The Courier Dispatch

Advances in Wargame
State of the Art

By Paddy Griffith


THE COURIER recently received the fo!lowing letter from Paddy Griffith on the subject of the Wargames Developments group in England. Many of the ideas originating from this organization will be of great interest to readers of THE COURIER, and Paddy will be giving details in future columns of specific aspects of WD activity.

Readers of THE COURIER Vol. 2 No. 5 may recall that an organization called "wargame developments" was set up in England a couple of years ago with the aim of bringing greater realism and greater playability to our wargames. Well, we have now held three residential conferences and a number of other activities, and our "product" is starting to come on stream. THE COURIER's Editor has very generously given me this opportunity to report back on what has been going on.

WD has always been very loose sort of grouping, since it includes such a diversity of independent and original spirits it is often difficult to talk to an "organization" at all in the formal sense. But we do hold regular conferences for about fifty people each time, and we have a little journal called THE NUGGET which appears six times a year. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that we all share a particular attitude to wargaming - a willingness to re-examine any idea, no matter how firmly established, and a willingness to experiment with new ideas.

The 5mm revolution is a case in point. A number of our members had a feeling that when most wargamers played with 5mm armies they were simply transferring the ideas and rules from 25mm games to the smaller scale. This obviously sacrificed many of the potential benefits which 5 mm had to offer, and tied the game to a set of basic assumptions which had rather marginal relevance to 5mm. With this scale you can start to think in terms of higher formations - whole Napoleonic army corps, or whole WW2 brigades.

You need no longer start with the low level units of the 25mm army, where Napoleonic games tend to be set at Divisional level and WW2 games at company level. So in 5mm we have been busy designing rules which start with the higher commander and then work down from there to portray the particular problems which would be important to him. This cuts out a lot of the detail and pedantry inside each divisional battle, since that would not be the concern of the corps commander.

It also allows us to bring in factors which would be important to a corps commander but which are not usually played - the timing of orders for large scale operational movements, for example. In the process of designing these games we keep encountering problems which are not usually tackled. Readers of THE COURIER will be familiar with George Jeffrey's systems for variable timescales, which is a case in point. In WW2 games with miniatures, such as Jim Wallman's "Stonk" rules, we have been getting down to the problems of representing a unit of several vehicles by a single vehicle on a base of the appropriate size. If taken to its logical conclusion, that can give a very different game from the normal tank v. tank skirmishes which are so widely played.

Identity Crisis

A key principle which we keep coming back to is the need to identity precisely who it is that you are playing. If you are trying to play as a corps commander, then you should set yourself only those problems which a corps commander would have to face. You should not be bothered with the small change of each company or battalion under your command, but should only be involved with the higher "generalship" task of commanding your four divisional commanders. Once we have isolated this need, we are much better placed to analyse just what it is we are trying to simulate in the game - in this case the personal relationship between one commander and his four immediate subordinates. We have to start asking ourselves how they communicated; what their staff officers were supposed to do; how important personal factors could become, and so on. Suddenly a whole new area ot interest imposes itself on the wargame - and it can sometimes be a very far cry from the normal difficulties of deciding whether to put your battalion into column or line.

In WD we have been making experiments with a whole group of games designed to simulate the processes of generalship, as opposed to the "pure" tactical decision-making which forms about 95% of the content of most wargames. Thus we have Andy Callan's Dark Ages game in which the style of leadership of a few top warriors are seen as the key problem. These warriors play a sort of skirmish game designed to gather their followers, inspire them for battle, and then lead them into the fray. The figures for the leader's immediate circle of retainers are played in slightly less detail, while the "outer circles" of followers are played in very sketchy detail. In this way you get a Dark Ages game which reflects the real priorities and decision-making which applied at thattime. It is a far cry from the stylised "Chess games" which are so often portrayed as Dark Age battles.

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