1 . I've been writing wargaming articles for over two decades... I've submitted items to THE COURIER, LONE WARRIOR, WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED, and, of course, a continual input to the REVIEW. Whether my thoughts on gaming ploys and procedures are silly or not, the focus has been, for the most part, devoted to the idea of forcing the gamer to make some sort of tactical decision on the table top... not the simple decisions concerned with 'should I move up 3 stands or 47, but a more complex series of decisions dealing with logistics, and unit reaction, and the augmentation and assistance of officers, etc. Many systems have been tried and discarded. Some have been discarded because they didn't work, and others discarded because I lost interest in them, and still others because they did work, but I saw no reason to develop them further. What is interesting to me is that, in the past recent years, a number of rules systems have been placed on the market which utilize procedures I abandoned years ago, simply because they just didn't gel, they led to logical inconsistencies, or they simply produced a slow, boring game. A case in point is DESPERADO, a 'wild, wild west' skirmish game which is card driven in that each man on the field has his name on a number of cards in the deck, and he's activated when his card is drawn. DESPERADO simply places the cards of all men in one huge deck, producing a rather thick stack if there are, say, 15 men on the field, and each man has 3 cards. The 'thick stack' syndrome, in turn, results in a slow moving game, as each player waits and waits and waits for the cards of his men to be drawn. A secondary problem with the 'thick stack' procedure is that it is possible to have a run of cards which permit only the men on one side to function... the other side simply waits and contemplates their collective navels and twiddles their fingers until one of their own cards finally appears. I learned through experience to divide the cards of each side into separate piles, and pick from the piles alternately, so that the action would swing back and forth between the sides, ensuring that both sides always had something to do. Of interest to me is that in the latest COURIER (No 75), there's an article by Dick Bryant on modifying DESPERADO for the French and Indian War. Dick thanks DESPERADO author Tom Kelly for permission to use his rules and states: "Tom tells me that he got the idea for DESPERADO from an article that appeared in the COURIER some time ago, 'Two Gun Brown Comes To Town'." The "Two Gun" article was written by me, one of my very early efforts... it used action cards and each side had its own deck. In this wild west game, there were about six or eight men on the table, a maximum of, say, four per side, and hence the action deck per side never amounted to more than a total of some 10 or 12 cards. Thus even way back then, I was smart enough to create two decks and to not overload a single deck with too many cards. While I'm pleased that Tom Kelly read my article, my delight is somewhat tempered by his resorting to the 'thick stack' procedure. If Mr. Kelly will pardon me, I'll disassociate myself from DESPERADO. Wussest of the Wussest Another instance of a rules set that employs the wussest of the wussest concerns the BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER (BAB) rules, an ACW skirmish game at the squad level. BAB is also card driven, and again the authors have succumbed to the 'thick stack' syndrome, but in this case, it's even wusser. Here, when an action phase occurs, and units move, two cards are drawn from the deck for every action phase...it's quite possible that the cards will refer to units on opposite sides. Which means that now, in effect, we have simultaneous movement, the very procedure which the introduction of the card system was designed to prevent. Fairly recently, I observed several games of PIQUET (PT), and here, too, the author incorporated a technique which I had discarded. PT is card driven, and Bob Jones, the author, gives each side its own deck... it's the content of the decks with which I have trouble. In his Napoleonic version, Jones has 28 cards for the 'standard' French deck. Of these 28, 3 of them are "infantry in the open will move" cards... and another 3 are "cavalry in the open will move". The ACW and Franco-Prussian sequence decks follow the same pattern. To my mind, there are far too few movement cards. The movement distance for infantry-in-line is in the order of 6 inches when a movement card appears. The draw of the entire deck, therefore, produces an infantry advance of only 18 inches up the field. Exacerbating this slow movement rate is the fact that there are only two 'maneuver' cards in the deck... these cards allow a wheel of up to 180 degrees. Here, therefore, one must wait and wait to execute a simple maneuver. Indeed, one must wait and wait to reload muskets (2 cards out of 30). All this 'wait time', supposedly to represent the command and control problems faced by commanding officers in the field, produces what I call a 'choppy' sequence of events. Events flow neither smoothly nor logically... for example, if the officer wants first to wheel his men, and then advance, but the 'move in the open' card appears before the 'maneuver' card, does this mean that the officer got his orders mixed up, or he doesn't know what he's doing, or his men are completely misinterpreting his orders, or... what? I can understand what the author wants to do, but I think that the multi-card-action method he uses to carry out his intentions is awkward, and that there must be a more elegant way of showing the 'fog of war'. For the most part, when I gin up a card driven game, I give the opposing commanding officers a number of 'actions'... an action is not precisely defined, but it gives the officer some leeway... the action permits the officer to have his men fire or move or wheel or reload or change formation, etc. The more actions received by the officer, the easier it is for his men to understand and carry out his orders. I've also found that the fewer cards there are in the action decks, the smoother-flowing the game. Back to PW Review January 1999 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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