The Variable Length Bound (VLB) playing procedure is based on “Critical Event” wargaming. This has been employed, chiefly in the form of Kriegspiel games, for well over 100 years. The basis of the Critical Event concept is that the action is ordered, and then the critical events that it causes are presented to the players in sequence for their responses. This is how the VLB game system operates. It might actually be better described as the “Command Length Bound System”, as it takes the players from command decision point‚ to command decision point, however, as it has become known for having varying bound lengths, we will stick with VLB. The VLB playing procedure consists of four elements. These are:
- The progression of the ordered action to the next occurrence of a critical event (which we call a “Change of Situation”, or “COS”).
- The “up-dating” of all action on the battlefield to that point by moving troops on the table, (with their new positions thus providing the new “snapshot” view available to commanders that represents their next “situation”)
- The issue of orders by the player (if desired and permitted).
- The “input” of the effect of any orders issued to the future progress of the battlefield action, (that is, troops will now begin to do something different, or change their previous actions, if so ordered.)
The first thing that the reader will have noticed is that there is nothing about “time” in the above. That is because time is not a part of the VLB procedure, although its use as a measurement tool is necessary to the up-dating process. Let us consider each of these elements in turn, and see what they imply and require.
Progressing the Action
A Commander orders action by his forces based on the situation facing him when he issues the orders. His situation is produced by the orders his superior has given him (which tell him what he is required to do with his force) and the actions of hostile forces that would, or could, affect his ability to comply with his superior’s orders. Having made his decision based on the situation as known to him at the time he issued his own orders down the chain of command, the Commander, consequently, has no reason to change them unless that situation changes.
This is a very important point. Since Commanders do not change their orders at regular clock intervals, there are no set “turns” on a battlefield. If nothing else intervenes, an ordered action, once set in motion, carries on unchanged until it is changed by new orders issued in response to a change of situation. To represent battlefield conditions, therefore, it follows that our game action should likewise continue until a change of situation occurs.
How can we determine how long a bound will last, or how far to move out troops? We tell our opponents what they see our forces doing - and they tell us what theirs are doing - and we compare the actions of both sides to determine where, and for whom, they will cause the next change of situation. Let us, therefore consider what constitutes a change of situation (COS), and who can respond to it.
Changes of Situation
A Commander’s military situation can be said to consist of three elements. The first of these is the orders he is acting under, the second is the actions of hostile forces and the third is the actions of his own command group. In respect to the actions of hostile or his own forces, it is those that cause a threat to his execution of the orders he is acting under that count. Simply put, if any of the three elements changes, a Commander’s situation changes. Let us consider, therefore, what will change the different elements of his situation.
A Commander is always acting under orders. It has, sometimes, become standard wargames parlance to talk of forces that have not been given orders since the start of the game as not having orders, or something similar. This is completely wrong. Troops only arrive and take up position on the battlefield as a result of the orders their Commander is acting under. The way to view this in wargames terms is that, at the start of a wargame, all forces are under orders to stay where they are‚. Since Commanders do not continually issue orders telling their subordinates to “keep doing what you are already doing”, the receipt of a new order therefore inevitably changes a Commander’s situation.
The actions of hostile forces need not necessarily cause a change in a Commander’s situation. This is for two reasons. Firstly, if the hostile action is not directed against his command group, then, from his point of view, it doesn’t affect him. Secondly, even if the hostile action is directed against an adjacent command group, it is none of his business! As each command group is part of a superior’s command group (all along the chain of command) an attack on any command group is a threat to its Commander, his superior, and that superior’s superior - right up the chain of command. Thus, a hostile advance directed at one brigade of a division would not be a threat for another brigade Commander in the division. It would be a threat for the attacked brigade Commander, his divisional general, his corps Commander, and the army Commander. (To decide which commander is the appropriate one to take action, or to ignore the threat, would depend on the action required).
So, how do we define when action is considered to be directed against a command group? In practice, it is quite simple. To “threaten” a body of troops, a hostile body of troops must be able to inflict damage on it, either now, or in the immediate future (as when it is advancing on the other). Any force can only operate straight ahead, and can only inflict damage on a hostile force on the extent of its own front. If, therefore, we mentally visualize two lines extending forwards from a body of troops’ flanks, at right angles to its front, we can visualize the “Threat Zone” within which it can threaten hostile bodies of troops. I have used the term “body of troops” deliberately in dealing with threats. It is only bodies of troops that can threaten one another - whether they are infantry, cavalry or artillery, and it is only bodies of troops that can be threatened.
In the VLB game I designate these as “Direct Command Groups”(DCGs), because they are commanded by officers whose verbal orders cause the troops to act. The distinction between “Command groups” and “Direct Command Groups” is that Command Groups represent the “control” relationship of officers to each other and how they send orders to each other that will then activate the men under their command. The Direct Command Groups are the bodies of troops who can cause physical threats to enemy troops through movement, change of formation or position, or fire upon the verbal orders of a commander, the “basic units”, as it were. In a large Napoleonic battle, for example, we would expect to see Armies, Corps, Divisions, and Brigades as command groups, but the Brigades would also be Direct Command Groups.
Having determined the condition for when one DCG can threaten another (i.e. it must contain the other within its Threat Zone‚) we can now decide the circumstances under which one DCG will threaten another. Obviously if opposing forces simply sat and looked at one another, they would not be threatening one another. So our first circumstance is that a DCG is moving towards another. Of course, if a DCG were not moving towards another, it could still threaten it by firing on it, therefore that too would constitute a threat. A third circumstance would be where a DCG was not directed against another, but changed its facing direction so that it did contain the other within its threat zone.
Having dealt with the threats caused to a Commander by the opposing side, we may now turn to those caused by his own forces. Commanders really only have one requirement of their troops - that they do what they are told, and keep doing it until the Commander tells them differently. Naturally, therefore, his troops cause a threat to his ability to execute the orders he is acting under if they stop doing what he has ordered them to do. This can happen in one of two ways - either the troops become what I term “shaken”, i.e. not scared enough to flee, but not confident enough to “mix it” with the enemy - or they break and flee. These are situations, of course, which we can only discover the results of by the game mechanic process we call “morale tests”.
The occurrence of a threat to a body of troops that is part of his command group, the receipt of new orders (or a message informing him of something he himself cannot see‚) or the loss of willingness to comply with his orders caused by morale failure all cause a change of situation for a command group Commander. We may summarize these causes of a change of situation as follows:
A Change of Situation will occur for a Commander at any time that:
- a. A hostile DCG that contains a DCG of the Commander’s command group within its threat zone starts to move.
b. A hostile DCG that does not contain a DCG of the Commander‚s command group within its threat zone starts to change direction and will, on completion, contain a DCG of the Commander’s command group within its threat zone.
c. A hostile DCG that contains a DCG of the Commander’s command group within its threat zone starts to fire on the DCG of the Commander’s command group.
d. A hostile DCG that contains a DCG of the Commander‚s command group within its threat zone and is moving towards it increases its rate of movement.
e. A hostile DCG that is firing on a DCG of the Commander’s command group increases its rate of fire.
f. A Commander receives new orders.
g. A Commander receives a message.
h. A DCG of the Commander’s cmd group becomes shaken.
As the reader will have appreciated by now, none of the conditions or circumstances, which cause a change of situation for a Commander, is new. They are all part and parcel of the games the reader has been playing since he started wargaming. What is new, however, is the way these are used in the VLB game.
Dialoguing
As was said earlier, the way we progress the action in a VLB game is that the opposing sides tell one another what their DCGs are doing, and compare those descriptions in order to find out when the action will cause the next change of situation. This is not as difficult, or radical, as it sounds. Let us review, at this point, the things that make dialoguing a straightforward process:
- a. DCGs can only threaten others if they perform a threatening act, and we have defined these.
b. DCGs can only threaten others within the Threat Zones lying directly ahead of them.
c. From (b) above, we can identify visually and quickly, which hostile DCG(s) a DCG (performing a threatening action) would threaten.
d. By applying control properly, we restrict the ability to respond to a threat only to those Commanders actually threatened by the change of situation, thus preventing an unauthentic “free for all” of order issuing by non-threatened commanders.
We should note that the theory of the VLB system should work at any command level - as long as the definitions of “changes of situation” and “threats” are consistent with the commanders being portrayed. However, an additional aid to simplifying the discovery of changes of situation, in, for example, my own period of Napoleonics, is that the brigade was the “unit” at grand tactical level, not the battalion or cavalry regiment. Infantry and cavalry forces usually operated by brigades, and in brigades, with battalions and regiments simply being “bits” of the brigade. (In fact, the situation was analogous, in many ways to the way in which the companies of a battalion operated as part of the battalion). Because armies operated at this level, the commanders who could be affected by a change of situation were the Commanders of brigades and above. This, of course, dramatically reduces the number of Commanders for whom we need to determine “changes of situation” when fighting major Napoleonic battles, compared to games that must use battalions as the basic unit.
Of course, in a major, multi-corps game, we are hardly likely to find a lone brigade marching of to fight the enemy by itself. There will probably be several of them advancing simultaneously and we will naturally see several changes of situation arising as they do. With experience, players can readily identify the first that will occur, however, initially, how do we establish the sequence in which they will occur? That is where time comes in, coupled with a different way of dealing with movement and fire effect, so that we can up-date‚ the battlefield.
In order to determine the sequence and duration of events on our battlefields, and the intervals between them, we use time as our measuring tape. To permit us to do this, since it is the action that is determining when we have to measure the time, we have to relate the rate of action‚ to time. Since the result of allowing the action to dictate when we have to call a “time out” (that is, to end a game bound in order to deal with its mechanics to prepare the description of a new change of situation) will necessarily produce time spans (bounds) of varying lengths, we have to use a common denominator that will apply to all bounds, whatever their length. For this purpose, I use the minute, since it is the one we commonly use in our daily lives, and is the easiest to work with (no sense in making work for ourselves after all!).
First we quote our movement and fire effect rules in rates per minute. This allows us to convert any distance traveled or number of casualties inflicted into minutes‚ of effect, and any number of minutes into distance/casualties. In the VLB game, when up-dating, we use both methods of conversion. If we can see which force will cause the first change of situation, we measure the distance it has traveled (or, if under fire and not moving, then the casualties it has caused or sustained). That gives us the elapsed time - length of the bound - since the last change of situation. Having determined the length of the bound in minutes, we simply reverse the process, and bring all other on-going action up to date. To update the table, we multiply the movement rates (or casualty rates) of other forces on the board‚ by the number of minutes in that bound, to discover how far to move other units on the table, or how many casualties to remove.
The resulting new positions or strengths form the basis for the “snapshot” description given to any commander now faced with a new “change of situation”.
This is not so radical as it might at first sound. In fact, players have been doing it for years without making it the formal basis of their playing procedure. As an example of this, consider a typical cavalry versus infantry in line situation, where orders are issued at the start of the turn‚ in a fixed length bound game, and changes in orders can only be made at the start of the next turn.
As soon as the infantry’s player is informed that the cavalry, which had been stationary, is advancing on his battalion, what does he want to do? Naturally, he wants to respond to the change of situation by issuing orders to his battalion to form square. Ah, but he can’t, because the game procedure only allows him to issue orders at the start of the turn, and not change them. Well, that is patently silly, so many players over the years have decided to allow the infantry to be ordered into square. They both, of course, want to know how long it would take the infantry to form square, and whether they would do so before the cavalry reached them. So, by pro-rating the cavalry’s full-turn movement distance and comparing that to the portion of a turn the infantry would need to form square, they calculate or establish odds for whether or not the square was formed before the cavalry made contact. This is (almost) pure VLB.
Issuing Orders
Once the battlefield has been up-dated, the player with Commanders affected by the change of situation can issue orders for those Commanders if he considers that he can affect the situation(If the change of situation is caused by his troops breaking, of course, he couldn’t affect the situation). The only Commanders affected by a change of situation are the DCG (Brigade) Commander who is threatened, and Commanders superior to him on the chain of command. The player has to decide which Commander(s) to react for, and what orders to issue. In the VLB game, where time is a visually continuous flow, this brings us to an interesting situation.
Action in the game can be measured in terms of the time it takes. Since what the player is doing when he contemplates and issues orders, and the time it takes him, is representing what his miniature Commander would be doing - and the time it would take him - we could actually time the player with a stopwatch during his order-issuing process. Then, we could add that number of minutes when calculating the up-date of unit positions on the tabletop battlefield to account for the amount of time he takes before his orders would actually have gone out(In 99% of cases, this is not necessary - however, it is handy to know that it is possible to incorporate into the game in case one comes up against a player who tends to take an inordinate amount of time to make decisions!).
Once the player has issued his orders in response to a change of situation, he calculates how long those orders would take to come into effect(i.e. when troops would start responding to them) in order to be able to fit the action in at the appropriate point in the dialogue. This brings us to another aspect of the VLB game, which is that certain events can be known in advance.
Future Events
Imagine being tied to a chair that was bolted to the floor, with, suspended above you, a one ton block of stone. Imagine that this block was hanging from a rope, which ran through a pulley to a fixture on the wall. If someone put a lighted candle beneath the rope at the wall, and told you that it would burn through in 5 minutes, what good would that information be to you? The answer of course, is none. Since you cannot react to the event (the stone block falling on you) even though you know it is going to happen, knowing about it doesn’t do you any good. It is exactly the same in a VLB game. Because our little lead soldiers cannot do their own shooting we have to do it for them by the application of the mechanics of our games. As a result of the way the VLB game operates, having bounds of different lengths necessitates the use of rates per minute.
To determine the duration of a firefight, for example, we first calculate the rate of loss for each side. By comparing that to each side’s breaking point, we learn what the duration of the firefight will be. Suppose we find through dialoguing that a firefight will begin at 10:00 AM. We calculate and learn what the rate of loss will be for both sides. In addition, each side will know its own breaking point or have an estimate of how long his side can sustain such losses. Thus, each side can calculate the potential endurance time for its own participation in the firefight.
The beginning of the firefight would be a change of situation (COS) for the affected command groups. The expected casualty rate to be sustained would be part of the situational knowledge available to a commander during the COS. That COS would be his opportunity to give orders or react to the change of situation, which could be influenced by the rates of loss he might reasonably expect in the fight.
Once the COS is over, each side compares their endurance times to that of his opponent. The duration of the firefight will therefore be equal to the shorter of the two. Suppose one side finds it can last 25 minutes before breaking, and the other would break after 18 minutes. The firefight duration would therefore be 18 minutes. The breaking of one side will signal the end of that firefight and would also be the next COS. To update the game to that new COS, both sides would be assigned 18 minutes worth of casualties, and one side deemed to be broken. At first glance, this appears to give the commanders advance knowledge of the next 18 minutes into the future and an advantage historical commanders would not have had.
This, however, is not a problem in the VLB game. A firefight is not a continuing change of situation, so players cannot keep responding to it throughout the duration of the firefight, minute-by-minute. The point of having the COS at the beginning of the firefight was to force players to commit their affected commanders to some course of action based upon the knowledge that commander would have had at that time. Thus, even if the player himself were to gain some new knowledge during the firefight, he would not be able to take advantage of that knowledge in the game because the involved commander wouldn’t have had that knowledge and is not able to make use of it.
Note that by definition, the above example assumes that no new “changes of situation” would occur during the 18 minute firefight. If the game dialogue revealed a new event after 12 minutes of firefight(such as artillery joining in to increase the rate of loss for one side, or another Brigade’s attacking movement will cause it to make contact with the firing troops), then a new COS will occur after those 12 minutes of firefight. The table can be updated to that 12 minute point, with both sides receiving 12 minutes worth of casualties. This new knowledge becomes part of the new “snapshot” upon which the affected commanders will make their 12th minute COS decisions. In this way, the VLB system ensures that commanders won’t be cheated out of any legitimate opportunities that may arise.
To help get used to the VLB system, a ‘Future Events Chart” can be used to guide dialoguing by each player. In its simplest form this would be a lined page with a different time on each line. The first line would be the battle start time. The 10th line would be 10 minutes later, the 60th line would represent one hour after the beginning of the battle. Players can write down potential future events on appropriate lines as the players become aware of them.
For instance, in the first firefight example above, let us suppose that one brigade had been ordered to advance against the enemy at 9:45 AM. That would be entered on his Future Events Chart. He would say, “At 9:45 you see this brigade in this formation advance against yours. If nothing else happens, they would reach you your troops at 10:00 AM. This is a COS for you.” The players note 10:00 AM on their charts, and the COS player may issue orders if he wishes. The players then continue the dialogue, asking if either side makes any changes that would cause a COS for the other prior to 10:00AM. In our case, there are none.
The players would then update the field to 10:00 AM. The attacking brigade is placed in front of the defender. Let us suppose that morale tests are made that result in a firefight beginning. This is the next COS, after which players would note “firefight begins” at the 10AM line on their own charts. In addition, one player would note his “breakpoint” at 18 minutes, the other player his at 25 minutes.
The players then ask if either sees any actions that could cause another COS. They would look at their charts, and one would say, yes, in 18 minutes. They would then update 18 minutes and reach the next COS, where one side breaks. Suppose that one of the players did have another brigade whose attacking movement would reach the firefight at 10:12 AM. That arrival time would be noted on the chart. If so, then after the 10:00 AM COS (reflecting the beginning of the firefight) the next COS to be found on the future event charts would be the 10:12 arrival of new troops. He would announce it instead of the 10:18 or the 10:25 events, because it happened first.
Let us further suppose that the new troops arriving at 10:12 cause the enemy to break and run. In that case, the 10:18 and 10:25 events listed on players’ future event charts become moot, and they can be crossed off and ignored in future dialogue when players look ahead to find the next COS.
Instead of paper, players might choose to write note events on one side of an index card, with the time on the back. Each player could then insert those cards into a future events deck in chronological order. The cards can then be pulled and used as a dialogue guide to find the next COS. Whatever system players devise, the point is that mutual dialogue in the VLB system is there to bound the action forward to the next COS. This should enable players to spend their time on making decisions based upon knowledge available to a commander at a particular time, and then having to react to the results of those decisions, instead of making a fixed move and then being free to make the best game move possible based upon what the player can see across the whole table.
The latest version of George’s Code Napoleon, which was intended to showcase the ideas you’ve just read about, had not gotten past a playtest version when he passed away. Though he defended his opinions fiercely, George often stated that he never viewed his ideas as “the final word”. His fondest hope was that someone else might be inspired by those ideas to move gaming forward if he couldn’t. With that in mind, some of the playtesters and participants in the internet VLB Rules group have decided to attempt a collaboration to tackle the project. If a version of CN can be made practical, The Courier will let you know. If not, we hope you found interest in some of GWJ’s thoughts – and perhaps they may spark some new ideas for someone else.
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