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?