It seems as of late that I have been doing a lot of questioning of how we go about playing wargames. Perhaps this is a mid-wargaming-life crisis, having thirty something years of gaming. (We will leave unstated the total number of years necessary to achieve this!) Whatever the reason, my latest train of thought is concerned with the general question of why we include certain rules in our wargames. Some things we do just seem clumsy and always end up getting in our way. Without the annoying impediment of worrying about how to do it differently, let's just consider for a few moments why we have to have ...

Turns

Turns are always in the way. They never let you do what you want to and never keep the other guy from doing what you do not want him to do. They are patently unrealistic and unhistoric; after all, did Napoleon every worry about a turn?

If you are moving, you are moving. If you are standing you are standing. You should not have this herky-jerky move-stand-move-stand jitterbug that goes on in the game.

Instead of turns we need "opportunities." An opportunity gives you the chance to do something, but does not guarantee it. Real commanders did not take turns. They took advantage of, or missed opportunities. A commander should not be given the chance to issue and execute an order at regular intervals simply because it is his turn. That is dumb.

Move Distances

On equal par with turns is move distances. I guess if you have turns you end up having move distances. But what lunacy, what artificiality. Why do we need it? Are we interested in how far someone can move in an artificially determined amount of time (which coincidentally never quite calculates out correctly any how)? Or are we interested in how far the formation gets before it becomes disordered, or losses elan, or gets hung-up crossing a terrain obstacle, or any one of a hundred other things happen to the formation to terminate its movement? We want results not statistics. Let's get into the action, that is where the fun is.

Fixed Sized Units

We always know how strong the other guy is. It's simple, just count the castings and bingo, you know what to expect when it comes to the fight. Did the real world guys get to do that? They tried, but they were not real good at it. Look at McClelland at Antietam; he looked at Lee's 30,000+ and saw 100,000. Did that impact the course of the battle? You bet it did! I once read of a cavalry versus Indians game in which the Indians got to place three times as many figures on the table as they actually had. The phony figures were used to build fear and uncertainty in the cavalry commander's mind. Can't we find some way of providing allusion in our games? Note that this is different than not putting figures on the board. That is both too hard to keep track of and too simple to overcome. I'm talking allusion here. Now you see 'em, now you don't.

Casualties

We spend two-thirds of our gaming time calculating casualties, but when does one of these calculations ever really make a difference in the game? In most rules systems, decisiveness is left to the morale rule (see below). Further more we spend the same amount of time computing the results of a skirmish stand firing at long range as we do for a regiment of cuirassiers charging someone in the flank. Tell me this makes sense! Why can't we do all this by descriptive terms like "Fresh," "Staggered," "Blown," "Wavering," "Battle Mad," etc? Wouldn't they convey all the information we need as commanders? Couldn't we have a mechanic that generated these terms more simply than all the hoopla we go through now to generate a casualty?

Morale Tests

Peter Young never included a morale rule in any of his wargames. I have had both David Chandler and Don Featherstone tell me that his rational for this was that "... morale is, after all, in the mind of the commander, isn't it." I find this a fascinating statement coming from an experienced combat commander. He is saying that morale is not something to be modeled in a wargame but something to be experienced by the wargamer.

I ran a very experimental game once that had a very different morale rule in it. It was very simple. If a unit you commanded received a casualty, you, the commander, had two choices open to you. You could decide to stand where you where and take the one casualty, but you would also have to take three more to represent the stragglers and skulkers that result from the real loss. Or, you could decide to fall back one move from your current position and all you had to take was the single casualty. There were no other morale effects as such. A unit could be reduced to one casting, but that casting could still stand and fight or attack and fight for that matter. This simple change liked to drive the players crazy.

I must say that I really did see morale in the minds of the commanders. It really created uncertainty, even though the rule was absolutely deterministic. But the really interesting thing was that I thought the most historically accurate part of the entire game was the way this morale rule worked. Never had I seen such a subtle, but significant impact of morale on the playing of the game.

So what are we left with? A game that has no turns, no move distances, no fixed unit sizes, no casualties. and no morale checks. Think how simple it would be to play! Impossible you say? It is if you think it is!