Dick Bryant, Editor of THE COURIER, recently ran a picture of a wargame in progress with lots of "clutter" on the table, and mentioned how this type of thing detracts from the appearance of our wargames. I have to agree with him on this subject, however, some of it is difficult to avoid, and it really, of course, depends upon how much it bothers the individual game master. When I look at a wargame in progress, I do enjoy seeing "how it visually looks" and the less table clutter, the better. There are some very non-essential items we frequently see on tabletops: coffee cups, pop cans, plastic bags full of purchases from the dealer area, caps, jackets, sunglasses, keys, convention flyers, food items, etc. This stuff is not needed and it should be "gamer etiquette" to find other places to store their personal items. Obviously, there are essential items required to allow us to conduct our wargames. Dice - there are things you can do about "dice clutter" but I've always been able to accept dice on a tabletop. I've seen people use cups of one type or another; closed plastic containers, etc., and games, such as mine, using a lot of dice, could result in less visual appeal. Rulers, or some type of measuring device, are needed. I can't say that I have seen any substitute for them in games. One possibility would be wooden dowels marked as to distance, especially for artillery fire though it would be possible, I suppose, to mark inches for measuring movement distances on them as well. If they were color coded, they would be more effective/attractive on the tabletop. Most people distribute "cheat sheets" and I think the only way around this type of clutter is to either ask gamers not to put them on the table (won't work) or write cheat sheet information on large poster boards for gamers to see. I've seen people put a poster board cheat sheet supported in some fashion on a nearby table. This would work. The area of wargames clutter which does bother me is that of marking casualties and identifying unit morale. There are pipe cleaners and plastic casualty caps, for identifying casualties and they always end up being scattered all over the table. In several rules sets I've written, I've used "whole-stand removal" and it has worked well for me. If you take one casualty on a three-figure stand, you roll a D6 and you have one-third of a chance of losing the entire stand and two-thirds chance to keep the whole stand. Where we can easily really make a difference is in the area of morale markers. I've used casualty figures (prone and falling wounded) to denote different morale states and I really like this approach. Any other ideas out there?  Back to MWAN # 125 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com