There's a rather ironic civil service in-Joke about projects. According to it a supervisor calls in a worker to receive a special project assignment which includes a lot of very specific directions. The worker promptly turns to. works very hard and produces the assignment on time.

Unfortunately the boss decides "no, that's not what I really want, I wanted you to (fill in with new specific instructions which replace the ones already given)!"

This game continues a varying number of times until the boss finally ends it with those traditional words. "that's just exactly what I wanted, why didn't you do it that way the first time!"

It seems to me that the present state of ancient gaming is rather like this. We're still trying to figure out just exactly what we as gamers want from our games and those poor souls who write rules sets are still trying to help us to figure out just what we really want!

Again it's interesting to see where we've been and what drove us along the way. From about 1969 to the rise of 15mm figures. war gaming came to be very strongly dominated by so-called tactical war games. When Phil Barker produced the first edition of WRG, his figure to actual troop scale was 1 to 20 or what became known as the tactical scale. In this. he went right along with American Civil War and just about every other war gaming period. The fact that there weren't that many sources of figures rather helped this state too. For instance back in 1972, there was only one known importer of Minifigs in this country. When they were out. everybody snarled around until a new shipment arrived from the UK!

Philosophically we started out with the impression that in writing rules detail was everything, and hence it was useless to think in terms of an excess. This was defended in terms of realism.. Combat was a complex and difficult process to understand. To model it successfully. you had to resort to complex methods. The complex and convoluted rules sets in fact seemed to encourage a modern equivalent to the successful ancient general - namely gamers who were successful because they knew the rule book cold and precisely when to execute what maneuver.

Then during the late 1970's. sources of ancient 25mm figures increased and manufacturers discovered the 15mm figure. As individual figure collections got larger and larger, people began to demand rules sets so one could refight large battles of Alexander without bogging down in overly finicky tactical detail. Napoleonic gamers discovered grand-tactical rules sets so they could be Napoleon or at least a marshal of France. The break through moment for ancients gamers came when Phil Barker wrote WRG 7th. thereby shifting the focus of his rules to the grandtactical level.

About the same time, some players began to demand a simplifying of the rules environment to allow for more emphasis on pure tactics and less on rules-lawyering. Next came the realization by authors like Phil Barker that the higher the game level was set, then the more detail could be abstracted and still leave the player satisfied as to its accuracy and realism. Once you've decided that all Roman legionaries from Marius' reforms through the end of the Patrician Roman units can be designated as Bd (O) @ 7 AP, then you needn't worry about issues such as armor, weapons, or elite status. That means fewer rules. tables. etc. When you abstract out all of this detail, a side benefit is an elegantly simplified rules manual which becomes instantly playable.

With the publicat10n of edition 1.1 of DBA, we even see the alignment of a beginning, three-page rules set which gently points newconners to a more comprehensive and advanced set. The publication of Armati, provides another range of abstraction from a beginning to the final epic game.

Incidentally his rise of grand-tactical rules sets is really changing the whole discourse on ancient war gaming. Under previous rules sets details counted heavily because they affected army lists and even how troops performed. Ever since Armies and Enemies of Imperial Rome. 1st edition. it's been an article of faith among ancient gamers that later Imper1al Roman 1nfantry wore a leather cuirass rather than some type of metal like chain mail. Simon MacDowell's recent Osprey book on late Roman infantry proves he isn't the first or only person arguing this point. I know won't get an argument if I show up with a DBM book two list 64 middle imperial Roman army. from the time of Septimius Severus which has 30 stands of legionaries wearing chain mail and not that leather armour. My opponent might find my choice of figures aesthetically interest1ng but won't be concerned because no matter what these figure are wearing. they're still under DBA/M Bd's not MI, LHI. or HI. This makes me wonde just how many disproven or even dubious bits of ancient warfare will hang around. simply because gamers don't have a vested interest to challenge them.

Future?

So what of the future? One interesting possible trend is the UK firm of Wargames has caught onto the potential of converting their fantasy battle rules to straight historical ancients games. This approach was broached over the past year in a series of articles in "Wargames Illustrated" describing a set up of late Romans versus Germanic tribesmen. It's also been a feature of many demonstration games through out the UK convention circuit. All signs, so far point toward its success when a straight historical set gets published and targeted towards ancients war gainers. If you've never heard of them Wargames is behind the Warhammer rules. Their bright/garish (your choice) large and very well-stocked shops are prominent in busy places in the UK like Edinburgh's Royal Mile between the Castle and Holyrood House. This is very noticeable when you can't find an equally large shop selling historical figures in the same locations. With their individually mounted figures, this set may well prove to be a wave of our future. This might also be that long-hoped for way ol gently moving fantasy gamers towards historical ancients. This could be a defining moment 1n the history of ancients gaming.

So what else could be new anyway? Years ago I had a class in marketing which taught that the ideal spot in business was to be in the market place with a product which no other seller has to offer. Based on this. there are a few wide-open spots in the market place which I should like to commend to aspiring authors. It does seen to me that doing endless variants of the logic and philosophy behind Tactica, DBA/M and Armati won't be what gamers want or will buy.

First given the supplanting of WRG 6th edition, I do think there's a significant group of ancients gamers out there just yearning for the return of rules with a 1 to 20 or 33 scale and hav1ng all the detail which current grand-tactical sets avoid. Doing this means gett1ng around two primary challenges. The prospective new author must have some ideas for innovative structures and mechanisms which are not merely repeating Phil Barker's previous thoughts on this subJect. Another challenge or opportunity would be to use new graphics technologies to impart a great deal of information without overwhelming the gainers. Such a set would be a genuine innovation and meet the needs of an unsatisfied segment of gamers.

The second line of approach is to develop an effective and ready method of generating specific rules sets aligned to actual historical foes. Such an aproach would be a nice compromise of giving the rich, ripe specific detail to delight an enthusiast in exchange for sacrificing the material extraneous to the battles being fought. For instance. a refight of Agricola Vs Calgacus in 84 AD would generate no cause to worry about elephants or gunpowder artillery so why waste rules on them? At the same time both sides have a very strong interest in performance of twin-horse chariots and the tribal rush fares against auxiliaries.

So you could generously lay on the detail here and still keep the rules reasonably short and playable. While a 40 hour work week with computers causes me to avoid them after hours on general principle, a computer-generated specific set might be very workable. The trick here would be to have a reasonably large number of groupings ready to go when you publish and not have people waiting still years later for match-up as is the case with Ancient Empires.

Another possibility would be to produce games investigate special problems in gaming. For example a Roman legion trying to maintain and fight from the ares triplex against Hannibal faces a very different world from that of a small late Roman field force. 4500 years is a long time span to include in our games and it may be that certain sets just do a better job with special aspects like recreating a Dark Ages infantry shield wall than do other sets. This one differs from the second approach in that the goal is to specialize in a particular time (i.e. 3rd century AD) or problem t i.e. early cavalry army command and control) compared to specific armies's problems.

A final point of departure would be to limit command choices but show the details of the results of your decisions. So your Trajanic Roman legion, once locked into a straight-forward sword fight isn't going to maneuver very much or do anything really dramatic. Instead you get to see the melee develop and watch the race as your cohorts feed in more fresh replacements to try to wear down an all-out Dacian charge. Gamers who are fond of Xerxes' Immortals and want to see them in action would probably like this approach.

Compared to say 1969, today we have a wide variety of interesting ideas and concepts to use for ancient gaming. Put another way our tools have gotten more subtle and refined. Perhaps we're getting closer afterall to where we really want to go. But if nothing else the trip is proving to be agreeable and interesting.