This year it has fallen on my shoulders to organise our customary Christmas wargame. After some deliberation I decided that refighting a large Napoleonic battle would be the best option. My time was somewhat limited and refighting a battle removes the `hard' work designing a scenario - the terrain, troops and deployments are all available and just require organising into a game format.

As I started looking through the material I had easily to hand, a battle from either the 1809 or the 1813 campaign looked to be a good bet, and eventually I settled upon the battle of Lutzen. For the refight I planned to ask a certain Dave Watkins if he would a) play Napoleon and b) bring his computer and a copy of Follow the Eagle with him! One of the biggest advantages of computer rules as far as I'm concerned is that using them allows players of varying experience and knowledge easy access to the game without having to worry about learning rules,

This leaves everyone free to concentrate on what they are going to do with their troops, rather than trying to interpret lengthy pages of charts and tables. For the terrain and `figures' I planned to use a suitably modified version of our `Napoleon's Battles' system described in an earlier issue.

Looking through the accounts of the battle I had, along with maps and orders of battle, I began to see several drawbacks to just simply setting up the battle of Lutzen and refighting it. By refighting I mean using the historical orders of battle, organisations and deployment and giving the players a fairly free hand from then on. There seem to be two main faults with this approach. Firstly, there is the inevitable smartarse who happens to know the history of the battle and participants down to the nth degree - and will spend all day telling everyone just which troops are where and when the reserves will arrive on the left flank and so on (and we all know who we are don't we David...?) [Ed. Not Guilty ... just you make sure you remember the Neapolitan Velites 31 Officers, 625 men in the 13th Provisional Demi Brigade, 31st Division XI Corps......]

Secondly, using the historical forces and dispositions will not necessarily produce a balanced games that will involve everyone all day (and I think this is an important point to bear in mind when setting up larger games).

The first problem is not easy to overcome. I usually try and keep the subject matter of the game a secret which prevents people `swotting-up' the night before! I've probably just blown this!

The second problem can be tackled to some degree by adjusting dispositions and arrival times of the forces involved, within the realms of what was `possible'. However, this still leaves the basic problem of the players having no influence of any events off the battlefield or prior to the battle. This can leave the game still seeming a little contrived.

One solution to this might be to `jump-back' the action 24-48 hours before the battle actually started. The game will then start at the point where each sides patrols and screens are just making contact and beginning to gather intelligence about each other. The players will then be concerned with manoeuvring their forces to find the enemy and determine his intentions and then concentrating in the most advantageous positions.

The two days before Lutzen are suitable for this approach, Napoleon had just finished his concentration along the Saale River, whilst the Allies were advancing to the South of the French looking to sever their lines of communication. Both sides, for different reasons, were looking for a decisive battle early in the campaign, and so it so relatively easy to set objectives that will ensure the armies collide at some stage!

I then decided that if we are going to try and play through about two days of `game' time in 6-8 hours playing time that using a set of conventional wargames rules will be impossible. What is required is a boardgame style of game set at around Brigade or Divisional level. Having come this far I then decided that this game would be ideal as a map Kriegsspiel type of game. The French and Allied HQ's can be sent off to different rooms and communicate with the umpire via our trusty Tandy intercom set! I now found myself in the situation of having jumped from simply organising a simple refight of a battle, to creating a whole new scenario requiring a map, playing pieces and rules!

Starting with the map. I looked at the area and forces involved and decided that the map needed to cover an area of around 30km x 30km. Transferring this to a hex grid, with one hex equal to around 500m, gave an area about 60 x 60 hexes. Using this ground scale meant that the counters will represent units of around brigade size. I already had a set of suitable blank counter sheets, so the map and playing pieces posed no great problems.

As this game will be run in a kriegsspiel format, the rules are not so much of a problem as they might appear. I am the umpire so I can make it up as I go along! No, seriously. what I have is a whole series of tables. notes and data for each major section of the game (movement, combat, command, intelligence, supply etc.) These provide simple mechanisms and a basic framework on which to make decisions and provide information. The players will be provided with `briefing notes' on the same headings but only including information that is relevant and was available to the commanders in real life (or at least a representation of this!).

The game will actually work as follows; Each side will be provided with details of their forces and starting positions, along with certain objectives. Once the players have formulated a plan the they will have to write fairly detailed orders for each Corps Commander, and then for each Division and Brigade. The umpires can then implement these orders and send reports back to the HQ's as the action unfolds. As the amount of information available to the players increases, they will want to change their orders or implement new ones, this can be put into motion and then the game updated until they take effect.

As the effect of new orders becomes apparent it will be reflected in the reports sent back to the HQ's, which in turn may trigger a fresh set of decisions. And so on until one side or the other achieves their objectives.

The actual mechanisms for resolving movement, supply. fighting and all the other game functions need to be fairly quick and simple - this does not matter as long as the results fed back to the players have the correct `feel'. Of course a good proportion of the information passed back to the HQ's will contain reports that are mistaken, lost, exaggerated or just plain lies! It will be up to the players to filter it and decide which to trust. The accuracy and usefulness of the reports will also be affected by the quality and experience of the commanders so allowance will have to be made for this.

This mini-campaign style of game seems to offer an interesting variation to a normal wargame. Because the time scale is short, only 1-2 days, then many of the rules requires for a full campaign can be dispensed with. Topics such as supply, foraging, stragglers, attrition which usually generate lots of paperwork can, without too much loss of realism, be conveniently forgotten about. In the next issue I will conclude this article by using the actual game to show how these ideas worked in practice (and which ones didn't!