If you ask the average Napoleonic player 'What's your level?' the chances are that he'll say something like 'Newcomer to the hobby', 'Fairly experienced wargamer' or 'Expert'. He'll think you're talking about his personal level of skill and experience in the game. It probably won't occur to him that you're really asking bout the size of battle he plays - ie. the organizational level at which the action takes place. Yet this is a question of vital importance for the whole way that we look at the game, and it determines almost everything that happens. It is therfore well worth our while to get our ideas absolutely clear about it. Most nursery wargames start with one model soldier representing one man. This was the system for H.G. Wells' LITTLE WARS, and it has since been refined and modernized into what we call 'skirmish' wargames. In theory a skirmish can be set at any level from squad to army corps, if only there are enough model soldiers to represent every man. H.G. Wells himself fought skirmish games with several hundred figurines, although most but not all - modern rules would give an impossibly slow game with such a number. We usually find today that the level of the skirmish game is set at a platoon at most -say 30-50 men on each side. Instead of calling it a 'skirmish' game, therfore, it would make sense to call it a 'platoon level' game. what we are simulating is the action which takes place within a platoon - and the player pretends to be a platoon commander. The advantage of this approach is that we can really get down to the nuts and bolts of Napoleonic fighting. We can look at the detailed individual actions of loading and firing, fixing bayonets or drawing sabres. These are often the things which fascinate players about the warfare of the period (as testified, for example, by the popularity of black powder clubs and 're-enactment' societies - all of which tend to set their activities at platoon level or below). In a platoon level game we can examine every man's action every 10-20 seconds (the normal length of a bound). This is incredibly detailed, in fact, even for a platoon commander! On the other hand most Napoleonic battles were a lot bigger than a single platoon. There is another fascination to this period, which is that of high command - of pretending to be Napoleon or Wellington directing whole armies and deciding the fate of nations. It is for this reason that most Napoleonic wargames take one model soldier to represent a whole platoon of real men, with ratios of 1:33, 1:50 and even 1:100 being quite common. With this type of multiplier you can say that a force of 1,000 miniatures represents a whole Napoleonic army. To put it another way, you have stopped looking at what each individual real man is doing, and you are starting to look at the action of companies and battalions. The normal 'unit of play' is no longer the single man (represented by one figurine) but a company (represented by 2-6 figurines). This convention has led the wargaming faternity into games which are in fact set at a level of the Division. The player pretends to be a Division commander, with a dozen or so battlalions under command. He manipulates each company in each battalion, thus retaining a certain 'minor tactical' interest; yet overall he is looking at a battle big enough to feature on a 'grand tactical' or 'operational' map. In real life a Divisional commander would not actually have had such detailed control over his subunits, and certainly not once every 2 minutes (a favorable bound length): but no matter. The wargamer has found a compromise between strategy and tactics which seems to work fairly well most of the time. Using this system one can also simulate action higher than a Division by bringing together a large number of wargamers for a 'big game' - ie. a game involving many thousands of figurines and a lot of real time. thus you can multiply the number of 'Division level' games which are running concurrently, in order to get a 'Corps level' or 'Army level' game overall. This technique is cumbersome and difficult to organize well. It has plenty of pitfalls - but the fact is that games of this type do take place regularly, and lots of people do derive pleasure from them. The parameters of the 'Division level' game, in other words, have generally been accepted by the wargaming community. New trend But quite recently there has been a new trend. A number of game designers have pointed out that even the 'Division level' game falls far short of allowing the players to 'pretend to be Napoleon. The wargamer is only playing at commanding a single Division, after all, which is 2 or 3 steps lower than the army command. It has also been noticed that there were very few genuinely 'Division level' battles in the real Napoleonic wars. Most actions were at Corps level or higher. And to cap it all it has even been noticed that the detailed control over every single company which the wargamer retains is far from realistic. In real battles a Division commander could not organize things that far down the chain of command except on special occasions. He could not be everywhere at once. There has therefore recently been a 'new generation' of Napoleonic period games. They have tried to set the action truly at the level of the army commander, and not just at a rather garbled version of the Division commander. I would like to think that I myself was at the forefront of this movement with my book NAPOLEONIC WARGAMING FOR FUN (Ward Lack, London 1980-see The Courier Book Choice this issue). But many other game designers are also at the same place. George Jeffery in Scotland; the London Chestnut Lodge group; David Morgan in Australia; Ned Zuparko and now the authors of 'Empire Third Edition' in the U.S.A. All of these game designers (and I am sure there are plenty more) are trying to look at the Napoleonic game from the point of view of an Army - rather than of a Division -commander. This means that all the minor tactics must be simplified in order to make time for the'higher' things (like staff work, logitics and recce.). The game really does become a matter of what Napoleon could do, rather than what a particular Divisional or Regimental commander could do. This 'new wave' of Napoleonic game has been greatly helped by the appearance of ranges of 15mm. and 5mm. figurines; both of which allow the player to field much bigger armies on a small table top. If you retain the multiplier of 1:33 or 1:100, therefore, the 'unit of play' will still be the Company but you will have far more companies under command than in the original game at Division level. You will find, in fact, that you really have too many for them to be managable, and there will be a lot to be said for sticking all the companies of each battalion onto a single base when you play at this 'Grand Tactical' or 'Army level'. The 'unit of play' can then be the battalion instead of the company. There are even some suggestions floating around that in fact it should be the brigade which is the basic unit of play - ie. nothing that happens below the brigade commander would be played in detail. This really would release the wargamer from a lot of his low-level preoccupations! One interesting feature of these Army level games is the increasing experimentation with time scales which they have brought, due to the need to reduce the time devoted to moving round the models. no longer need the player be committed to moving everything on the table once every 2 minute bound. Instead, he might use I variable time' (otherwise known as 'critical event time') so that each unit moved only once for each of its 'critical events'. Thus if a regiment is told to "attack that hill" it will not climb the hill in 2-minute lurches, but in one smooth action - at least until it encounters a new 'critical event' such as the need for a morale test, or the arrival of new orders. Another time system in use with some Army level games is to retain the traditional 'segmented time' idea, but to use much longer segments. Instead of a 2-minute bound, in other words, you would have a 15 minute bound. Battalions might be able to march as much as one scale kilometer in that time, although they would have to stop if they came up against the enemy in their move. This type of system means that you can also greatly simplify the actual process of combat. If each 'round' of combat lasts 15 minutes it will be assumed to contain a great deal more action, and lead to a more desicive result, than would be possible with a 2 minute bound. Really you are just trying to find which battalion is the winner after 15 minutes, and with how many casualties, rather than finding out who fired volley at what range in each of the 2 minute segments. The whole game suddenly becomes much simpler, in fact. You can thus find more time to cope with all those extra troops you've fielded, without needing all the administrative fuss of running a 'big game' for a large number of players. All this is pretty straightforward, and is to become fairly well known. What particularly interests me at present, however, is the additional possibility of making a game which covers brigade level action, i.e., a game in which the player is pretending to be a brigade commander, and his 'units of play' are half companies or platoons. This is a level which has not often been wargamed, since it falls between the 'platoon level' skirmish and the 'Division level' game. At first sight it does, in fact, look very similar to the Division level game itself - although perhaps the ratio of figurines to real men could be reduced to 1:10 or 1:20. Thus a battalion might contain 50 to 100 model soldiers. Brigade Levbel An important difference between the 'Division level' and the 'Brigade level' games is that a Brigade commander ought to be in much closer touch with the details of each battalion's manouevres than would a Division commander. Whereas a Napoleonic Dividion commander would often be a partipant in higher strategy, the Brigade commander was not. Take the case of Brun de Villaret, a General of Brigade at Bautzen. His entire contribution to the battle consisted of feeding his battalions successfully into a wood held by the Russians. He apparently had no inkling of anything happening on his flanks, and he was, quite literally, a full-time tactical director for his half dozen or so battalions. Or at Vimeiro, consider Brigade-Generals Anstruther and Fane. They both made key tactical decisions which led to the rout of Thomeres brigade - they were in very close contact with their battalion commanders throughout the action. (For these actions see chapter 3 of my recent book, "Forward Into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to Vietnam" (Antony Bird Publishing, London 1981). With a 'Brigade level' game you are really forced to identify with each and every battalion under your command because you may have only three or four of them. A Division commander, by contrast, would often be able to take a more detached view, since he would have a dozen or more battalions. His REAL 'units of play' in real life would actually be his brigade commanders, his cavalry commander and his artillery commander (ie. the 'Five sub-units' which Clauswitz thought were ideal). Even though wargamers like to imagine that Division commanders were able to influence very minor tactical decisions all the time, this was not in practice the case. It was usually the Brigade commanders who had this responsibility. By playing a 'Brigade level' game you sacrifice the 'higher' or 'grand tactical' point of view, but gain compensation in the better portrayal of each battalion's minor tactics. You are recognising that there was a particular level of decision appropriate to Brigade and battalion commanders, which was different to that of either the Division commanders and up, or of the platoon commanders and below. To put it another way, you are expressing your interest in true minor tactics, but also your dissatisfaction with the 'one-for-one' skirmish game approach, where every single man has to be accounted for. If you design a 'Brigade level' wargame, therefore, you will have to go into a great deal more detail about company drill and morale than is possible in the average 'Division level' game. But by reducing the number of battalions being played you will in fact automatically gain more time for this. Such a game would be a land equivalent to the naval wargamer's single ship duels. (incidentally it is curious that no one seems to have designed a naval 'individual skirmish' game, where each sailor's personal role is analysed. The novels of Patrick O'Brian in fact give plenty of inspiration for just such a game so who's going to have a crack a it?). A 'Brigade level' game would often resolve itself into precisely a 'single battalion duel', where the outcome depended entirely on what happened when one specific battalion met a specific enemy one. Julian Skinner, to whom I am greatly indebted for his ideas on Brigade games, has even suggested that the best application of this type of game would be to limit it to one single battalion, and give great detail on the composition of its men and officers; the length of training it has received, etc. You would then design a series of games to follow that battalion through its campaigns. Dice formulae would determine which theatres of war the battalion visited, and which battles it took part in. The wargamer would have great fun devising realistic types of threat for each one. Thus a British battalion which started at Hondschoote would have to face hordes of revolutionary skirmishers; but when it moved on to the Helder it would have dykes to defend against massed columns. Then to Egypt with burning sand and dragoon attacks interspersed with camekmounted skirmishers (?). Then to more familiar ground in the Peninsula, perhaps, finishing up a Waterloo. In all of these games the composition of the battalion would gradually change as it gained experience and increased 'veteran' status - but there would also be a pressure on the player to avoid a total disaster, since that would finish off the series on the spot! The possibilities are apparently endless with a game of this type, although as always in wargames one must first establish the precise level at which one is operating. Only if you realistically identify just exactly who it is you are pretending to be will the tactical rules work out perly. And that, to me, is the key to the whole thing. Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. III #3 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1981 by The Courier Publishing Company. 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