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?