Last year, I started gaming the Spanish-American War. With this year being the centennial of the war, more people have started gaming this period. The following are some notes on gaming on the war and on Richard Houston's San Juan Hill game at Historicon.

After a two-year hiatus, I made it out to Historicon. The convention theme was America's colonial wars with the Rough Riders being the main theme. I only saw games for Spanish-American War and Boxer Rebellion and not other periods like the Moros in the Philippines.

I was running my San Juan Hill game on Friday afternoon. I wished that the scheduler checked if similar games were running that day. Richard Houston ran his San Juan Hill game Friday morning while another game master was running his San Juan Hill game an hour before my game.

I wanted to see Richard's terrain and how his rules worked so I signed up. Richard has a great looking setup. The figures from his San Juan Hill pack are nice. If they had been available last year, I would have used those instead of the Freikorps that I'm using now because they're cheaper and just as good.

I was on the American side with five other players. Richard signed up two younger boys to be the Spanish. Each player commanded two units of about sixteen figures each. Though the Spanish Mausers were better than the American Krag rifles, the rules don't differentiate between the weapon types. Richard brought up with the Americans moving and firing on the Spanish trenches, the Americans won't be rolling a lot of dice anyway.

The Spanish will be rolling a lot more dice.

The way firing works is each unit starts out with a base of one. To that base, various modifiers are added due to the unit moving and the target's terrain. The final number is divided into the number of figures in the unit and rounded down. This is the number of dice the unit rolls. All sixes are hits and remove one figure. American units will be rolling one or two dice compared to eight dice for Spanish units. This works quite well.

One main feature of the rules is that when a unit comes under fire, adversity points accumulate and the unit starts rolling on a table for its movement allowance. A unit that takes a lot of fire is slowed down to moving one inch. I like this rule so much I am thinking about including it in my game.

Melee is good old fashioned one on one with each figure tossing a die and adding modifiers. High die toss wins and kills a figure depending on the margin. I do not care for this system but that's personal taste.

Artillery fire is random and dependent on a table. Instead of having a miniature unit garrison each fort and blockhouse, Richard assigns a certain amount of dice to each fortification to roll depending on range. If a fortification takes a certain damage total, it's destroyed. I'm going use this idea when I game El Caney. It's better than putting figures around blockhouses.

By the way, the Americans won. We didn't lose one unit and killed all the Spanish units. The Spanish couldn't roll enough sixes to hit American units. I'm still not sure what the victory conditions were. They didn't seem to be exact. However, a lot of miniature games don't have exact conditions. Richard presented everybody with medals, which was a nice touch.

Later that afternoon, I still had four players for my game with two other San Juan Hill games going on that day. I use modified Principles of War rules from England. They were reviewed some time ago in the Heliograph. The Americans start out with fifteen infantry units plus an artillery battery. A galling gun arrives on turn four. There is the potential for the Americans to receive two more artillery batteries if they roll high enough on a chart.

The Spanish have six weak infantry units plus one artillery battery. There is the possibility of receiving three more infantry units. I took this idea of random reinforcements from the board game Rough Riders published by Simulations Workshop (2708 General Chenault NE, Albuquerque, NM 87112) which cost $12 including postage.

I tried to make a good game out of the situation. Historically, the Spanish should get only three infantry units in the scale I'm using. However, it would have been too much of a walk-over for the Americans. I wanted to give the Spanish a chance. I feel that the Spanish will be over run over eventually. However, if they kill six American units, they win.

Much of the outcome depends on how the Americans stage their assault. If they attack piece meal, the Spanish will probably win. However, if the Americans stage a massive coordinated assault, they will probably win. The Spanish players can do little in this case and usually whine. In my games, the Americans only do this half the time so I've seen the Spanish win about half the time.

This is one of the problems of gaming the war. The battles are so lop sided with respect to troop strengths. Only the skirmish at Las Guasimas doesn't have this disparity in troop strength. This would be a good wargame of what might have happened if the Spanish didn't run away as they did historically.

I plan on gaming El Caney some time. It has the same disparity in numbers as San Juan Hill but Richard feels it's a more interesting battle and should receive more attention. The maps I have on the battle are quite crude. However, Richard's new rule book Rough Riders has a great map and orders of battle. I hope my account of Richard's and my own San Juan game was interesting and helpful.