A Spell with the Black Dog and a Couple of Quick Reviews

First blog post after a bit of a hiatus, on this occasion the result of a relatively minor depressive episode. Those who know me well know that I have been prone to depression for pretty much my whole life and that I have at times found myself in some very uncomfortable places as a result. This time the trigger was a period of intense stress both at home, where I care for a wife with young-onset Alzheimers and a son with autism, and at work.

I don’t want to come across as remotely self-pitying, I know many people with heavier burdens than mine to bear, including both my wife and son. It is merely an observation that might help readers to understand where I am coming from sometimes.

An upside of decades of depressive illness, combined with a tendency for self-analysis, is that you develop a close familiarity with your own emotional and cognitive processes, and an intense sensitivity to looming crises and what is likely to trigger or to soften them. I tend to recognise almost to the minute the point at which I am starting to unravel, and my excellent GP is always happy to work with me to identify a solution. Which leads to another upside of decades of depressive illness: that moment when you feel the cloud begin to lift. You go through hell to get there, but it’s one of the sweetest feelings you’re ever likely to get. It’s like making up with a partner after an ugly row, or the sudden coming of spring after a hard winter – it takes you by surprise to realise that life can be good.

While plodding through the murk I found that, while I wasn’t quite feeling sociable enough for much gaming activity, I did recently get to read a couple of decent books so thought I would share some details here.

For the first, Chris Carey’s Thermopylae, I have to immediately add a disclaimer and say that the author is my elder brother so I am biased. That said, being a Professor of Classics most of his output to date has been academic works that, even if they were about subjects of more interest to me, I would have struggled to read, or at least to understand more than one word in ten. This book, which he was invited by the Oxford University Press to write as one of their Great Battles series, is his first foray into more popular history and he has told me that it is the book he has enjoyed writing the most. Because ancient warfare has always had slightly less interest for me than modern, it took me far longer than it should have done for me to read the free copy that I was given, with other books pressing for my attention.

Why did they always fight naked? That is never going to end well.

It’s a very good read though. What I liked most about it is that it was not in the least what I was expecting, which was a straightforward narrative of the battle. In fact the details of the fighting take up only a few pages out of more than 200. Most of it is more investigative or analytical writing about such topics as the reliability or otherwise of our sources, where the battle took place, the motives and aims of the antagonists, what the battle represented to contemporaries, and its lasting significance to ancients and to moderns. As a classical scholar of many decades and an expert in Herodotus Chris was certainly the man for the task, and the scholarship on display is seriously impressive. He also had a blast when researching the book, following the path of the Great King’s army from Western Turkey across the Hellespont and down through Greece to the fateful pass, there mapping and following all the possible routes along which the treacherous Ephialtes might have lead the Persian host to fall upon the Greek rear. The enjoyment he had in researching and writing the book, along with his sheer enthusiasm for the subject, comes through in the style, which is engaging and witty.

I find I am curious now to look at other books in the series to see if they take a similar approach to their subject. I see that so far the OUP have published volumes on Agincourt, Lutzen, Culloden, Waterloo, Rorke’s Drift/Isandhlwana and El Alamein.

The second book I read was an older one that I first read back when it was first published in the 1980’s and is more social history than military: The Old Lie : The Great War and the Public School Ethos by Peter Parker (yes, when I first saw it I thought of Spider Man too). The theme of the book is how the public school culture that grew up in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century – athletic, anti-intellectual, deeply male-oriented, with its emphases on honour, fair play, intense emotional attachment to school and ones peers there – was instrumental in creating a generation with the exact mindset that was required to fulfil its tragic destiny as cannon fodder in the trenches of the Great War. The more so since the public schools were so evangelical and their ethos spread by school stories and magazines, as well as the missions that the schools set up in inner city areas to bring their culture to the benighted masses there.

No, not that Peter Parker

Parker follows the history of the schools from the barbaric bear-pits of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century when boys were subject to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of all-powerful prefects and there were school riots that necessitated calling out the militia (Floreat Seditio was scrawled on the walls of Eton during one ruck at the time of the French Revolution); through the first steps of reform initiated by the revered Dr Arnold of Tom Brown’s Schooldays fame, and then the more profound reforms of the Clarendon Commission of 1861-6, to the schools’ heyday of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

When war broke out in 1914 and the British Army needed a sudden and dramatic increase in numbers, the only ready source of officers was the OTCs of the public schools. The response was overwhelming, as evidenced by the appalling casualty lists that all the schools had to show on the memorials that were built post-war. The poignancy of all these young officers, imbued with that ethos of honour and service and swearing, bizarrely as it seems to us now, to die for their schools as readily as for King and country, marching off to perish miserably in the mud and horror of the western front, makes the book quite a sobering read. The theme of loss of innocence is a strong one, but there is an underlying anger to the book, at a culture that was ready to so mindlessly condone and encourage such a sacrifice. That the image of young men dribbling a football across a blasted muddy wasteland before being mown down could be seen as something rather sporting, to celebrate (‘True to the land that bore them, the Surreys played the game’) as opposed to something quite grotesque is a reminder of quite how foreign the past can be.

Again, a good read (although possibly not the best choice for an already low mood!), especially if, like me, an interest in things military co-exists with a nostalgic fascination for old public school stories (another disclaimer: I love the Greyfriars/Billy Bunter stories and have a huge and unwieldy collection of Magnet reprints that I can sadly hardly read anymore because the print is so small!).

Perhaps not the most coherent blog post but it's been a funny old month or so, hopefully what counts as normal service will be resumed soon! Hope all are well.

What makes us uncomfortable?

A recent cartoon on the Ragged Soldier blog, to which I gave an inchoate (and in fact largely alcohol-fueled) reply, reminded me of a subject that has always been of some interest to me, and which in fact was one of the topics I had in mind for an early entry when I created the blog. That is, the entire subject of what is considered unacceptable, or at least what we tend to feel less than comfortable with, in our wargaming.

Of course to some outside the wargaming community the hobby itself is often seen as odd at best and positively shameful at worst. I have heard of wargamers being challenged on why they should find this regrettable aspect of human history to be something of interest; to read about war is bad enough, but to play games about war is seen to be celebrating it, almost to relish the horrors that have always ensued when wars are fought.

While I have no qualms about my interest in things military, and while I regard myself as one of the most peaceable of chaps – a regard I extend to every wargamer I have ever met – I am still not exactly sure what defence I would make to such a challenge. War is hideous and always has been. If the military history books we read present an honest account of the wars they describe, complete with all the eye witness accounts of the suffering and the maiming and the misery, then there are grounds for the accusation that we are taking a ghoulish delight in such details; if the accounts are higher level or more academic, then we can be accused of glossing over the gory details and trying to distance ourselves from the realities of our subject. I would certainly have to admit that my interest in war started with an excitement at the spectacle (all those big blocks of brightly coloured soldiers in Waterloo or the row of gleaming white pith helmets lined up along the top of the mealie bags in Zulu!) and a part of that will always remain despite more sobering thoughts of the pity of war. As Thomas Hardy says, ‘War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading’. The fact that I have since those days developed a more cerebral interest in the theory and practice of war both in itself and in its political and social implications hardly seems to make my fascination any the less immature.

The realities of colonial warfare in the movies; war as spectacle

I mentioned in my comment on the Ragged Soldier blog the example of King Philip’s War, a game of colonial warfare in seventeenth century New England, which was published in 2010. Colonial warfare, with its often genocidal results, is always going to be a sensitive subject, and rightly so, so it is no surprise that the game aroused a degree of controversy when it was released. And, as most of the debates I saw were on the internet, it goes without saying that any sense of restraint or civility tended to disappear very quickly. That said, the communications I read between the game designer, John Poniske, and Native American representatives of the Wampanoag people who took part in the rising, were civil and dignified on both sides, and what mostly came through to me was an understandable misunderstanding of the word game. When most people think of games – that are not computer games – they think of the likes of Monopoly or Cluedo, and from that point of view a game about a colonial war might indeed be seen as trivialising the conflict. But for most wargamers that is not how we tend to approach the word. We would tend to regard our games as simulations and studies as much as ‘games’ in the traditional sense, and from that point of view designing a game about a subject such as King Philip’s War is a pretty serious undertaking.

The realities of colonial warfare as represented by King Philip's War; war as study

I would contend that from this point of view a thoughtfully designed wargame like King Philip’s War seems much less a trivialisation of something unpleasant than non-wargames that are set in the past and include contemporary institutions without making any comment upon them. Yet the potential for causing offence of such games never seems to make it onto the radar, presumably because in most cases they are not really intended to closely model any historical reality and most historical details that do appear in the game are more ‘chrome’ than anything.

Within the wargaming community itself there are often questions about whether certain nations or armies are ‘ok’ to play. Many players don’t like to play Second World War Germans or Soviets, or American Civil War Confederates. Again, while all we are doing is pushing around counters on a map, there is a slightly queasy awareness of what the counters represented in real life. Those SS counters we blithely move across the map of Russia were in reality groups of very unpleasant men committing all sorts of hideous atrocities as they went. It has never bothered me personally commanding those armies in games, but that might just be because, without any personal link to the events, I am able to establish a certain distance – my father served in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, and if you were to invite me to play a game in which I am a German U-Boat commander trying to sink a convoy in the North Atlantic, I am honestly not sure about how comfortable I would feel doing that. I suspect a part of me would envisage my Dad looking over my shoulder and being slightly aghast at what was going on. This unwillingness to play in a role that was in real life something that posed a lethal threat to a parent or grandparent seems not unusual.

That said, here we must acknowledge the nuances of history and the simple fact that nobody is innocent. The glorious Second World War allies of course included Stalin, so when we fight that Barbarossa game we can be sure that those red counters are guilty of just as many horrors as the grey. Similarly, those khaki counters we play with such enthusiasm…well, they were the colonial power of course, often the same khaki-clad chaps who committed such atrocities in peacekeeping operations from Malaya to Kenya after the war ended. Similarly, insisting that we always fight as the Union against the Confederacy perhaps seems politically naïve when one considers the actions of Federal troops against the Plains Indians. There has never been a nation or a tribe wholly innocent of the blood of others, nor an army that has always spared the innocent and harmed only those in arms against it.

There are also those who would argue that certain conflicts should not be gamed. We have seen this in the case of King Philip’s War, and colonial conflicts are always at the top of lists of games that some find unsettling. Others feel that the acceptability of a game is related more to its freshness in time. Is it ok to game a conflict that is still unresolved and in which people are still dying even as we roll the dice? Playing a game about the insurgency in Iraq, for example, when car bombs were going off in the streets of Baghdad with hideous consequences, would certainly seem indecent to some.

How recent does a war have to be to be acceptable as a game...

...and is it ok to put a humorous slant on contemporary atrocities?

I started this post with a distinct idea that I was going to reach a conclusion and I find I have failed to do so. I have just ended up going round a bit rather, which is fine, I often find myself doing that. It is certainly a subject that arouses passions on both sides of the argument. On the BoardGameGeek website it is often the case that even to suggest that playing some sides might make one feel uncomfortable, or that a certain game about colonial conflict in Africa is lacking in conscience because it downplays the role of the native population, quickly gives rise to accusations of being ‘woke’ (hate that damned word! Were previous generations all supposed to have been asleep up to this point?) or being a SJW (pretty much hate that too). People become defensive pretty quickly, this defensiveness often takes the form of lashing out and so is in turn seen as offensive and it is often difficult to get an honest and unimpassioned statement of how people really feel about these things. My own feelings tend to be fairly muddled, predictably; I generally don’t get offended by wargames but I can’t say why, and I can’t but feel some sympathy for those who question some of the games we play. Maybe, as in so many other areas of my life, I am just overthinking things. But it is to me yet another of the interesting aspects of an always interesting hobby.

Wheels and Wargames II - A Kind Gesture

Just a brief addendum to a post I made a week or two ago about my longstanding fascination with public transport and my perceived overlap of this fascination with an interest in things military.

On reading my post a friend made an extraordinarily kind gesture and gave me his collection of 1/76 scale buses, a collection he had been accumulating for some years but had never seen the light of day. He thought the buses deserved a measure of love and admiration that he felt unable to provide, and I was happy to be able to assure him with the utmost confidence that they would receive this chez moi. They are now indeed occupying a shelf with pride of place in my lounge, although for the moment they are having to share it with some incongruities. That Pharoah’s head will have to go elsewhere I think, and ditto those protective dragons from Hong Kong, although I fear the consequences of invoking their ire by anything that might be seen as a demotion.

There were no fewer than sixteen vehicles in the collection but I have included only a sample of them in the photographs I have inserted here; those uninterested in such things would hardly want more, while those who do share that passion…well, I wouldn’t want to set too many hearts a flutter.

The buses will make me a collector again in a small way. I plan to expand their number, and, again with a nod to the donor, the plan is to acquire vehicles from fleets that represent places in which I have spent time of some significance, whether in the UK or abroad. I rather like the idea of a memoir written in buses. New acquisitions will almost certainly find their way into a blog post from time to time, quite possibly along with some very self-indulgent description of their significance, so you have been warned.

So, many thanks again to the donor if he is reading; it only goes to show what thoroughly kind and thoughtful people one meets among the wargaming community.

Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre

 So, Friday Night was Vassal Night. (Yes, this is a very delayed entry I’m afraid, blame my ever-hectic social schedule. Actually, don’t)

I have always been a bit ambivalent about Vassal. It’s a boon to those gamers lacking real life opponents and pretty much a Godsend during the Covid lockdowns, and some of its modules – presumably those that model the more popular games – work extremely well. In fact, in a real-time game, I have found that most of the modules I have tried have been reasonably clear and intuitive. I always found the PBEM version much less satisfying – having to step through an opponent’s log file and watch their moves and hope they didn’t make any mistakes before starting your own log file and hoping you don’t make any mistakes just felt like a chore. This was amplified to the nth power for multiplayer games…all of a sudden you had three or four other player turns to step through to get round to your own and the whole thing became an almighty pain…

Anyhoo. It was nice just to be doing a bit of real-time gaming online or otherwise. Our Vassal game on this occasion was another stab, after some years, at Compass Games’ No Peace Without Spain!, one of those games with an exclamation mark in the title (The only other example in my collection being the WWII ETO game Unconditional Surrender!)! As the title indicates the game is all about the War of the Spanish Succession with one player as the Bourbons (France, Spain, Bavaria and, initially, Savoy) and the other as the anti_Bourbon Alliance (Britain, the United Provinces, the Empire, latterly Savoy, Portugal and potentially Hapsburg Spain).

Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre-ing. That's never a real horse.

The game is card-driven; after an initial drawing of Event cards that introduce random events that can benefit either party, the meat of the game is the alternate play of cards with numerical values of 1-3. The values represent points that can be used to activate armies to move or make siege attempts, to rally troops demoralised by earlier defeat or to bring up to full strength corps that have suffered losses. Battles are pretty much uncomplicated dice-fests: half a die for each half-strength corps, one die for each full-strength corps and a number of dice for each engaged general equal to their Tactical Rating, with each die hitting on a roll of 5 or 6.

The stately pace of early eighteenth century warfare is enforced by a very simple rule. No army can move into an enemy-controlled space unless they are moving out of a friendly-controlled one. The only way to control a fortress space is to capture the fortress; so, as every space in the UP and Spanish Netherlands is a fortress space, the only way one of the armies can move forward is by taking in siege every space along the way. A turn represents a year and each side has only five cards to play during that time, so given the strength of the fortresses it is unlikely that more than one major fortress will fall to either side during the course of a year.

One nice touch is that a sufficiently overwhelming victory results in a Famous Victory marker being placed in the space, and this has beneficial results for the siege die rolls of the victorious player in adjacent spaces for the rest of the year. They say it was a shocking sight, and all that.

The game mostly does the job. There is a strong element of luck in the sense that if one side happens to draw a hand of 3-strength cards while the other has all 1-strength the former is going to have many more actions available and therefore a very strong advantage, while the absence of die-roll modifiers means that the results of most battles tend to be largely fortuitous – having Marlborough and Eugene in the lineup is a significant advantage but not one that cannot be overturned just by having a slightly larger French army.

We managed to play the years 1702 and 1703, during which, as the Allies, I managed to defeat the French outside Antwerp and reduce the city, at some loss. This gain was balanced in Germany by the loss of Coblenz to superior French forces and the fall of Linz to the Bavarians, posing a direct threat to Vienna, the fall of which would end the game with an automatic Bourbon Victory. At this point I am not sure how likely it is that I will be able to reproduce Marlborough’s famous march to the Danube, and of course even if I do it will be obvious to the Bourbon player so unlikely to have quite the same impact it did in real life. And of course if I get a load of 1-strength cards and the Bourbons get a stack of 3’s Vienna is probably toast.

Marlborough looking good in Antwerp.

Vienna not looking very safe though.

One thing that soured me slightly against Compass Games was their follow-up game of the Nine Years War (what at school we used to call the War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697, a dress rehearsal for the WSS). It’s good for such a little-covered war to get any outing at all, but the game was published with a virtually identical system, and a virtually identical map, to this one. I have never played it but I feel instinctively that it might have been a scenario in this one as opposed to a separate game, so I doubt it is a game I will ever feel the need to own.

The decision to play the game led me to some idle reading around the period, which led me to reading about the folk song referenced in the title. Apparently it was a tune that had its origin in a false report of the death of Marlborough at the bloody Battle of Malplaquet in 1709 and I was vaguely aware from my Napoleonic readings that Le Petit Caporal was fond of humming it. I never knew it provided the tune for ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, so you learn something new every day.

Wheels and Wargames; Converging Passions

I’m pretty sure I am not imagining this – there is a definite correlation between an interest in military history and a fascination for public transport and I have often puzzled over why this is so.

My own interest in buses, trams and trains, I think, preceded my obsession with things military by about a year. Beginning some time in about 1975 my best mate Carl – similarly obsessed – and I used to get up on a Saturday morning and immediately after breakfast we would take the bus into the Pier Head on the Liverpool waterfront for a day of bus spotting.

Buses at the Pier Head in the 1970s; hideous building, but you know I quite miss it

There were several angles to our bus passion. Like most spotters we had a thing for the livery and model of the bus itself. That racing green that the MPTE* used on its buses - or oftentimes a lighter green with a yellow stripe running along the middle – was a thing handsome enough; but when there was a change in the livery due to promotion or advertisement, well, that was enough to excite us beyond measure. One of these promotions I remember particularly well - the Old Higsonians series which was run alongside adverts in the Liverpool Echo and even (I think) on Granada TV for the watery local brew, Higsons, and featuring legendary Merseysiders like Ann Field, Doc Road, Phil O’Monic, Rock Ferry, Count Erode and of course Pierre Head. You had to be there…

Some of the Old Higsonians; how we laughed.

If changes in livery left us entranced, changes in model left us scarcely coherent. At times of heavy usage the MPTE would blow the dust off some of its older stock and instead of the usual 1970s workhorse the Atlantean we would suddenly get an old open-platformed Routemaster roll into view as we waited at the bus stop. The other kids probably watched us with a mixture of amusement and pity as we jabbered excitedly over this unexpected treat. Thankfully Carl was hard enough to deter most physical manifestations of our peers’ amusement; on my own I would probably have been bounced off said bus repeatedly until a Dave-shaped dent gave it an additional rarity value.

What I think distinguished us from other spotters though was the sense of the exotic with which we regarded those buses on a Saturday morning. Taking up position right at the top of Water Street, where the street opened up onto the broad space in front of the river, we would watch the buses debouch from the narrow street like an invading army (you see what I did there?). Water Street was the only inbound route for buses to the Pier Head and at the time there were well in excess of 100 routes terminating there, which meant that there was a constant flow of buses to be seen coming up in that green and yellow stream, from all over the city. Some of the route numbers I remember even now, over 40 years later – 72 from Hunts Cross, 78 from Halewood, 17C from Fazakerley. Despite the fact that none of these places must have been more than a few miles from where we lived, the lack of any reason – or any easy route – to get there made them seem places far distant; so limited were our horizons that Speke or Garston might as well have been on the moon.

Bizarrely, we always romanticised one route in particular – the 12C to Cantril Farm. Cantril Farm sounded to us like some untouched bucolic quarter of Liverpool, silent but for the birdsong and the lowing of cattle and the occasional rumble of the 12C bus. It wasn’t until later that I discovered it was a recent overspill development that in the decade or so since its creation in the 1960s had already become a byword for inner city decline – it was interesting and instructive to read Red Dwarf’s Craig Charles’ memories of growing up there.

The 12C; they must have just finished cleaning the straw off it.

From hanging around the hideously ugly 1970’s Pier Head bus terminus lusting over the buses we graduated to hunting down books about trams and trains and – for my wealthier mate Carl at least – acquiring gorgeous Hornby train sets that he would set up in his grandad’s old shop. As always the key was in part the visual kick – I defy anyone to set eyes on a 1930’s period Liverpool Corporation Streamliner tram and not lose their heart completely to its luscious curves - and that always faintly exotic sense of the far-flung routes along which these lovely creatures actually ran. There’s something about a bus or train ride for me even now that will always carry some echo of the starry-eyed trips of my boyhood.

A 1930’s period Liverpool Corporation Streamliner tram...Mmmmm...

The thing is though that I thought this transport/war thing was just us, and I don’t think it is really. As I grew older I became used to seeing military and transport on neighbouring shelves not only in budget book shops but in W H Smiths. And there are also bookshops that cater explicitly to that happy mix of interests – for example the Ian Allan Book and Model shop in London’s Waterloo, where basically half of the shop is books about buses, trams and trains and the other is military books and models. The Pen and Sword publisher list also shows a very pointed blend of military and transport, only more recently branching out into other historical themes.

I guess the clue might be in the word ‘model’. Most of us wargamers will at least go through a phase where we are as concerned with modelling as with gaming, whether it’s gently removing the decals for our dogfight doubles in that little bowl of warm water, or producing the gorgeously detailed armies I see so often in the wargame blogs I follow (there but for a shakey hand and dodgy eyesight…) Similarly public transport is a mecca for the modeller, from those big elaborate Hornby train sets to the stunning – and correspondingly expensive – new tram model kits available from the Spanish company Occre. But still, not all bus- or train- enthusiasts are modellers, and nor are all military history enthusiasts.

Is it just about the passion for detail? Is it the same impulse for correct detail that makes someone wary of identifying the wrong tank on a Normandy battlefield or the wrong regiment on a Peninsula one, that potentially makes them also keen to understand the differences between an Altona and a Ringbahn single deck Liverpool tram?

What am I missing? Or am I missing anything – maybe this military-transport overlap is something I have made up and similar links can just as easily be found to other interests. I would be interested in anyone else’s thoughts.

 

*The Merseyside Passenger Transport Executive set up at the end of the 1960’s to replace the Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport – the ‘Corpy’.

Kriegspiel; Le Vol de l'Aigle - I

So, this time last week I was deep into a solitaire Napoleonic game and thinking generally about playing wargames solo (see previous post). This week I am thinking about what must count as the polar opposite of that, wargaming in teams, with an umpire. 

Of course most wargamers don’t need telling that this umpired team model was the essence of those original kriegspiele fought by be-picklehaube’d (there must be a German adjective for that) Prussian staff officers in the nineteenth century that purportedly won the Franco-Prussian War before the first needle gun was fired. But while the success of the Prussian model made the team wargame a standard planning tool of army/navy general staff the world over, it is very much a niche activity within the wargaming hobby, presumably because of the numbers, time and commitment required to game a full campaign in that manner. 

A pickelhaube. Not very relevant, but a blog post has to have some pictures.

Like solitaire gaming, PBEM team gaming is something that I would imagine has found countless new adherents as a result of the unending COVID lockdowns and the impossibility of the face to face encounters so many of us enjoyed in the past. Certainly it is something I have only just started to explore (with the exception of a PBEM game of Diplomacy some years back which is probably best forgotten, not that I’m bitter; traitors…one day, one day I will have my revenge…) 

 

My first PBEM game since that Diplomacy debacle has been the quite fascinating Battle of Rivoli refight that Jonathan Freitag of the Palouse Wargaming Journal has been hosting. He will I’m sure have a great deal to say about that on his blog after the guns fall silent so I shall not steal any of his thunder here. I will only say how much I have enjoyed not only the playing but practicing my Napoleonic declamations. I suspect I would have been a very poor Napoleonic general, but I like to think that I can at any rate talk the talk; although promising at one point to fight to the last cartridge was a tad embarrassing. I must have been thinking of the Franco-Prussian War at that moment. 

I now find myself on the roster for a game of Didier Rouy’s Vol de l’Aigle, to which I am looking forward immensely. I understand the scenario will be the opening phase of the 1809 Campaign in Germany, the perfidious Austrians pouncing on Bavaria while Napoleon is still in Paris and some of his best troops still chasing the Spanish around the Peninsula. 

I bought a copy of this game some years ago thinking very naively that it would be a pleasing distraction to set up a game between two other players with myself acting as umpire, but looking at the conversations and planning around the proposed game it looks like it is a much more serious beast than that. 

Like the old kriegspiele, Vol de l’Aigle involves two teams, one team for each of the two opposing armies, each team comprising a commander in chief and a number of subordinates representing Corps or Division commanders. Each team is given a map of the campaign theatre - the maps that come with the game are apparently those from Adolphe Thiers’ Atlas De l’Histoire Du Consulat Et De l’Empire and very handsome things they are too. The notes remind us that this is more than was normally available to the actual commanders, who would be working with maps that were wholly unreliable or non-existent. 

Thiers' map of the campaign of April 1809

Teams are also given data sheets for their army, initial deployment details and order templates – this latter presumably means I will no longer be able to just declaim at length and issue an order as an afterthought, chiz.

After an initial team meeting to discuss strategy, subordinate commanders are sent to join their units. Subsequently, unless commanders are within 20 kilometers of each other, in which case they can ride over to each others’ HQ for a quick chat and hopefully a glass of brandy, communications are sent via messengers who travel on the campaign map at an average of 10 kilometers an hour. Assuming they don’t get lost or otherwise delayed/eliminated along the way. 

Each commander receives orders from his superior and issues orders to his subordinates accordingly. His command will move at a certain speed given the terrain or roads available and will occupy a certain length of road space depending upon troop types and march formation (as an example an Austrian division of 6,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry is estimated to occupy a road space of 7.5 kilometres, or 3.5 hours march, from the head of the commander’s horse to the rump of the last of the cavalry mounts). He will have to work out his fatigue ratings, number of units lost to straggling, he will have to decide where in his column of march he will position his supply wagons and his guns. 

What happens subsequently is mostly worked out by the umpire, who determines whether and when orders are received and collects and collates all the orders from both teams to establish if and where two opposing formations clash and a battle is likely to occur. 

Having mostly fought wargames where the commander has pretty much a God’s eye view of the field of play – he knows where and how strong his own units are, he knows where and for the most part (despite the use of various Fog of War mechanisms) roughly how strong the enemy’s units are, he can issue orders and see them executed instantly and can just as instantly see his enemy’s orders as they are executed – the situation of being mostly in the dark will be an interesting one. I suspect as an initial observation it will produce a good deal of caution, as opposed to the relatively gung-ho strategy you feel you can get away with when you have much more information about enemy positions, strengths and likelihood of reinforcement. 

As I write it looks like the number of people up for this game has passed 30 so it will probably split into two games, perhaps with differing time limits on the issuing of orders so there is a separate game for us plodders. The chap who sent out the original invitation on BoardGameGeek has been offered advice by a veteran, someone who has organised games more than once in the past, and it is his comments that have disabused me of my old notions of setting up a game as an idle distraction. Apparently umpiring a single campaign involved 10 hours of his time every week for 6 months. That is a part-time contract. However, in a review of the game he also described it as ‘one of the highlights of my 40 years in wargaming’. With an endorsement like that how could I possibly miss the chance taking part in a game of this? Kick off is in April (the 212th ainniversary of the actual kickoff would be appropriate if it could be managed) and I look forward to providing regular updates of the progress of the campaign here.

Napoleon Solo

(I have David in Suffolk, he of the Ragged Soldier blog, to thank for the excellent title to this post!)

One of the striking things about wargamers compared to other gamers is how many of us like to game solitaire, even when there is no shortage of potential opponents.

Numerous reasons are often given for gaming solo. A game might be approached as a puzzle to be solved rather than a combat to be modelled, and this is particularly the case with some of the many designed-for-solitaire games. The human player is attempting to outwit or outperform an AI whose behaviours are dictated by the rules. But many wargamers enjoy – in fact, would prefer - playing two- or multiple- player games solo, including many that on the face of it look like very poor candidates for solitaire play, typically because they include ‘fog of war’ features which are supposed to hide information from one’s opponent; you can’t very easily hide information from yourself after all.

(That said, I have heard elderly wargamers declare that after you get past a certain age that fog of war can be easily recreated by making sure you just leave a few hours between turns so you have forgotten what the other side had in their hand or printed on their blocks. Senescence can be your friend.)

But a wargame is to many of us something different from ‘just’ a game or a puzzle. We like to watch the events unfold before our eyes. Playing a wargame solo can be like writing a story; the narrative becomes key, and the moments of most interest often revolve around particular characters or units or subplots that can later be described at length in an engaging after action report, vivid enough for the reader to smell the gunpowder and hear the shouted orders.

At these times the presence of an opponent introduces an unwanted element of tension or pressure, the need to compete as opposed to the opportunity to observe at leisure. There are few experiences in wargaming, I find, to beat that pleasure of slowly sipping a glass of good wine over a board showing a campaign or battle finely poised, and just ruminating over what each side might do next, and how the situation before you contrasts with that of the actual conflict, and why that might be so.

I have several designed-for-solitaire games under my belt these days, and I plan to say something about all of them at some point in this blog. They are not normally my go-to games; if I am not playing an opponent I prefer to play a reasonably simple 2-player game as both players, just honestly trying my best for both sides and savouring my wine when the crisis of the battle approaches. But sometimes I will acquire a particular game out of curiosity, and the way in which the AI tries to model an actual opponent is always a matter of the keenest interest.

So my current game is a rather obscure one called N: The Napoleonic Wars, and oddly what first attracted me to it was how little it resembles your average wargame.

It’s quite a light-ish game, 12-pages of rules that are written with tongue frequently in cheek. Design notes include the following, on various events in the game that keep Napoleon busy:

Napoleon’s escapade in Egypt took him away from France for many long and critical months. His later escapades in the boudoir with Marie Louise, his Habsburg wife, did produce an heir to his throne, but also initiated him into the dubious joys of growing bald and pudgy and playing with the toddler while his Empire burned.

Boney busy in Egypt...

...and in the boudoir. Coo-er, missus.

Or, regarding the presence of the Josephine counter in a nation where a battle occurs:

The locals are in awe of her beauty, style and her legendary skills in the boudoir.

This jolly style might start to get irksome in a longer ruleset or a game that has pretensions to be a serious simulation, but in a light solitaire of this type it reads fine, and the rules are in fact admirably clear.

The first surprise to the game is that you, the player, are not Napoleon. You play his Coalition foes and the aim is to bring the Corsican Ogre down. This is unusual for a start – everyone always wants to be Napoleon, right?

The game board itself has a map of Napoleonic Europe in the background but that is pure decoration. The main feature consists of five appropriately positioned boxes representing nations where a battle may take place – France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain. Germany (as Prussia), Austria and Spain may also side with the Coalition and contribute their armies to the anti-French military alliance. The rest of the board is mostly a number of smaller boxes that either show information pertinent to the game (nations’ political status, current religious status of France, current status of Europe’s Jews to name but a few) or allow wars occurring outside of Europe in places as diverse as Egypt, Haiti, the Cape of Good Hope and Ireland, to be managed in an abstract way.

The board

An obvious omission is any box representing Russia, which initially seems very jarring. In fact this makes for another abstraction that fits in with the mechanics of the game very well. As the Coalition you have a good chance of bringing Russia onside as long as both Prussia and Austria are in the Coalition. If both of these nations are knocked out the Russians just decide to go home. A Napoleonic invasion of Russia itself is triggered when four specific minor wars have been fought, and this invasion is handled in a different way to the battles fought in the on-board nations.

The idea is to get Napoleon to abdicate by pushing the Napoleon Abdicate counter up from 0 to 16. The counter is pushed up mostly by winning battles – you have to win 3 battles per turn, which given the number of big beefy French Corps that get deployed each turn is a tall order. 

Those Coalition armies look awesome...

...until compared to this cup of bruisers.

You can also push the counter up by winning naval battles or key minor wars – the French hate to lose Haiti for example. Or, you can suffer a sudden defeat if the French win the Battle of Trafalgar and get to invade Blighty. The full game has 16 turns, running from 1794 until 1821 and if you fail to force Napoleon to abdicate by that time then the great man dies in his bed in the Tuileries and the nations of Europe settle down under the benign guidance of his son. Peace reigns and neither of the world wars ever happens. Hurrah! Oh, sorry, I mean, boo hiss!

The game is to an extent scripted, there are certain events that must happen every turn, Boney appearing in 1795 for example, but there is a lot of unpredictability also, unexpected accidents, variations as to what French forces are deployed and to where, and a High Politics chit pull mechanic that means you know there is a chance of a particular political event happening but no way of knowing exactly when. As might be expected, keeping the coalition going in the face of likely military defeats requires financial management and diplomatic success, as well as just plain luck. Getting an idea of the ebb and flow of the game is impossible without an example, so having played the first six turns I thought a brief after action report would be instructive and give an idea of what sort of history the game allows to play out. Here is the narrative of my game, to the end of 1805.

1792-1794

The First Coalition includes Britain, Austria and Prussia, with Sweden and Russia neutral.

There is fighting in South Africa which the Coalition wins, thanks mainly to British naval dominance.

Spain signs the Treaty of San Ildefonso with France and becomes a French ally.

French diplomats are active in Europe and the Allies find they have little spare cash for countermeasures.

Fighting occurs in three nations, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Italy sees a thumping French victory but in Spain and Germany the Coalition are victorious. The continuation of the Reign of Terror in France sees a slight shift in the Italians’ sympathies and they are not quite so enthusiastic about the Revolution.

1794 ends with a Naval Battle which the Brits win comfortably.

Summary: Everything seems to be going smoothly so far – most importantly the victory in Germany means Prussia are still onside.

1795-1796

Napoleon appears on the scene with his beautiful and fascinating Creole wife Josephine.

Minor wars in Switzerland and Haiti. Coalition manages to lose the Swiss War despite some considerable expenditure, but just scrapes a victory in Haiti which is a good one to win.

There are battles in Spain and Italy which both result in defeats for the Coalition. Germany once again gives us a victory however, aided by the fact that the main target (‘butt’) nation changes from Germany to France which means Napoleon goes off there with his army instead.

Among the random accidents this turn the Barbary Pirates lead the RN a merry dance which makes it more vulnerable to naval defeat, Yellow Fever in Spain denies the French use of their Spanish allies, the French attitude to religion mellows and the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta decides he has had quite enough of the French and throws his lot in with the Allies.

Summary: We are still unable to beat the French in three nations in one turn – that is going to be a major challenge – but another victory in Germany keeps Prussia in the field, which is key.

1797-1798

Russia abandons its neutrality but due to terrible diplomacy rolls the Allies are unable to entice her to join the Coalition. Meanwhile a war in Senegal goes badly despite the Allies throwing a good deal of money at it.

Much worse is to come.

There are battles in Italy, Austria and Germany. 

We might get something out of this one...

This one, not so much.

Italy yields a convincing Coalition victory but there are overwhelming defeats in Germany and Austria which knocks both of our German allies out of the war!

uh-oh...

Summary: A negative reaction in France to the ongoing Terror and another victory in a late naval battle is no consolation for the fact that Prussia and Austria have surrendered and the coalition has collapsed!

1799

A war in Egypt keeps Boney busy for the turn, and what’s more we win it. Ha ha, sucked in, Bonaparte.

We also manage to get Austria back into the fight with a bit of money and a bit of plain begging.

But the rot has set in now. The Coalition win a battle in Italy but the French effortlessly batter Austria into surrender again.

Meanwhile more disastrous die rolls mean we have been unable to bring the Prussians or Russians onside and the Barbary Pirates continue to distract the RN from its French enemies.

Summary: Bad times for the anti-French alliance, even without Napoleon being available to push us around in Europe. The die rolls are relentless. The same die that continually rolls 1s and 2s to enable French Cavalry Corps to move from nation to nation turns to rolling 5s and 6s when we are trying to oust French diplomats from Germany!

1800-1804

Britain concludes the Peace of Amiens with France so there is little fighting this turn. The perfidious Bavarians join the French alliance. Austria is game to have another go but with no other forces except the weak ‘Duchy’ units the result is predictable and the battles in Austria and Germany scarcely bother the French hegemony of Europe.

1805

Those French, they just can’t help themselves. With no other enemies on the European mainland they engineer a war in the Balkans between the Russians and the Ottomans that the Russians win, which is potentially good for the Allies in the long run.

More serious though is a battle fought at Cape Trafalgar which, contrary to all expectations, the RN narrowly loses! Lord Nelson is killed and the French immediately invade Britain. A victory would end the game immediately with a French win, but the British manage to inflict a costly defeat on the invaders, wiping out three corps. But the French Navy rules the waves and the situation is grim.

Better news in Germany with an unexpected victory over small French occupying forces and the prospect of Prussia rejoining the war. Late 1805 sees a naval victory that reverses some of the worst effects of Trafalgar and restores the RN to its former position of superiority.

Summary: Britain has survived an invasion attempt and an unexpected defeat at Trafalgar has been largely redeemed by two subsequent unexpected victories. But the Allies are on the ropes, not least due to some truly catastrophic die rolls.

And here, for now, the game ends. It’s a clever and enjoyable little game which to an extent captures the gist of the Napoleonic wars. To have a hope of beating Napoleon the British need to get Austrian, Prussian and Russian boots on the ground, which requires sound financial management, diplomatic success (which also costs money) and luck, and they also need to keep spending on the RN high enough to win any naval battles that might occur – losing the big one at Trafalgar particularly is a body blow. Land battles can seem pointless – the French can often pile in enough troops to make the result a foregone conclusion – or bizarre – the retreat/pursuit rules can lead to armies chasing each other from nation to nation around Europe – but where the forces are evenly matched it can be an interesting contest. The randomness is high enough that I suspect there is a good replayability factor, and I suspect also that if I stick to this game there will be future events that will likely turn the tide for the beleaguered Coalition. Not bad at all for a light solo gaming experience.

Whimsy and Wargaming

It might be argued that the last thing the internet needs is another wargaming blog, especially one that from the off makes no claims in the way of wit, erudition or insight. I follow numerous such blogs (see sidebar) written by witty, clever and insightful people and I am afraid mine will often seem a bit lightweight by comparison.

So what do I think I am bringing to the party? Well, firstly, there’s a lot to be said for a bit of raw passion, and I have that in spades. My History tutor at University recently referred to me, at a reunion attended by my elder brother, as his benchmark in terms of sheer passion for my subject – though I noted that he didn’t then extend that benchmark to my actual academic ability! 

Ever since I was pushing Airfix soldiers around in the 1970s making dakka-dakka-dakka noises I had a perfect passion for the hobby of ‘playing with soldiers’. When I saw the classic Sergei Bondarchuk/Dino de Laurentiis film Waterloo on TV on Christmas Day 1976 at the age of 12 I had that sudden Damascene moment, my passion became an obsession and wargaming and military history have been close to the core of my being ever since.

Secondly, unlike most of the blogs I follow I am not planning to include very much about miniatures wargaming. 

I was a miniatures gamer back in the day and I have more recently amassed some of the very fine 28mm plastic/metal Napoleonics produced by the Perry brothers; I have even used them to fight a skirmish with the venerable Bruce Quarrie rules, and I will certainly have more to say about them from time to time. But sadly I find that unlike many of my fellow bloggers I rarely have the time or space to set up a miniatures battle, and in any case my more recent experience is less with miniatures and more with board wargames. I think there are fewer blogs devoted to the board wargame than to its miniatures brother (some might argue that the distinction between the two is becoming ever hazier but that is a discussion for another time) While there is nothing to beat the visual spectacle of painted figures on a realistic battlefield, the ever expanding world of board wargames, to me, arguably offers a richer variety of gaming experiences. I understand that will not be a popular viewpoint and I do not in any way mean to belittle the pleasure of fighting battles with figures. But it seems to me that the broad categories of hex-and-counter, card-driven, block and other wargames that come out of a box or ziplock bag have spawned infinite variations and one can easily now game almost any conflict at almost any level using a dizzying array of design techniques, some strikingly bold and imaginative, to seek that holy grail of perfect immersive game or simulation.

Mostly though, I am allowing this blog to be somewhat lighthearted and leftfield, and this is where the element of whimsy comes in. Here I must give a nod to Keith Flint of KeefsBlog who mentions whimsy as a wargaming element in his Why we Wargame post and who I hope will not mind me referencing his blog here.

The name of the blog itself reflects an old piece of whimsy and requires some explanation:

The first wargames I ever played were the four battles from the old SPI Napoleon at War quadrigame in the 1970’s. The battles were Marengo, Jena, Wagram and Leipzig and each had its own distinct challenges and flaws (the extent to which those old Kevin Zucker designs reflected the ‘reality’ of a Napoleonic battle will certainly be examined in a later post). One of the things about the Wagram game that always tickled us was a typo on the St Cyr counter (for fellow Napoleonic obsessives, this was General Claude Carra Saint-Cyr as opposed to the future Marshal) that replaced the infantry figure’s legs with what appears to be a wheel

My elder brother, who was also my invariable gaming buddy, and I used to make great play of St Cyr’s wheels, making squeaking noises when the general moved around the battlefield and making oiling motions to avoid alerting the Austrians on the Russbach Heights.

Just don't leave him at the top of a hill

When you are a young (and very likely on the spectrum) Napoleon obsessive it is easy to allow a joyless rigidity to permeate your games. When everything has to be just so, there is very little room for whimsy or humour. As well as the SPI games we used to play with an army of 1815-era minifigs I had collected, using the old Bruce Quarrie rules as outlined in the Airfix Magazine Guide. My leaders were always real French Marshals – Ney, Murat and the like – whereas my brother, being less into history and more into fantasy, chose for himself a fictional general who he named Mon Lod Glaze. I was infuriated at this, and still more so every time I lost a battle (which was nearly always) and was told that Mon Lod Glaze was making my French prisoners walk around in heavy lead diving boots with peanuts up their noses (it’s a long story!). But I warmed to Mon Lod in spite of his fictional status and what surely must have counted as war crimes; and when I finally beat him it was saddening to have to consign such an interesting foe to an eternity of heavy lead diving boots and peanuts.

Those early battles with wheeled generals, diving boots and peanuts has I think enabled a very inflexible wargaming lad to grow into someone more comfortable with other game types from the ahistorical to the plain bizarre, from Starship Troopers to Dungeons and Dragons and beyond, so it will not be unusual for curiosities or non-wargames to make an appearance here. I hope, at least, it will provide entertainment, stir some memories and even, who knows, occasionally impart some knowledge.

And as an afterthought…

In the wake of the recent death of Christopher Plummer the old Waterloo fan in me was frustrated to see so many references in the obituaries to the less than convincingly martial Captain von Trapp and so few (i.e. none) to the Duke of Wellington. Plummer himself apparently referred to the Sound of Music as the Sound of Mucus so it’s not entirely unreasonable to believe that he saw his dual with Rod Steiger’s Napoleon as a higher career point. Is it?