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.