What is your favorite colour?

I've now reached the really hard bit, making a decision on how to approach the rules for this game. What sort of game do I want to play? Am I comfortable with my answer? Why? Why not?

There is no right answer to these questions anymore than there is a right answer to the favorite colour question other than it being an honest answer. Luckily there is no suspension bridge involved in this quest.

The Jaeger officer now has something approximating very roughly to a matching hat so that priming may begin. This picture nearly resulted in my tablet being smashed into little frustrated bits when it refused to acknowledge the presence of the picture file for editing or posting although it would show under Bluetooth in the file app. GRRRRR. I finally posted it from my smartphone without cropping but with firceful application of the Blue Air app.

The initial steps were easy enough, I wanted a simple, fast playing game of toy soldiers which would call to mind warfare of the early 20th Century without getting bogged down in detail. I did not want a game  that attempted to replicate the experience of captains and privates, showed the details of their tactics or attempted to to inflict on a player a sense of the alternating terror and boredom of being pinned down under fire for hours on a hot summer day. I wanted the player to take the role of a Brigadier, or possibly a division commander, trying to achieve a mission with the resources at his disposal while pitting wits against his game opponent.

It didn't take long to hit two snags: lack of information and a conflict with past gaming experience and expectations.

Memoirs and histories giving the  Brigade commander's view aren't common but for the Horse and Musket period they aren't that rare. Memoirs at this level often have a poitical purpose but are still useful if taken with salt. The American Civil war is particularly rich with them. The smaller wars of the period also provide many important battles at this low level which have had books devoted to them, battles that would be dismissed with a sentence if they were part of a larger campaign. I am sure some memoirs at this level must exist for the Boer War and Great War but I have yet to lay hands on them as opposed to the view point of privates and junior officers. I have tracked down  a few sketchy histories of smaller battles which were part of a larger one but not any in great depth as yet. There is good coverage of the larger battles from which subportions can be extracted but there the choices available to a Brigadier are too limited to be the basis of the sort of game I want so as so often I will focus on the sideshows and special cases and enjoy the hunt for information at a leisurely pace. Having decided that I have enough of a picture to proceed  I have run smack dab into a wall of prior expectations about how modern games should be handled on the table top.

One of the first things that one learns about modern war is that troops under fire are often pinned down. There seem to be 2 main methods of portraying this in a wargame, having it as a combat result or as the result of a failed morale test after suffering casualties. The trick with the latter method is it while troops were sometimes caught and suffered heavy casualties before being pinned, it seems very common that troops that came under fire took cover before heavy casualties were suffered but were pinned by the fear of what would happen if they left their cover.  The method of having some form of Pin or Suppression as a combat result works well enough except that it often mirrors life too well with players rolling turn after turn to rally only to be pinned again as soon as they do. At Magerfontein some British troops were pinned down for hours, not taking heavy casualties (until they retreated) but unable to advance. That's not a game that I am eager to play.

It occurred to me belatedly that this emphasis on showing the pins is as a result of a focus on small units and individuals. In the days before widespread wireless comms, the Brigadier  would be unlikely to know the status of individual companies. He would be lucky to know if the objective had been taken yet or if he needed to commit reserves.  Oddly enough some early war games by veterans seem to have relied largely on the morale or wisdom of a player afraid to push his figures into certain death to dimulate this.

When I first played Memoir and Battlecry it bugged me that units could be forced to retreat without casualties (ie morale failure in old terms on the surface) but there was no pin effect. Putting my less literal hat on and looking at the high level effect of this game mechanic I can see that the effect is actually reasonable.  A unit under fire may be unable to advance on the target or hold an objective even if it doesn't take heavy casualties or it may take casualties or both, or if might push on and take the objective. We see game mechanics and the result, not really the details of what really happened or how it happened and thats without looking at the effect and fuzzy meaning of the cards. That Borg fellow is pretty smart when you come right down to it.

There are other issues but this is long enough and the point is that after serious consideration,  fiddling and experimenting with various old school and middle school methods, I'm going to stick with an updated version of the Square brigadier after all.

Tin Plate Castles in the Air

Ok the title is just an excuse to include part of my first toy castle in a picture after having seen Bob's old castle re emerge from storage.

The newest unit rolls past my old tin plate castle with 1 of the 30mm knights I got at the same time. The crew and horses are Zinnbrigade, the gun is a Crescent 18pdr and the limber is a modified Prince August 18thC limber. I was tempted to leave the seated gunner loose and paint more for travel mode but my ecperiences with the FTC rocket troop dissuaded me.

The real point is that, while preparing an old Crescent 18pdr for repainting in grey, it occurred to me that my recent enthusiasm for WWI figures and books  and plan for a Centenary Homage game may have unintentionally given the impression that I might be on the cusp of reverting to being a bona fide historical miniature wargamer. Let me assure everyone that this is not the case, I remain a proponant of the Little Wars approach. Not the specific bit about shooting toy cannons but the general approach of studying history but playing a game with fictional armies of toy soldiers.

The gun in action.

Some Scruby Jaegers are up next.

Less is More and Bigger is Better

Don't you hate it when clichés apply?

But before I begin, thank you all for the various book suggestions but a special thank you to Mad Padre Mike for suggesting Walter Bloem's The Advance from Mons 1914. This is my favorite sort of military history, an eye witness account by an observent, thinking  person who knows his business and knows how to write.  In this case he uses his skill as a prize winning novelist and playwright to give a real sense of the emotions and motivations of men as well as relating the what and how. At least one of his prewar Franco Prussian War novels was translated into English but it looks like it will take more than a casual search to turn up a copy. I suspect his post war politics may have discouraged interest in his work but I have nothing but praise for this book which repeatedly distracted me from work and play alike from downloading to completion.  Highly recommended.

Other books downloaded and scanned/ spot read but not yet studied are a battlefield guide to Mons with some very detailed maps and  Spencer Jones book on the development of British tactics.

After reading Jones' chapter on infantry tactics, about 1/2 of the battlefield guide and Bloem's book I'm feeling much more comfortable about my understanding of the battlefield and tactical aspects of the early war, which is to say everything so far has confirmed and backed up what I already thought. I've also realized that I've read more than I remembered as  various snippets of books read long ago resurfaced to my consciousness.

The new Brigade General steps down from his captured Renault to address the Hussars who have escorted him here. At the same time he looks around  and contemplates how crowded his units are.

Unfortunately, all this has confirmed my initial impression that I need to make some adjustments on the tabletop.  I had been planning to work up to a Brigade attack on a grid of 15 x 18 squares, say 100 figures vs 50. Sitting down to cross reference rules with table I find that that as it stands the table would represent an area of 4-5 km wide by 3-4 km deep. OK for a brigade in the 2nd part of the Boer War but a suitable front for a divisional attack in 1914 or the first part of the Boer War.

To resolve this, there were 3 main options: increase the scope of the game to a Divisional action, change the scale to 100 yds per square making units into sections or platoons, or use fewer grid squares.

If I had gone with my initial impulse to make use of the many excellent 1/72 figures now available, both of the 1st two options would have been attractive. The 2nd option being ripe for a conventional wargame with 100's of figures on modular model railroad terrain. But I didn't take that route which is lucky for me because I hate doing model terrain and the approach has already been done by many, most of whom have done a better job than I would. Either option would work with my 40's so the deciding factor was that I don't really want to paint double or triple the numbers of the same figures or play longer games. I'd rather branch out into other campaigns and armies.

So that left a reduction of the number of grid squares either by using bigger squares or by playing on one corner of the board. It seems a bit odd to plan to use only about 1/3 of the table for 90% of games but it would leave my options open.

There is another issue to look at though, the look of the thing. Put simply, 4" squares are a tight squeeze for 40mm figures, especially when terrain is added although this could be eased by using semiflat trees and houses like the ruined corners that came with my Marx Over The Top mini-playset (or as featured on the Major General's site). Its next to impossible though to fit a limber in a 4" square even if using 2 squares per limbered battery or to fit my boats or most of my houses. Last night I broke out some of the various scraps of gridded cloth table mats  from my experiments over the last 4 years. This allowed me to compare the fit of troops and terrrain on 4", 5" and 6" squares. In the end the best one was the one I did for my first go at Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame in 2011. This was a cloth with 6" squares marked by solid lines but subdivided by a central cross into 3" square which could be used or ignored. Ding!

Much better. Does it come full size? In green? 

If I applied this pattern, I could take my 1/72nd troops from their 10x12 grid to a 20x24 grid of 3" squares for an occasional big battle or use my 40's on a 10x12 grid of 6" squares which fit them comfortably. I could also share terrain items across tables. Since tabletop teasers have been shown to adapt well to a 10x12 grid, translated scenarios map could be used for either the portable or the permanent table. The 10 x 12 grid would also be about right for a Brigade attack in 1914.

Thinking back to the pair of old books that I have turned to since I could first read, one was on the Boer War but the other was on the Great War. I've have been expecting for years to have to eventually put the Boer War on the table but I may just have been ambushed by the Great War while I wasn't looking. I wonder how my little toy train would look full of Turks, rolling across a desert?