by Richard Cox (Futura Publications, London, 1974). This book is unique as far as I know, in that it is a full length novel based on events which happened not in real lifep but in a wargame. It describes an attempted German invasion of Britain in September 1940 and it was played out at Sandhurst in January 1974. Although highly dramatised (there were no rules in the game for Bombardier Brown's spirit stove flickering and spitting in quite the way it does on page eleven), and in places downright inaccurate, the book succeeds in conveying an impression of the battle as it might very well have happened. As the designer, writer and co-ordinator of the wargame itself, however, I am disappointed that Mr. Cox saw fit not to discuss the technical aspects of the game. Instead, he conveys the impression that our distinguished advisers were alone responsible for the umpiring, although this was far from the case. There was a large and complex umpiring organisation which used the specialist advisers only as a backstop, and there had been a two day computerised "Battle of Britain" as a preliminary to the main game which is not even mentioned in the book. Players imported from Germany at great expense by the "Telegraph Magazine" are all mentioned, but the reader is left entirely in the dark as to the identities of the victorious and highly professional British team. This is hardly the place to go into all the technical details, but suffice it to say that the Sea Lion wargame was a mixture between the normal "fun" wargame techniques as used for map games -- i.e. two playing rooms and an umpire in between, all with their own maps and a set of rules -- and the more formal military style of wargame with a large staff marking up the evolving position and a committee of experts debating the results of actionsv without reference to a set of rules. Thus each move that a player might wish to make went first to his immediate umpire -- land, sea or air -- who would usually consult a set of rules to decide the outcome. In some cases this umpire would refer the action to a panel of experts who would discuss it for ten minutes or so before giving a result. In the event this mixture worked quite well and added a flexibility which would have been absent from any simple set of rules-on its own. It was the team of umpires who were actually on the telephones, of course, who did most of the donkey work, and I should like to take this opportunity to thank them -- John Davis from South London, Dennis Barr and Andy Callan from Lancaster, and Tony Thomas and Nigel de Lee from Sandhurst. Also my particular thanks are due to Ivan Collier and his computer team for all the work they put in for us. As a contribution to the literature of wargaming "Sea Lion" is like many other battle reports over interested in the personal emotions of supposed troops in the battle, much less interested in the strategy, and not at all interested in the mechanics of the game. If something had been done to reverse this order the book would have been of much greater interest to wargamers, for at 50p, a time not everyone will want to buy it. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 156 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1975 by Donald Featherstone. 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