths of the units are well out of scale. A battalion in column looks very nice, but it takes up far too much space, front-to-back. When the reserves come on, everything can grind to a halt because there is no room to manoeuvre.

As it is, Élan works fine up to maybe 20 battalions a side plus cavalry plus etc etc. At that point major traffic jams can set in, especially if the terrain is hilly. OK - easy - keep the battle smaller. Well, that's a bit of a heavy constraint. Particularly so since quite a lot of my games come from campaigns, and it seems unreasonable to outlaw battles over a certain size just because the rules and the available table can't cope. The Emperor wouldn’t care for that.

It would be possible to use a bigger table - I have a fantasy about putting a 30 foot x 8 foot table in a marquee in the garden, but at that point we are probably getting silly. I also have a rather worrying thought that the neighbours might catch glimpses of me fighting a solo action in such a setting. Hmmm. Another solution is needed.

No, I believe the answer is just to have an alternate set of rules which allows bigger actions. I have a preliminary sketch for a big-battle variant which is provisionally titled Élan MEP. Reluctantly, I have to admit that MEP comes from "moins est plus", which started life as a joke. As sketched out, MEP uses double the bound length (one hour of real time), double the ground scale (one hex becomes 500 paces, or a quarter of a mile) and FOUR times the figures scale (which means that a 750-man battalion will be a single 6-figure base rather than a formation of 4 such bases). The effect of this is that a brigade, instead of being a collection of battalions each of which occupies a hex on the battlefield, will occupy a single hex in total.

Much of the tactical deployment will be simplified, and thus some rules will have no place in the new game. For example, Élan’s fixation with unit formations will largely disappear. I have a feeling that it will still be necessary to be able to place an infantry brigade in square(s) for special occasions, but otherwise we should assume that the brigade commanders (who will no longer appear on the table) will look after battalion formations and all that. Once again, the game is getting more and more like a boardgame, but that is what happens as your helicopter-view gets higher and higher - the individual soldiers become less significant.

When I started thinking about this, I was quite excited to realise that I could, at last, do a re-fight of Salamanca if the big game works properly. Why on earth I would choose to do this, and what it would prove if I did, I haven't thought through yet. But the idea that I could if I wanted to was strangely appealing.

That's really all I want to say about this at present. I am hoping that the rules from Élan which deal with command, weather, concealment, army morale and a few other things will just drop into the new game with some minor tweaks in the arithmetic. Other bits will be trickier - my guess is that some of the nippier elements will be decisions about stuff to leave out. I have a strong fancy for borrowing some of the combat and morale mechanisms from Howard Whitehouse's Old Trousers game, which is elegant and, most importantly, simple. Anyway, you get the idea. More of this another time.

Playing at War - Part 4 - Hexes & Heresies

This will be the last in this mini-series of posts on my protracted ramble through the jungle of wargames rules. I intend to do something soon on my use of computers in miniatures wargaming - which may well alienate anyone who has not already taken exception to my use of hexes! - and I'll try to blog my progress with the development of the grand-tactical version of my game, which is in something like a beta-test state at present.

Hexes. Over the years I have often been surprised at the amount of adverse reaction they have generated. Not by people taking part in the games, more as a point of principle. I guess hexes may seem a little inconsistent with the otherwise Old School appearance of my battles, but in fact they are not that big a deal - the underlying game is still recognisable, though there are two important aspects which come directly from the use of the big hexes, which I shall attempt to describe. Bear in mind throughout this that I am always looking to fight pretty large battles - much of what follows would not make sense for a skirmish or very detailed tactical game.

If you are interested and you can get hold of a copy, I recommend you have a good look at Doc Monaghan's The Big Battalions Napoleonic rule book, which came out of the Guernsey Wargames Group. The rules are out of print now, I think - I have the 2nd edition, dated 2000. In parts they are themselves recognisably related to the TooFatLardies' Le Feu Sacré, which is no bad thing, but one central innovation (to me, at least) is the use of "Bands" to measure all distances. Bands can be changed to suit the size of figures, and also to suit the scale of the action. A band on the tabletop represents 250 paces - for 6mm-10mm figures, this is 3 inches; for 12mm-15mm it is 4 inches; for 20mm-25mm it is 6 inches. These measurements are all halved for very big battles. The bands introduce a sort of granularity into all measurement in the game - everything is expressed in terms of bands, so ranges and moves are rounded to the nearer band. This is not really so revolutionary - your own tabletop games will have everything rounded to the centimetre or inch, so there is an implied granularity already. If you think about it, the further step of drawing formal hexagons around the band-sized spaces changes very little. Doc Monaghan's son, the historian Jason Monaghan, described Big Battalions to me as being "a hex game with invisible hexes".

One area in which boardgames score heavily is speed of play. I have seen too many tabletop games where the movement was so slow that the players could hardly remember where they were up to or what they had been intending to do. The time-and-motion realism nerds in the 1980s broke their games down into short turns (sometimes as little as 30-seconds of "clock" time), so 2cm moves were not unknown, and we had the slightly embarrassing conundrum that a complete evening of labouring away at Quatre Bras or similar might actually be found to have ground through a grand total of 10 minutes of real time. Now, apart from the fact that I find 2cm moves tedious in the extreme (and this is, you will recall, all just my personal view), most self-respecting wargamers of my acquaintance are likely to fudge the moves in their favour by a little, and this "scentific error" margin is likely to be of the order of 2cm anyway, so you'd better have an umpire and a team of checkers handy! My big hexes remove this problem immediately.

Next - in my game, the hexes are assumed to be 200 paces across. Since the maximum effective range of muskets was rather less than this (and since officers normally forbade long range fire as a wasteful and disruptive distraction), this means that infantry can only fire into the next hex, and not very far into it, either. In common with Big Battalions and Sam Mustafa's excellent Grande Armée (and its Fast Play Grande Armée variant), I have taken the heretical step of making volley fire part of the Close Combat phase of my game, so it does not appear as a separate element. Artillery can fire, as can skirmishers, but actual formed musket volleys are simply abstracted as one of the unpleasant things that formed bodies of troops could do to each other when they got close enough to fight (or run away, as they frequently did). Yes, this is boardgame-like, and does represent a total lack of respect for the traditional Move-Missiles-Melee framework that is central to the Old School approach, but it doesn't actually change the game very much, apart from speeding it up - oh, and also removing the problem of deciding exactly when and how often in a bound the troops can fire. The combat effectiveness of troop formations in my rules reflects the amount of fire they can bring to bear, so that, for example, a battalion in line gains an advantage in combat for its greater firepower (especially when it is defending) - an advantage which can be reduced dramatically in wet weather, by the way.

Having reached this topic of using a gridded terrain in a tabletop game, there is one important development which is coming soon and which I'd like to mention briefly. Part of the perceived resistance to hexagons in tabletop games comes, I think, because it blurs what has become a potentially emotive divide between boardgame players and miniatures enthusiasts. I don't see why there have to be camps, but camps there appear to be. GMT Games are very successful market leaders in board wargame publication, and one of their biggest selling games is Commands & Colors: Ancients, which has many enthusiastic fans. Because of the form of the game, quite a few people use miniatures instead of the supplied unit blocks. Now this is getting really blurred - so much so that one poor soul in one of the GMT fora said "blocks are elegant and miniatures are for children - if the game was sold with miniatures I wouldn't buy it". So there! - rather sweet, actually.

GMT have been threatening to launch Commands & Colors: Napoleonics for some time, against a background of considerable excitement - and quite rightly so - it will surely be a splendid game. I understand that they are now hoping to issue it in November. There will certainly be many who wish to use it with miniatures, and I believe that this could be a significant moment in the development of our hobby - invaluable cross-pollination between boardgames and tabletop games, and - maybe - the widespread adoption of a handsome, tick-tock, best-of-both-worlds game of exactly the type I have been promoting for years. There are a couple of nice recent postings on the forthcoming game in one of my favourite blogs, Joy and Forgetfulness, which set out what one miniatures wargamer expects it to be like.

So - before I end - don't be too fixed in your ideas about hexagon-gridded miniatures games - in a couple of months you may be the only kid on the block who doesn't have them!

Having reached this stage, I propose to slow down the rate of publishing of posts on this blog. In my enthusiasm to get the thing going, I have been keen to create a solid foundation of material for people to have a look at, and also to attempt to give an idea of the style and range of subjects I hope to cover. If you have read any or all of what I have done to date then I offer my best wishes - if you like any of it, or even if you disagree, please do drop me a comment - I am always delighted to get them. I will continue to introduce new posts, hopefully at a rate of one or two a week, rather than the faintly hysterical stream of consciousness which I've produced to date!