The Continued Recollections of a Wargamer or Nostalgia Ain’t What it Used to Be

I mentioned last time round probably to no one but my reader and myself, how I’d built up a SYW Prussian army in Minifigs 25mm (as small group of school mates variously built up French, Austrian and Russian forces. Minifigs at that time (late 70s) were not the greatest of models. Apart from being on the chunky side. They were not just an extra 5mm taller than Airfix but twice as wide and ‘deep’. Other failings were inaccuracies, anachronisms and idiosyncrasies in the figures. The Prussian heavy cavalry hats were arguably a bit too late for the SYW, but passable. ‘Hungarian Fusileers’ had uniforms and hats that were about 2 decades too late (I don’t know the correct name but they look a bit like short Belgic shakos without the peak; and I cannot find any pictures of said articles). Prussian cuirassiers and Austrian dragoons were modelled holding their carbines, when most authorities at the time emphasised action with the sword  in anything but outpost duty. I’m sure ‘button counters’ can find many other faults. However, they were readily available and served us well at the time - remember there was none of this t’internet business in those days and penniless 15 year olds were not apt to ‘waste’ money on catalogues (printed/typed price lists) when they could pop into a shop in town.

At some point in the 80s I bought a publication called A Book of Sandhurst Wargames by Paddy Griffith.

 Front cover

 Contents page

Back cover showing maps and game pieces

It consisted of 3 boardgames and an RPG (Roll-Playing Game not Rocket-Propelled Grenade. Obviously). I haven’t re-read it for many years and I seem to have lost the maps and counters. I must re-read it because in the back of my head I feel it was somehow influential on me, but I can’t remember exactly how. Oh and I bought this when it was (re-)published in the mid-80s by Bill Leeson:

It only held an interest for me in the part it played in the history of our hobby. I found it of little practical interest beyond its use as a source of data like movement rates.

As time moved on (mid-80s), I’d left the delights of South Humberside’s premier coastal resort and became 'spacially challenged' for a few years while I attempted to join the booming property market in the capital’s outer suburbs. I sold the Minifigs and re-invested the proceeds in H&R and Irregular 6mm SYW ranges. By then Miniature Wargames had been going a few years and Wargames Illustrated had joined the 80s glossy mag market. I devoured them both avidly, and Practical Wargamer too when it came along. I’d had the Morschauser article in the back of my mind and other articles in MW introduced me to the idea of ‘Strength Points’ (SPs) with single base units. SPs were, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, a way of combining size of unit with unit quality (training, morale, experience etc). They could be used as die roll modifiers in modelling combat. An idea I think borrowed from board wargames.

Never being a great originator of new ideas, but a shameless adapter, I latched onto the idea as the basis for a new set of rules I wanted to write. There didn’t seem to be any real grand tactical rules around for the Seven Years War - everything I saw and read about commercial sets involved some sort of figure or sub-unit base removal, and usually formation changes, despite claims that they were for war in the grand manner. I wanted to get to the point where I could at least game something the size of Lobositz (30ish thousand a side) which meant a ground scale in the region of 100 paces to the inch (25mm). So I got writing and eventually went along to SELWG one evening with my toys and found a willing victim to try it out on. That taught me a valuable lesson in play testing. The rules basically totted up the combined SP of any units in contact in a combat, adjusted based on tactical factors, and added a dice throw. What I hadn’t thought of was the decidedly un-Frederician tactic of building up a mass by having deep formations adding SPs to the combat. I felt like the Ancien Regime commanders must have felt like when their battalions in the effete sounding ordre mince faced the hordes of Revolutionary France in l’ordre profond.

The rules got adjusted accordingly, but I somehow never managed to fit in return visits to SELWG. It was a faff and a half to get to after work, and then get home. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Real Life also intruded in other ways - I was still ambitious in those days and I had a wife at least as ambitious. Long work days, including some weekends, and domestic responsibilities took precedence, even before having kids. I managed a few solo games in the partially converted loft of the house we moved into in the mid-90s (it seemed expensive then but I could cry when I think what I had to pay for a run down house in a less desirable street nearby, a few years ago). The rules were gradually honed. I borrowed the idea of using playing cards to generate an element of randomness in the order in which units were activated. A small sized set of cards from a Christmas cracker came in very handy.

Units were foot battalions, 3 cavalry squadrons or a company of heavy artillery (battalion guns being considered ‘factored’ in to the infantry SP). Frontages were 50mm (200 paces). Bases could be any shape and I was able to create various dioramas or tableaux with units. Combat was engaged in when opposing units of cavalry or infantry came within 200 paces of each other. At this range cavalry were assumed to be committed to charging and infantry engaged in a fire fight and advance with the bayonet. Artillery, obviously, engaged in ranged combat and could degrade enemy units’ SP before they got to combat range.

Provision was made for hidden movement - never really tested or testable in the solo environment. The idea was to use blocks to represent columns of troops, as range decreased these could be rotated to show troop type (cavalry/infantry), then later specific categories (e.g. cuirassier/dragoons/hussars) then actual strength (models replaced the blocks).

Next came Command and Control. There had been discussion of the issue in a number of magazine articles in the 80s/90s and the idea of Initiative Ratings for generals came up. I think I got the idea from Koenig Krieg. In fact I’m pretty certain. A now lost version of my rules had basically the same table of Initiative Ratings as used in KK for named historical figures. The way I used these were to get units to perform a certain action, be it initiate movement, assault the enemy or change direction, a simple dice test had to be passed whereby the dice throw had to be below the Initiative Rating (IR) of the force’s commander. In fact there had to be 3 levels of general in an unbroken chain of command from brigade to commander in chief or penalties were incurred. ‘Unbroken’ meaning that units had to be within a command radius of their brigade commander, he in turn had to be within a command radius of his column commander, who in turn had to be within range of his C-in-C. If the chain was only partially complete, the combined IR was therefore lower and the test was harder to pass. Simple and effective in principle, but it required a bit of tweaking of IRs and/or type of die used to get the balance right. [The following text in blue is a new addition to explain a little more about my thinking.] The idea was that the player was nominally the C-in-C, so formations lower down couldn't be expected to act as the player wished without there being the ability to communicate (command radius being the proxy) with subordinates. It wasn't impossible for formations to act on their own initiative but it was a lot harder, unless the subordinate had the coup d'oeuil of a Seydlitz. 

The thinking that underlay this was that disciplined military formations (particularly) in the linear period would follow instructions (if they understood them) and would continue to follow them until something made them stop following them. Those 'things' could be combat with an enemy that stopped them, the attainment of an objective (what next?), new orders (successfully delivered and understood), or different circumstances noticed by the local commander who saw the need to do something different AND he was willing to use his initiative. In less centralised armies than the Prussians, say, aristocratic rivalry might cause nominal subordinates to show less willingness to follow the original script.

Then Real Life took over. Big time. 2 small children and divorce straddled the old and new millennia. Time, space and budgets were massively impacted, to say nothing of the emotional fallout. The new Frau* Nundanket came along, followed a few short years afterwards by the new Misses Nundanket, so even less space and even less disposable income.  Around about this time I re-established regular contact with Old School Tony
* or I should say Rouva Nundanket. 

Tony had discovered Baccus and Polemos in his self-enforced exile from the Mother Country. He started building up forces of French and (if I recall correctly) Russian Napoleonics based for General de Division and Marechal de l’Empire (‘GDD’ and ‘MDE’).  I tried a game on a trip home and was hooked! This was the basis for my next few years wargaming. Helped in no small measure by his purchase of a house-warming present of a British Peninsular War starter army, ready painted and based, for my impending move back up North. A move that never came off (too good to be true - same income as I was on in London but with the ability to go to bed every night in the DN35 postcode area!). We played the Talavera and Austerlitz scenarios from the Polemos scenario book and later Zorndorf using my home-brewed rules described above. The SYW game went OK but the rules lacked something. The obvious answer was there on Tony's bookshelf. There being no Polemos SYW ruleset at that time (around 2010) I set about adapting MDE to the mid-eighteenth century. And my cardboard bases were somewhat lacking too next to his beautifully finished MDF bases. A mass re-basing followed, including a tweak to the ground scale, and a refresh on the paintjob of my H&Rs (some of which were over 20 years old by then). In my new found enthusiasm, I also painted and based to a decent standard a fair amount of Baccus Spanish and Portuguese, and a couple of corps worth of late Napoleonic Prussians (for my son who I'd suckered nurtured into being a historical wargamer). As well as the Polemos-style grand tactical rule-rehash, in my continued obsession with things Frederician, I dabbled in rules for everything from campaign, to siege, operational, to battalion-level** actions.

** as in a battalion's part in line of battle rather than a skirmish.

Nearly there now. Just a major re-hash, ditching of the Polemos MDE framework for my SYW rules to follow before I get to the ECW and the last few years!