My friend, Capt. Mitch Abrams brought up a point to me not long ago. We'd fought together in a game over the weekend and he was wondering why wargame rules couldn't have some kind of restrictions against suicidal attacks or soak-offs in the old AH boardgame terrainology. Other than losing the poor gays, there really is no guilt or psychological effect on their commander who commits them to their destruction.

Now this might seem to smack too much of the "war is hell" syndrome of wargame realism. I remember playing a game in St. Louis where John Zaharias and I tried to simulate an Arab attack on a French fort. It started out innocently enough. John had his sand table set up with dunes surrounding the scratch-built fort with a small oasis made up of artificial palms and a hollowed out depression for a well. We had some airfix figures which we decided needed a better paint job. So I took mine home and stayed up most of the night painting them (my first experience with shading in the mid-sixties). John wanted to take pictures. He had an elaborate photo set-up and the next morning, half asleep as I was, I saw that something was still missing from our "realistic" battle scenario. With a little work we soon had real water in the cat's dish surrounded by real shrubbery for our oasis.

We started to play and as night came, we wanted to simulate this on the wargame table! John lit a candle at one side of the table which served as our "moonlight" and a tiny candle inside the fort did duty as lanterns, etc. Needless to say, at dawn's early light, what with our almost total exhaustion and bleary eyes, many troops had wandered to places not intended.

Anyway, this just serves to illustrate the problems that we can run into by becoming too realistic in our approach to the hobby, but it was a lot of fun!

Getting, back to the original premise of this article, Mitch thought that a useful deterrent to soak-offs, forlorn hopes, suicidal charges, etc. would be to have those figures which were casualties in a game handed over to an impartial referee and deposited in a can of paint remover! No more to-the-last-man charges with those exquisitely done Crusader knights. If defeat looks you in the eye, will there be any more "what the hell, it's the 12th period anyway" major assaults on enemy positions?

In Jack Scruby's TTT magazine in the early sixties there was an even more permanent solution brought up. Take a hammer and smash the lost figures to pieces! Not many takers on that one.

How a bout a compromise? Why not take the casualties of a battle and allow the opponent to keep them? At the end of a game, these will be exchanged on a one for one basis with the remainder either being kept by the new owner or ... RANSOMED! Too Medieval you say? Yes, for me as well. But just think if twenty years ago that suggestion in TTT had been adopted by the fledgling WRG in England, we would now not only be ordering our 7th edition rules and new lists, but our official 7th edition mallet as well!