I'm the kind of of wargamer who wants to experience the "I was there" feeling in miniature wargames. The more I can experience the chaos and confusion of a battle, the better. Of course, I'm dam glad I can walk away from my weekly gaining and return to the comforts of home. Yet, I always look forward to matching wits with my next opponent.

A favorite period is the American Civil War, many of my ancestors fought in the war, some died. Perhaps because the Civil War is not only a great triumph as well as the worst tragedy of this country we can never forget it. I, for one, learned much about the history of the war through my wargaming.

This article describes a favored method of wargaming, the "eye-level" battle. Developed by the president of my old club in California, I've played this type of game many times. In fact, I much prefer it to the traditional "God-Like" view that most games result in.

The essence of the eye-level experience is that each player sees only what his personality figure can see on the battlefield. No more does the player enjoy the ability to observe threats to his flank or that the second line of enemy is far out of supporting distance. No, in this type of game, chaos and confusion are the norm. A battle-plan will never survive contact with the enemy and player's generally don't learn the "whole story" until the game is ended.

To play an eye-level game, you need only a few simple things: umpires, a raised table, players, figures, and lots of terrain.

Prior to the start of the game, the umpires will set up the gaining area. My club usually used the 30"x72" tables that can be found at discount outlet stores or some department stores. These tables would be elevated by some method, usually chairs, so that the table edge would be just above the nose of a man sitting upright in a chair.

Terrain, and lots of it, would be set up according to the scenario or battle being played. Of great importance are big, leafy trees, and large bushes, shrubs, walls, and fences. Generally, anything that will break up flat terrain. Hills and valleys are also important and favored. Really, very few battlefields are completely flat. Most have small differences in elevation that conceal blind spots or obstacles.

Then, the umpires will set up the troops for the scenario. Personality figures, one per player, will be placed near where they would be in reality, generally with their men. One chair per player would then be set around the tables, one chair next to where a personality figure is present on the table.

Any player arriving in a later turn would be placed several feet behind his base edge, so as to prevent him from getting a good look of the action.

Once everything was setup, the umpires would designate a C-in-C for each team who would then assign commands, usually a brigade or division, to each player. As each player receives his command, the umpires would tell him where to sit. Each player would be allowed a brief view of the battlefield, brief meaning perhaps 10 seconds. After that, the players were to never raise their nose above the table edge. Doing so would result in severe penalties which will be explained later.

When everyone was seated, the C-in-C's would give their players a general battle plan and objective, beyond that, no talking was allowed for the rest of the game, at least no talking about the game.

What is important to the eye-level experience is that the players not be hampered with any non-historical and non-battle related minutia. For example, players never roll dice, as all die rolling is done by an umpire. Players never measure distances and move their troops, this is all done by an umpire. In fact, even knowing the rules is not important, generally the umpires don't tell you which rules set they are using for the game.

What is needed is that the players have a general knowledge of period tactics and capabilities. Reason being, is that each turn, an umpire will ask the players in succession what their orders are for their units.

For example, an umpire will ask you what you want your brigade to do. You respond, "I want to advance in column with skirmishers deployed." The umpire moves the troops and now your movement is done. If you have any combat, the umpire asks if you want to fire or not, if so, he rolls the dice and whispers the casualties to you which you record on a unit card. If you do any damage to your opponent, all you're told is "you see a number of the enemy fall due to your fire" or something along those lines and your opponent records any casualties that he received. That's it, the turn is over.

You, as the player, only see what your personality sees. If he's stuck behind a hill, you're not going to see much. If you decide to try and get a better view, well that's possible, but you may want to consider if there's any enemy on the other side of that hill first.

As fire combat happens, the umpire will place pieces of cotton balls in front of the firing units. Each successive turn of firing creates a larger accumulation of "smoke." After a while you, the player, can't see beyond your unit, if that. Generally what happens during the battle is the player sees less and less of his troops as they move further and further away towards the enemy. If your troops move beyond a hill, you simply lose line of sight to them and must then base your orders on knowledge of the terrain and reported enemy positions. The more "smoke", trees, and terrain in the way, the more likely you are to lose control of the situation as you lose the ability to direct your troops based on what you see.

Eventually, if the player's troops move far enough, he'll be allowed to move his chair around the table to the opponent's side. Otherwise, he's stuck with seeing less and less of his command.

As you can see, this method of gaining simulates the realistic situation of a commander losing the ability to control his forces. As time progresses, smoke and terrain prohibit you from knowing much at all. Since your knowledge of the damage being inflicted on the enemy is limited, you don't quite know if he's close to breaking or fleeing. Generally, your first glimpse of this is when the umpire tells you, "the enemy to your front is running away." Of course, you don't know if this is because they are routing or because it's a ruse.

In my own experience of playing this way, what I was able to see during any one game were the battleflags of my regiments and the tops of trees and buildings. Many times I knew there were enemy formations on the other side of a hill or rise, but didn't know their strength or deployment. I was often flanked and had to fall back to save my command. Another time, I pursued a routing enemy only to find that I was being cut off from help. How often does this happen in most normal games?

Since talking about the game with the other players was prohibited, we were allowed to write orders or send reports to our fellow commanders on small sheets of paper. These were then given to an umpire who either delivered them or not. Usually, we were asked to whom the message was supposed to go and where we thought the recipient was. The message would travel via "courier" in the direction we named. Often, the battle situation changed a bit before the courier arrived and he was either captured, killed, or had to go looking for the intended recipient.

Sometimes, the message would arrive ripped, tom, or otherwise mutilated. Red ink (blood) or black ink (smeared message) would occasionally disfigure the message and we wouldn't be able to read everything. This alone caused a lot of confusion about orders and objectives.

If we had a player who stuck his nose above the table, and was therefore able to see more than he should, often his units became "stupid" and moved a bit less or fought a bit worse. Formations would become disorganized, couriers would go missing, or any other nasty thing that the umpires could think of. As you can tell, the idea is to not see everything, but to try to command and fight with a general lack of knowledge.

We never had a rules question or problem come up. The players simply didn't know enough to have a problem with the way the umpires were doing things. The lack of rules discussion and arguments alone sped up the games tremendously.

The number of umpires had a great effect on the speed of the game. Our rule of thumb was one umpire to every four players. Each umpire took care of his assigned players and that's it. Gaines went very quickly this way.

Now that I am 3300 miles away from my old club, I haven't been able to play the eye-level games and I miss it. I'm hoping to run a demo game at the Game Parlor in the future, but I'll need someone to bring the figures. My old club president had over 3000 15mm ACW figures on his own, so we were never short of troops. Alas, I don't have that many and probably never will.

I'm sure than many of you have probably thought about this gaming method, if not actually participating in such a game. If you have never had the opportunity, then you've really missed out.

As for me, I'll never forget my many eye-level battles and I will hold out hope of playing that way again.