That the disharmony between Bragg and his subordinates was a critical factor in the Army of Tennessee's lack of success is obvious. Reflecting that discordancy in a wargame, however, can be difficult. Games played with a single player on a side simply cannot reflect the fundamental degree of disagreement inherent in the historical situation. Team play helps some, but even then - unless you deliberately recruit people who fundamentally dislike each other - the tensions of the real command structure are not likely to be achieved. That's why designers should settle for the next best thing: Chaos. Introducing restricted control and even outright confrontation can help reflect the problems Bragg had in simply getting his army to obey his orders. Limiting control can be done by introducing a random element into the mix that prevents the Bragg player from moving or using all of his forces on a given turn. This produces a great deal of uncertainty. Confrontation, on the other hand, is riskier. Allowing the opposing player or team to have momentary control of Bragg's forces for movement or even combat can create very chaotic conditions, but requires a light touch lest it overwhelm the game. After all, who better to ensure that Polk or Hill make the worst choice at the worst moment than your opponent? Lots of games today use some form of limited control. Chit-pull and limited activation techniques all serve to break up the sequence and often limit the units a player can use in a turn. The net effect is of troops that don't move at all, or at the wrong time. It is most effective in undermining that most unrealistic of game-play effects: excessive co-ordination between widely scattered elements. I like the effect of these techniques better in a campaign or operational setting than at more tactical scales. Certainly the difficulties Bragg had in getting anyone to move forward at Dug Gap, or again at Lee and Gordon's Mill, can be realistically modeled using these ideas. The designer can dictate when or if a player moves a force, without actually trying to dictate how to move in a manner contrary to player self- interest. But what of troops who march the other way? Who actively disobey orders instead of simply choosing not to act? A much rarer occurrence, certainly, but also much more likely to change the course of events, sometimes dramatically. The classic example of course, has to be Sickles' famous advance of his entire corps on July 2nd at Gettysburg, which changed the nature of the whole battle. The key to introducing confrontation effectively is via surprise. Random events are a great vehicle for this. Rolling dice to consult a table, or introducing an extra counter into a chit-pull system are both easy ways to add a pinch of real chaos to the game, without really predicting when or where it will pop up. I prefer to see active chaos in more tactical games, because I fell that the heat of battle was more likely to produce these kinds of events. Combat has a way of dictating it's own pace and decision-making under pressure has a way of going dramatically awry. Additionally, farther down the scale the game goes, the more units are likely to be in play, and the less likely that any single event will actually change the whole game. Bragg had a total of five infantry and two cavalry corps under his control in September, 1863; they totaled fifteen divisions or forty brigades. Disrupting an entire corps would be much more game-changing than doing so with a single division or brigade. Moreover, the divisional and brigade commanders with less of a grasp of the overall situation - were historically more likely to make an active mistake than their counterparts at corps level or above. Both styles have a great deal of potential in game design, and the state of boardgaming today routinely uses them in many current designs. We are, however, limited somewhat simply by the mechanics of boardgaming. We are prevented from being too clever for fear of burdening the actual playing of the game to the point of real annoyance. The more often chaos is introduced, however, the more likely its use will be streamlined and simplified, as designers keep looking for more ways to skin the cat. Chickamauga The Army of Tennessee Introduction Union on Offensive Bragg Acts: McLemore's Cove Battle of Chickamauga Chickamauga as Simulation Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 1 no. 2 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com * Buy this back issue or subscribe to Against the Odds direct from LPS.