George Jeffrey's "variable bound" concept pops up occasionally in my thoughts as, from time to time, I try to develop a gaming structure to account for real-time activities on the table-top. And of late, I've been playing with a "siege" game, in which Side A besieges Side B's fortification, and in which the time consumed by each game turn is not constant. There are "tactical turns", representing one day's activities, interspersed with "strategic turns" in which the passage of time-per-turn can vary from a single day to two or three months. Putting Jeffrey's concept together with those of the siege game, I thought I would try to come up with a "big picture" game, one in which a bound was more than the 20-to-30 minute period usually found in most of the miniatures wargaming rules sets. The first cut at this used the following definitions: a. A bound, a full turn, represented the passage of a day. At the end of the bound came nightfall. b. The scale was 2 miles to the inch... the ping-pong table, 108 inches by 60 inches, thus represented an area some 54 miles by 30 miles, a small theater of war, rather than a single battlefield. c. The basic single-stand unit was defined to be a brigade, 4 stands became a division, and several divisions (somewhere around 12 to 16 stands) formed a corps. d. During the bound - one day - an infantry unit was permitted to march a maximum of 18 inches, or 9 miles. It could only do so if it was in column formation. e. Due to the large scale (2 miles to the inch), the combat routines subsumed the firing procedures. f. The time span between bounds was variable, decided by a dice throw: Passage-Of-Time Table 01 to 33 one night 34 to 66 2 full days 67 to 100 4 full days Under the provisions of item (f), dice were thrown at the end of each turn, i.e. , at the end of the day, and the passage of time between turns was determined. If a low number was tossed (33 or below), the game continued with the next bound representing the next day. If other than a low toss occurred, then the 2- or 4-day time period which would elapse between turns permitted units to recover, to move, to deploy, etc. , before the next game turn commenced. Given this timing system, certain surrealistic situations could occur. For example, a corps could move forward, and during the last phase of the turn, i.e., the last phase in the day, deploy in the proximity of an enemy position, readying for an attack the next day. Then, as dice were tossed to determine the between-turns time span, the corps commander could find that, suddenly, instead of merely one night passing, 4 days had passed since his troops deployed! This could be interpreted in a number of ways: perhaps the commander was extremely inefficient (4 days!) in terms of readying his assault force, perhaps he vacillated concerning the time of the start of the actual attack, perhaps - just as he was prepared to launch the attack - headquarters mandated that he postpone the attack... in short, one can dream up lots of cover stories. When we tried the system on the gaming table, it was only natural that the dice ran against us. It seemed that whenever we referred to the Passage-Of-Time Table on the preceding page, 4 days would elapse between bounds. The battle was defined to take a total of 20 days; either the attacking commander could obtain his objective within this time span, or he had to quit and go home. The first day's moves were made, and we diced for the between bounds time span, which turned out to be 4 days... thus a total of 5 days had passed. The sixth day's moves were then made, and we diced again... another 4 days, so that a total of 10 days had passed. And when the dice were thrown after the eleventh day's moves were made... another 4 days! Which meant that although 16 days had passed, we only had had three tactical turns during the entire time span. What this meant was that a great deal of "strategic" between-turns movement took place after each one-day tactical turn. In fact, most of the action in the game occurred between-turns. During the tactical turn, we'd form the troops up, resolve our attacks, and the loser'.- units would fall back. Then, between-turns, because of the long time span involved, forces would recover and be ready for the attack on the next tactical turn. The consensus: an interesting ploy, but it needs a lot of work and a lot of thought for its implementation. This first cut indicates that the between-turns passage-of-time concept seems to be more easily adaptable to a siege configuration, wherein the forces are relatively static, than to an actual battle between two fluid, moving forces. Back to PW Review October 1994 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com