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...

Acknowledgements

I'd like to express my appreciation and sincere thanks for a couple of additional nominations for my blog award.

To Fabrizio, whose lovely Torgau Project blog is a favourite of mine, and has often made me think wild thoughts about starting all over again, and doing 6mm instead...

...and to the legendary Conrad Kinch, the worthy proprietor at Joy and Forgetfulness, which is always intriguing, always full of surprises and delightfully off-beat.

Thank you, gentlemen, for the work and good taste you commit to your fine blogs and the pleasure which they bring.

Prof Richard Holmes

I'm really very sorry to learn that Prof Richard Holmes, the military historian and TV presenter, has died at the age of 65. I did not know him, and never met him, but feel I knew something of him from his excellent books.

Hooptedoodle #23 - Dandelions, What Dandelions?

I knew it would happen. If I lived long enough, we would eventually buy a gadget that works.

With all this focus on blog awards and suchlike (well, not focus, exactly) I am once again aware that the one thing this blog is short of is stuff which is actually useful. Well today I am going to make up for that.

I have a friend who emails me regularly and says things like "I enjoyed the posting, but why on earth did you write it?". He also once described one of my posts (the one about bananas, in fact) as "an exercise in pointlessness", a judgement with which I cannot find fault, to be honest.

Anyway - a new world is here - if this works OK, I may start a series of domestic tips of the week - useful things like "how to get bloodstains out of a clown suit".

If, like me, you regard gardening as one of a number of things which take up time which could be spent with your toy soldiers, keep reading.
If, like me, you spend some time each week wondering just how the description "low maintenance" applies to your garden, keep reading.
If you have ever bought a patent gadget to make gardening easier, keep reading - especially if it turned out to be crap.
If you hate dandelions in your lawn (though you might like one if you met it socially), keep reading.

Gentlemen - I have bought a dandelion remover. This is not an advert - I am simply so overjoyed that I am sharing some news with you. The device is made in Finland, and is marketed under the trade name Fiskars. And it works. Mme Foy bought it for me, and it works.

I have a long, unhappy history with dandelions - I have sprayed them with all sorts of stuff, dug them up - no good, they come back stronger. In sunny weather, you can hear them laughing. Well, no longer. This new toy is well made, simple to use, and reliably pulls them up - as often as not with a complete tap root you could just about boil up for soup.

Wholeheartedly recommended - don't say I haven't got your interests at heart. If you want to see a demo - click here.

Blog Award Nominations - pass it on!

I'm really very pleased to get a nomination - thanks very much to Ross, whose Battle Game of the Month blog is compulsory reading for me – the new stuff and the comments. Until yesterday, I was unaware that this sort of award thing went on, but am very pleased if someone finds my burblings interesting.

As I understand it, a nominee who accepts is obliged to do a number of things:



(1) Thank the nominating blog(s) and link back to it/them
(2) Share seven things about myself
(3) Nominate more blogs which you think deserve it
(4) Tell the people you nominate (and explain what it means!)

There is definite uncertainty about point (3). The number varies a lot - I've seen 4, 5, 7 and even 15. I'm nervous of chain-letter arithmetic - if we really go for 15, everyone on the planet will have several awards by mid-May, so I've gone for seven, which seems more than enough. I tried to go for blogs which I read regularly, and to avoid those which have obviously been nominated elsewhere. To the people I forgot to include, as well as those I included who may not appreciate it, my apologies.

As part of my research I found myself briefly in the world of chic-lit blogs, hair products blogs, lip gloss blogs, kids' parties blogs, pet grooming blogs, and weight loss club blogs. Wow. Interesting, but a bit too much like bl--dy Facebook for me - a lot of this stuff is terminally cute - as one who gets a nominal 1/2-meg of rural broadband when the wind is in the right direction, I am left gasping at the time and effort involved. However - pots and kettles...

Seven things about myself:

(1) I was born in Liverpool, but have lived most of my life in Scotland. I attended the same grammar school in Liverpool as John Lennon (though he was long gone before I got there).
(2) Between leaving university and taking early retirement a few years ago, I worked for just one firm. It may not sound very exciting, but it’s OK when they are working out the redundancy packages!
(3) I have 4 sons - my 3 sons from my first marriage are grown up now, and my youngest son is 8. Correction – he tells me he is 8½, and that ½ is significant when you're 8. Sorry, 8½.
(4) For many years I’ve been a semi-pro musician – mostly blues and jazz groups (though I’m less busy in that area these days) – and I’ve been lucky enough to travel fairly widely through music. One of my older sons plays professionally – he is currently touring Europe with North Atlantic Oscillation, who are worth checking out (skip the ad at the start of the YouTube clip).
(5) I live on a farm about 40 miles east of Edinburgh, right on the coast. No, I am not a farmer – they have to get up too early and work far too hard for me.
(6) I am appalled by how uninteresting these things seem as I type them. Somebody (Woody Allen?) once said that he was terrified of drowning, because he knew that as his life passed before him he would realise how boring it was. That rings a bell. Would it be all right if I wrote about someone else?
(7) In addition to being a soldier collector and wargamer who has become disenchanted with painting, I am also a keen hill-walker, though I am terrified of heights. Is it possible to get counselling on choice of hobbies?

My victims/nominees – this is difficult – I’ve excluded blogs which I know have already been nominated, so if you’re not listed here, there’s no stigma! There’s no implied order here:

(1) I’m very partial to Unfashionably Shiny, largely because it’s a good, no-nonsense blog with plenty of good pictures of great soldiers.
(2) The same is true of Stryker’s excellent Hinton Hunt Vintage Wargame Figures
(3) I thought seriously of nominating two of Clive’s blogs, but since that seemed a bit like victimisation I opted for The Hinton Hunter because it is such a valuable resource, such a terrific labour of love. This, to me, is an example of blogs at their most useful. Clive also has told me that he tries to keep his opinions out of the blog, to keep it factual. I am so impressed by this, and so completely unable to do the same, that this in itself may be worth the nomination.
(4) Small Scale World – always something different, and it’s an interesting presentation of a subject area I know very little about. And the rants are always good value, too.
(5) Miguel Angel Martin Mas’ blog – because it’s invariably interesting, and he keeps the posts short enough to give me a chance to try out my vestigial grasp of Spanish
(6) Project Leipzig (1813) – great blog, Rafa – so many good things and so much information
(7) Illustration Art – something completely different – beautiful and informative – always interesting and entertaining

I’ll set about sending comments to all these, to give them the good news...

My sincere thanks to the authors of these, and all the many other blogs I enjoy; I came into this blogging business pretty cynical, and it has been a revelation. Thanks, guys.

Hooptedoodle #22 - Mann Overboard - Vandalism on a Grand Scale

A short Easter break with my family gave a chance for a rare visit to Liverpool, my birthplace. The weather was good and we had a very enjoyable trip. Like all lost souls, each time I go back I am surprised by the amount of change, but I have no real axes to grind, the city is much more prosperous than it used to be, and I can take it all with an open mind.

This time I got to see the new buildings which are going up at Mann Island, in the Pier Head area of the city, and I am really not very enthusiastic at all. Whether or not you care for Liverpool, it does have a vitality and a bustling, cosmopolitan feel which befits its traditions as a seaport. It even has beauty. The "Three Graces" - the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the old Dock Office buildings - are now clean and refurbished and rightly occupy centre stage in what may be the most widely recognised waterfront view in the world. But they have a new neighbour – an asymmetrical monstrosity of black glass which I would consider, at best, ill judged. The strange shape is supposed to represent the bow of a ship, an idea which is interesting for maybe 15 seconds, but the structure is not at all in keeping with its surroundings, and completely obscures the famous view of the Pier Head from the Albert Dock area to the south.

Liverpool's Pier Head

Mann Island - no, it isn't a practical joke...

I tried very hard to see some merit in this addition, but regret that – like the majority of the locals – I can only see it as a blot. It feels, somehow, like a deliberate defacement of the traditional image of the city. I started wondering idly about why someone might wish to do this.

Liverpool has become many things it did not used to be. For one thing, it has become extremely contrite, and not before time. The wealth of Georgian and Victorian Liverpool was largely based on the unspeakable triangular trade which its merchants plied. Ships loaded with beads and copper trinkets would sail to the west coast of Africa and the Goree, where the goods would be exchanged for slaves, who would be shipped across the Atlantic to the plantations of the New World. The ships would return home filled with cotton, sugar and tobacco from America and from the Caribbean, and round they would go again. It’s appalling, but it’s true. In recent years the city has made a very public attempt to present an honest appraisal of its historic role in slavery – the top floor of the Maritime Museum is now given over to a permanent exhibition of the subject. It’s a heartrending experience, but well worth a visit. I do not doubt the sincerity of this effort, but there is an inevitable whiff of PR there as well. A proposal was made recently in the city council to rename a number of streets which commemorate prominent local families and individuals who profited from (or were otherwise connected with) slavery – the Tarletons, the Newtons, the Tates and so on. It was realised that this would require Penny Lane, no less, to be renamed. Since a great many cash-bearing tourists would be disappointed by its disappearance, the project was shelved.

It is obviously difficult to be selective about which bits of your history you wish to admit to. Liverpool has to come to terms with what it has been and what that means in the modern world. In my idle way, I wondered whether self-mutilation – deliberately spoiling the famous landmarks of the mercantile tradition – was part of all this.

You can’t blame the architects. Architects will always dream up something new and different – why, even the Liver Building might have been considered inappropriate when it was designed. It’s the planners. If you tell an architect not to be silly, he will generally go away and happily come up with something else – that’s what he does for a living. No – some weasel on a committee somewhere is delighted that he has earned a little immortality by achieving what the Luftwaffe failed to do in 1941 – he has destroyed the city’s waterfront.

No doubt I shall get used to the results, like everyone else. It would not surprise me if the new Mann Island building is demolished long before the Three Graces – it may even fall down, who knows? In the meantime, if some lunatic wishes to put up a large, 3D version of a child’s drawing in front of the Sacre Coeur, or the Rialto Bridge, or the Taj Mahal, see if you can talk him out of it, will you? We have to look after what we’ve got.