Skirmishing Wargaming

What's It All About?

by Mike Blake

Or How Would You Like To Be Wyatt Earp . . .or Flashmann or Sharpe

Introduction

I was brought up on an Army camp on Salisbury Plain and I have been interested in things military all my life it seems to me. I have played with toy soldiers for as long as I can remember - real toy soldiers, 54mm ones. They were all I ever wanted for birthday and Christmas presents- apart from toy guns of course! So, apart from a few wasted years in my teens and early twenties when I misguidedly pursued other more fleshly interests, things military have always been an important part of my life.

I never actually wanted to be a soldier, you understand - the experience of being so close to the military life - living on a camp - was enough, I think, to dissuade me. So all my military experience has been vicarious, second hand [though I can say that I have been under live artillery fire - and bloody terrifying it was too! But that's another story.]

In The Beginning

What this article will attempt to do is explain what makes Individual Wargaming, or One to One Wargaming , or Skirmish Wargaming as it has become more widely called, a different - indeed unique - way of wargaming. Most wargaming involves hundreds at least, and sometimes thousands, of figures. The games are at division, corps, army level. Grand manoeuvres are what it is all about, with the players taking the roles of high ranking commanders. Each figure represents a number of men, usually around the 1:50 mark and the whole thing is a scaled down version of a whole battle. The time represented by the wargame will be hours of real battle .

Skirmish Wargaming isn't like that at all - in fact its the exact opposite. This is wargaming with small groups of figures, each with an individual name, personality and fighting ability. So its about clashes between small groups, fighting it out eyeball to eyeball. Each figure on the table represents one man. The games are close-range engagements, clashes between scouts, heroic last stands, shoot-outs, section level combats. The game represents action over a very short period of time, minutes, seconds even, probably no more than an hour.

And, perhaps most importantly, each figure represents one man [or woman] who is given individual characteristics. They have a very distinct personality or character. Indeed we usually refer to them as characters, and certainly not as "figures" because that's far too anonymous. Each character is given skills and abilities, ranging from the obvious such as Firing [with distinction being made between hand guns, shoulder arms, bows and so on],and fighting Hand to Hand [ and again melee ability with a weapon being separate to that with bare hands] to the less obvious such as Reaction [to events and occurrences during the course of the fight], Shock [effect of wounds] and Dexterity [handling tasks like reloading]. There can be many more, but these give you the flavour of the thing. The other very important element is that each character is also given a name.

This is vital, because it really brings the character alive. It can be difficult to do - we had some problems tracking down enough real Zulu names when we did a re-fight of the Death of the Prince Imperial recently, but we did it. Each character is given a set of these "abilities" as they are usually called, which will determine how they behave during the course of the action. It is this very individualistic and detailed approach which marks out Skirmishing from other wargaming, and gives it its unique flavour - and fun. One really starts to identify with one's characters, and to be far more cautious than when one is just handling regiments and brigades. They become extensions of yourself and one treats them accordingly.

Individual Quirks

They also develop in the most amazing way. We have been running an 1860s-70s US Cavalry against Hostiles campaign for some time now and one particular US officer has developed into a real martinet over the course of the linked games we have played. He started as a somewhat nondescript major called Jesse Lee, but then in one momentous fight, when his small patrol was suddenly attacked he became a legend. We have a mechanism which will generate enemies in a random and surprise way, which really gives the Regulars a headache.

There was Major Lee and his dozen or so men were, on the open prairie, suddenly confronted with groups of Plains Indians coming at them on a 180 degree arc to their front. "Dismount and form skirmish line" Lee sensibly orders. But he didn't follow this with "Horse holders to the rear" as one would have expected - no - "Picket your horses" he shouted! Here they were, about to be ridden over by a horde of screaming warriors, the "best light cavalry in the world", and he had ordered a camp manoeuvre of considerable complexity. They had to find their picket pins, hammer them into the ground, secure their reins to them and then form a firing line! Amazingly, Lee survived [though he lost a few men] and, of course to this day is known to all by the sobriquet "Picket Pin" Lee. It is this kind of individuality and flavour that makes Skirmishing so attractive to those who play such games.

We once described the rules as like a time-and motion study of what a man can do when the adrenaline is [or is not!] flowing! That's a pretty good description of the mechanics. But it is much more than that. It is also a wonderful study of how people under stress may behave, - with all the bravery and cowardice, cleverness and stupidity - that this can bring.

Let me hasten to explain that this Individual Wargaming wasn't new when we came to it. As Donald Featherstone pointed out in his book "Skirmish Wargames", it had been part of the overall wargames scene for many years. He'd described his own ideas in a number of his books in the late 60s and early 70s but as he very kindly put it, the "breath of life" was really brought to this kind of wargaming by a trio of close friends in Bristol in the early 70s. The three were Steve Curtis, Ian Colwill - and me.

Ol' Long Hair Hisself

This brings me quite neatly to just how did it all begin. I can't do better than use some of the words we used at the time. "In the beginning it was all Steve Curtis's fault really!" He was a Western nut and his enthusiasm and persistence drew unsuspecting individuals like Ian and me under his "evil influence." Originally, all he had wanted to do was a re-fight on the wargames table of the Gunfight At The OK Corral with 54mm Britain's cowboys and buildings - no more and no less. We would write some rules for that game alone and that would be it. Since then we've written and published 4 sets of rules, Ian and I have come near to breaking up our marriages, and we started [or rather helped to make legitimate] Skirmish Wargaming.

I should explain that Steve was also unique - he wargamed from a wheelchair and he had an enthusiasm and joy for life that used to make us feel almost envious. If ever there was a guy with "True Grit" it was Steve, or Ol' Long Hair Hisself as he became known, from the name of his Old West Skirmish alter ego, Long Haired Steve Curtis.

So we wrote some Western Gunfight rules [and indeed the whole genre is still sometimes referred to by that title], then some Colonial Skirmish rules, then Flintlock & Ramrod rules, then we re-wrote the Gunfight rules as Old West Skirmish rules, and finally we wrote a 3 volume set of 20th Century Skirmish rules. We continue to develop and tinker with the rules. Another friend called Mike Bell became the 3rd member of the team when Steve died, and he has been leading the development of a mammoth work called The Code of the West which looks like out-doing the 3 volumes of the 20th C Rules by a big margin. Indeed they will probably never see the light of day as a commercial set of rules. But new ideas keep bubbling up; Control Rules which enable players to play "against the game" instead of having to have real people on both sides, the Random Enemy rules I mentioned earlier and so on. In fact we are now working on distilling the essence of these rules down into a publishable set which will be brought out by The Foundry.

The Big Break Through

The big break through with the mechanics came when we switched from 6 sided dice to 20 sided dice. As you are probably aware, there has to be an element of chance in wargaming. If there wasn't, a force of size and type "A" would always beat a force of size and type "B", and the result would be so predictable that there would be little point in playing the game. What one tries to do is predict the chance of "A" beating "B", and then introduce a sensible level of unpredictability. That's why wargames use dice.

The traditional 6 sided dice is still used in many wargames, along with all sorts of other kinds. The advantage that 20 sided dice [or indeed 10 sided ] have is that they look much more serious on the wargames table and we do like to be seen as taking part in a dignified and serious endeavour. No, that isn't the reason at all. The real reason is - percentages. A 20 sided dice has 1 to 0 on it twice. This means that, if you take two zeroes to be 100, you can through 1 to 100 with an exactly equal chance of throwing any number in that range, if you take one colour to be tens and one units.

The "discovery" of decimal or percentage dice as they became known, by a wargame nut and mathematician called Mike Philpott [also in Bristol in the late 60s/early 70s - it was quite a prolific place for wargames ideas back then] opened up a whole new way of calculating the effects of fire and so on in wargames, and we saw the advantage immediately.

Individual firing, ie by one man as opposed to a regiment of men, for example, really lends itself to a percentage approach. The basic chance of a weapon hitting a man size target at certain ranges can be determined from data available on that weapon's performance and expressed as a percentage or chance in 100. That basic chance can be modified [up and down] to reflect the firer's ability and whether he is snapfiring or making an aimed shot and so on. A percentage chance is arrived at, say 70%, and all the firer has to do is throw the % dice. If the result is 70 or under he has hit, if 71 or over he has missed. This simple mechanism of using percentage chances of something occurring can then be applied throughout the rules to great effect.

Skirmish Scenarios

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