All posts by james

James has a keen interest in military history, backed with experience as a TA reservist and a 17th century re-enactor. He has designed and run several face to face social games and is the editor of MilMud, the journal of the CLWG game design group. He is currently working on a book on the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.
CLWG, design, games

The Other Side of the COIN

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Today was the September CLWG meeting. My game used the whole session and was looking to explore some of the things that might drive farmers to becoming insurgents in modern Afghanistan. I’m not quite sure that I achieved that, but it was a fun session and mostly worked as a game, although the economic model was quite broken. I’ll leave it to some of the players to tell us the story of what happened. I had Jim, Mukul, Dave & Daniel as ordinary farmers, John R was the leading farmer and the acting Governor of the valley (not that he managed to persuade the others to do what he said much). Nick Luft was the local Chief of Police and Rob Cooper was the local cleric, and also a Taliban representative.

On the whole the things I learnt from today were:

  • this is a game that probably works better in an annual turn basis rather than trying to do monthly real time, the agricultural decisions can be made quite rapidly and it is just a distraction to try and string it through the game. Also the turn based structure makes it easier for a single umpire to keep everyone at the same point in time.
  • – I need to indulge in quantitative easing, or alternatively sort the economic system to make it easier to scale things up from basic subsistence farming to full on agriculture. So things to look into are the rate at which more land can be brought into production, and reasons why the level of productive land is so low. I also need to look at a valley wide weather effects as well as the localised stuff. That way there is a higher community effect as all the agriculture is co-dependent.
  • Another things is looking at the relationship between the town and the farming hinterland. There needs to be a a two-way relationship, the town needs the food the farms grow, and the farmers need the services the town provides. Some thoughts in the post-game discussion were around levels of infrastructure in the town being necessary to support some of the things that the farmers might want. e.g. needing mechanics to support tractors.
  • consumption from the farmers could be delivered by a range of quality of life indicators, perhaps allowing for a tension between the Islamic and non-Islamic natures of some of them. So there could be an ‘easy’ western track and a more ethical Islamic track. Either way some sort of geometric progression would probably do it and also give the players some sort of indication of how well they were doing compared to the others.
  • there is probably a triangle of technology, belief & opium that can be used to give specific flavour to the game, and perhaps also draw out the conflicts in a more three dimensional way.
  • – I could also give players a qualitative objective or attitude to help them along with decision making and getting into character. E.g. go on the Haj, or an admiration for motor vehicles.
  • – there need to be more women to make more scope for marriages to take place.

Generally there is a lot of streamlining that I can do, which will improve the game. Much of this is pretty obvious from the tryout and not much needs to be said, stripping out some of the layers of complexity and perhaps ignoring the task allocation part of the game except for those that have roles that might change during the course of the game. Also perhaps having a slightly different family tree style approach to the record keeping. You’ll see how it changes by the bits that get posted up on my website at http://www.full-moon.info/doku.php/rules/clwg/coin

And a final governing thought in streamlining things is to keep Jim’s question in mind. “Why is this Afghanistan rather than Ambridge?”

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History

Kings of War

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Kings of War is a blog written by faculty and research students at King’s College War Studies department. A very interesting blog with lots of articles on a variety of different aspects of warfare, both modern and historical. I came across it when looking for things to help develop my insurgency game. I am enjoying reading it.

 

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CLWG, design, games

Thoughts on an Insurgency Game

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An article I read in the New Scientist on why people got involved in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia triggered some ideas about trying to run a game about the locals caught amidst an insurgency campaign.

Farming Today, Fighting Tomorrow?

This is a game to explore why people become insurgents (or perhaps not). Most of the players will be tribal elders leading their group of peasant farmers and directing their decisions about what to grow where and making sure that they can feed themselves and afford to buy the things they need to improve their lives and farms. Loosely set in modern Afghanistan I’ve taken huge liberties with the agrarian system and abstracted it to a level that can play through years in minutes. However I want to play on an event based accelerated real time basis through a period of a few years with a semi-kreigspieled combat system (should that even be necessary).

I think it would work best with about four local players, plus a couple of military players (1 ANA & 1 NATO) and perhaps another umpire to assist. At a minimum we can probably do with three players and me and I’ll plumpire the military side. If turnout was good I think that it could absorb a couple more players, so 3-10 people plus me. Minimum time is probably a couple of hours and we could probably play/discuss all day if no-one had any alternative sessions.

Locals operate on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend“. Each tribe is its own group and works on a very tight knit basis, all of them having the same broad allegiance. Some sample briefing and objectives below.

Example Briefing

Your land is a war-zone. You want this to end at the earliest possible time, ideally without any further loss to your people. In fact there might well be some way that you can profit from the chaos and the reconsitrcution and aid budgets of the foreigners helping your national government. However, you need to remember that you will continue to live here with the people once the foreigners have gone home, and you need to make sure that you avoid making enemies of those that will also remain here as much as possible. If you do make some enemies, then you need to either make amends, or get some powerful allies.

 

Objectives (in order of importance)

·        maintain the prestige and standing of the tribe

·        be pious and well respected in the community

·        add to the holdings of the tribe and their prosperity

·        increase your tribe’s share of local position

 

Some mechanism ideas

There needs to be a table showing the contribution to being self-sustaining from the point of view of livestock owned, fields farmed (depending on size and crop grown), and cash spent. If there is insufficient food then accrue a hunger marker and if too many hunger markers then someone may die. This might well be in the gift of the player controlling, but perhaps not.

 

Tribes will have resources in the following terms:

·        cash (measured in dollars)

·        fields (different areas, but perhaps all a standard fertility level)

·        livestock (unspecified number of animals)

·        food stocks (unspecified but enough to negate a hunger marker per unit)

·        small arms (a measure of how many men can be equipped)

·        heavier weapons (RPGs, machine guns, etc)

·        vehicles (only motorised, ignore donkey carts etc)

·        men (probably in some broad age groups – teenagers, unmarried men, husbands, fathers, grandfathers)

·        women (unmarried & married is probably enough, but perhaps grandmothers also)

·        children (male/female in 0-5, 6-10, 11-14) – maybe too much complexity

 

Crops

very abstract, three types of growth

·        food (both human and animals)

·        cash crops (gives money rather than food, but could be food at a pinch)

·        illicit drugs (gives money, definitely not useful as food)

 

[poss crop yield of 5 tonnes of food per acre]

 

[poppy gives 3-5kg per acre, profit margin is 50-100 times that of surplus food, and about ten times that of other cash crops. In 2002 the farmer got $300 per kilo, the traffickers out of Afghanistan got $800 and it had a street value of $16,000 in Europe. Raw opium is bulky and jelly like, a basic lab (which could be in a field) can convert it into morphine base which can be dried and converted into bricks for easy transport and storage. ]

 

I need to go and do lots more reading around this to see if I can get enough info to run a realistic game.

 

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CLWG, dark ages, design, games, History, WW2

CLWG June 2010 Meeting

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What you missed at Sunday’s CLWG June 2010 meeting (unless you were one of those present) were some good conversations and two games:

  • Come One, Come Eorl – another megagame tryout from Andy Hadley; and
  • D-Day beach landing – an improvised game by Jim Wallman
We started with a chat as Jim, Mukul & I watched some of the Stalingrad episode of World at War which Jim had on DVD on his laptop. This while we cut out some of the cards for playing Come One Come Eorl. Once John Rutherford, Andrew Hadley & Brian Cameron also arrived we started playing.
Come One Come Eorl
This was another tryout of the streamlined rules using the Welsh part of the game. I found that it was relatively easy to pick up, although there was obviously come benefit to be had from having played in a previous version and understanding who all the characters were and what they were after. In all we had a very civilised approach, rapidly came to a relatively amicable settlement of power and lands and then attacked the English. We sent out two colums, with myself in charge of the Northern one and fought in three battles, being victorious in both the ones I was fighting in (not a coincidence I believe).
Overall I had a positive experience and think that this is probably more or less done from a mechanistic point of view. There needs to be a little more work on fleshing out the briefings, but Andrew already knew that as we were working off the previous set with hand-written amendments. The game pieces were good, and the suggestion there was around making each army easeir to identify by using flags stuck onto foamboard counters.
I look forward to playing the megagame.
D-Day Beach Landing
Dead and wounded infantry on Sword beach, on t...
Dead and wounded infantry on Sword beach, on the morning of 6 June 1944. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Seeing as it was 6th June we couldn’t have a meeting and not have a session about the Normandy Landings.

Jim had drawn a map of a typical beach sector on a large piece of squared paper. The Germans were pre-positioned and fired at the closest target they could see. There was also some random artillery/mortar fire using a couple of dice and the map grid to determine where it landed.
The attacking forces were two companies of infantry with some supporting assault pioneers and a mortar. Jim had found some generic ‘jenga’ blocks in a local pound shop and used these to produce a series of section level markers. The system was very simple, each section could take up to five hits (being eliminated on the fifth hit), had to roll 1d6 and score more than the number of hits sustained to leave cover, and moved 1d6 squares each turn. When being shot at hits were scored on a 6, or 5 & 6 if in the open.
IWM caption : OPERATION OVERLORD (THE NORMANDY...
IWM caption : OPERATION OVERLORD (THE NORMANDY LANDINGS): D-DAY 6 JUNE 1944. The British 2nd Army: Commandos of 1st Special Service Brigade landing from an LCI(S) (Landing Craft Infantry Small) on ‘Queen Red’ Beach, SWORD Area, at la Breche, at approximately 8.40 am, 6 June. The brigade commander, Brigadier the Lord Lovat DSO MC, can be seen striding through the water to the right of the column of men. The figure nearest the camera is the brigade’s bagpiper, Piper Bill Millin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I started as a company commander, but managed to get killed as I got off the landing craft. I then moved to being the senior platoon commander as the Company 2ic took over command. I then became the Coy 2ic as well as being a Pl Comd. We took about 40% casualties on the beach but managed to get mortars producing smoke to screen the closest bunkers from effective MG fire. The assault pioneers then blew a hole in the wire and I personally assualted a bunker because I couldn’t make any of the troops come with me. This proved decisive and we were then able to move more freely and outflank the central bunker and deal with it.

The other company didn’t fare quite as well as we did, but it also managed, eventually, to get off the beach. What the game had going for it was the relative simplicity of the mechanisms and the realistic level of control (or rather lack thereof) of the troops. Once casualties had been taken it became harder and harder to make troops do what you wanted. Also the plan was what counted, and how troops landed in the wrong place interpretted it. We had a slightly better time than the other company simply because there was less ambiguity on the bit of beach we landed on, so the chance of misinterpretation was lower. Most of uor company ended up in front of the correct breach point, although a couple of sections went right instead of left.
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games

Siege Engines R Us

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Alexander got a new castle playset today, and on the front of the box were pictures of more things than were actually in the box. In particular there was a catapult (in the style of an Onager) and a few other siege engine type things. So in typical four year old fashion Daddy was asked to help with construction of a replacement. 

To start with we had some string and some lolly sticks, but those were just too difficult to work with, the lolly sticks were really too flat to be able to get the right sort of shape. Fortunately I remembered that we had some a load of wood left from an ash tree that I had cut down and that some of those were about finger thickness. So I popped out into the garden and cut some of the wood up to the right length. Five minutes later, with the aid of knots remembered from my Scout days, we had a working catapult!
It shoots one of the plastic balls that came with the castle playset about a yard or so (metre if you are metric). Best things about it are that Alexander played with it as much as the other parts of the set and that the balls are shot at low velocity so they don’t hurt when they hit you…
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alternative, games, History, megagames, WW2

War in the West: German Plan

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Alex Kleanthous, Trevor Duguid-Farrant and I got together a couple of weeks before the megagame to do the German plan.

At the planning session we had a discussion about the plan to use, we were constrained to the historical planning directive issued by Hitler, but not to the historical operational plan. After a debate we decided not to follow the historical plan as that would allow the Allied player the option to use hindsight against us. Instead we developed a different plan with some different groupings of forces, and also changed the positions of the Army Groups and Armies concerned.

In outline, the main thrust is against the Belgians and it is intended to push onto the Belgian coast west of Antwerp and then sweep down the channel coast to the west (destination Dieppe). The thinking is that the Allies will not allow the British to secure their flank on the sea in fear that they evacuate. This ought to leave the Belgians on the flank and we believe that they are easier to defeat. If they are pushed back then this is likely to cause the British to retreat in fear of their lines of communication and in turn the French also.

Across the remainder of the line there will be a steady pressure so that if the enemy retire we will be able to close up and take any ground that they cede. In the North there will also be a determined assault on the western Netherlands to secure their capital and major conurbations.

All the available mobile forces have been used, and we checked with Jim that we had them all (a few that existed on paper, still forming or training but which played no active part in the campaign have been omitted from the orbat).

The attached documents show the chosen groupings of forces and their tasks. There is a preponderance of mobile forces in the Pz Gp (9 Divisions, 6 Pz 3 Mot Inf) with another mobile corps (1 Pz & 1 Mot Inf) in the flanking Army to ensure that it can also make progress. The remaining 3 Panzer Divisions have been allocated one to each army to allow them to make rapid progress along their points of main effort. In total we have 14 mobile divisions and 11 of these have been assigned to the main effort and will be working in a relatively narrow front, so penny packets is not a suitable description of their employment.

Airborne forces have also been employed to neutralise a choke point 48 hours ahead of the panzer group advance so that they can remain mobile.

The key to the plan is keeping the panzers mobile. I am sure that people can appreciate the importance of this.

 

PS – have now re-posted this to the brand new Megagamer Forum that I set up for megagamers to discuss games, both before and after.

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Books, games, History, megagames, WW2

Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend

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"In the West (Western campaign).- Panzer ...
“In the West (Western campaign) – Panzer II and Panzer I in the woods; KBK Lw Kompanie Luftwaffe, “Luftwaffe war-reporting company 4” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the WestThe Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West by Karl-Heinz Frieser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As part of the planning for the megagame War in the West I bought myself a copy of Blitzkrieg Legend because it is the German Army’s official history (although it didn’t get written until the 1990s).

Blitzkrieg Legend Review

From reading the first couple of chapters and looking through the maps you can see the evolution of the German plan. You can see why the directive was written the way that it was in October 1939.

The most interesting thing for me is that there is no concept of a lightning war, the general staffs & high command all believe that the start of the world war was a gross mistake and spells certain doom for Germany as being too soon to be winnable. the strong belief is that the strength of the economy is what wins wars, not surprise attacks (and for my money they were right).

After the planning phase there is a fairly detailed examination of the attacks themselves. What becomes clear is how lucky the Germans were, although some of this is down to the way that the 100,000 man army has trained its troops, and this training continues into the expanded army. It is human factors rather than technology that makes the blitzkreig work. The Germans were exceedingly lucky, when they infiltrate forward and put small parties over rivers and obstacle the enemy retires rather than counter-attacks.

I would certainly recommend this book strongly to anyone who has an interest in WW2, and particularly the Fall of France in 1940.

View all my reviews

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CLWG, design, games, History, Scottish

Inspiration – Glencoe & Dinosaurs

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Map in English of Scotland This is a lighter r...

Image via Wikipedia

Today has been an unusually inspiring day, I had two separate ideas for games both of which I reckon could be pulled off in the space of a couple of days basic research and writing briefings etc.

Tracy & I both woke up early and we got a couple of hours to do things before Alexander surfaced at the rather late (for him) 9am. In that time I unusually got to watch some TV of my own choice.

Glencoe

The first idea came from a programme on the freeview channel ‘Yesterday’ about the Glencoe Massacre (or more accurately the events leading up to it and the aftermath. This is the follow on to the two games I’ve done about the revolution in 1689-90 in Scotland. There was a meeting between Albany and the Highland Chiefs where two secret treaties were agreed, one for each of the Kings! It struck me that there was huge potential for one of CLWG’s traditional double dealing and money making deals in this. So much so that I went and checked my bookshelf to see if I had any books on the subject, but it was a bit thin. So I ordered the John Prebble book on the subject Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre from Amazon.

Dinosaurs

20140624_103621I was going to offer that as a session at the CLWG Christmas meeting until I got my second sleet of inspiration later on. After dinner Alexander decided that he wanted to watch a movie about dinosaurs, so we got to watching Jurassic Park III. This set the brain cells firing again, and I got to wondering what the Government reaction would most likely be to the news of the first Jurassic Park. The game idea is that I will brief one player to be the CEO of a corporation that has built the dinosaur safari park on an island offshore. The other players will be the various Government Ministers and officials. Depending on their reaction we might re-role and widen to take up other national government roles, and perhaps even military roles. Anyway no doubt I will do a little more on this as I get on with writing it up as a game.

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History, Re-enactment

Re-enactors' Market

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Went to the traders fair today, mainly because there was an officer’s meeting for Fox’s. While I was there I bought a few books from Paul Meekins, a small pottery kettle and some marbles for Alexander. I also had a tour of Warwick because I was driving sans navigator and went left onto the A425 instead of the A423. Still got there in the end though.

Saw lots of people I hadn’t seen for ages including, Edmund & Emily with little Ed, Paul Meekins, Howard Giles, Charles Kightly, Mutts, and Sophia Sidney. Also saw a fair number of others that I managed to catch up with at Sherwood Forest pretty recently. 

Gist of the officers meeting was simply that we need to do some more recruitment, and to assist that effort we need to sort out some flyers and then tart up the website to give people a better idea of what we do, how much fun it is and get them into the idea of joining, The primary audience for this recruitment effort are people who are interested in history but who have never tried re-enactment before. We’re looking at students, wargamers, and general history buffs.

Anyway, to get some momentum going we’ve set up a small working party to knock some ideas on design and content together. Paul Stinton (Fox’s 2ic & also Fairfax Publicity Officer), Marika and myself will try and get something sorted out over the next few weeks. Emphasis on getting it done rather than discussing it. Marika has done a fantastic website for Lord Orkney’s regiment, a 1660s group that portray what became the Royal Scots. we ought to be able to adapt the template for it to have similar material for the Fox’s website.

The other topic of discussion was about getting the bank account signatories updated. What is required is a copy of the latest minutes of the 2009 AGM so that we can confirm to the bank that our officers have changed and who we need as signatories on the bank account.

After the meeting I had a wee look around to see if I could get a small cauldron with a lid. Not being terribly certain what I wanted to buy from a historical accuracy point I didn’t actually buy anything, instead I picked up some leaflets. Best seemed to be Anvil Art although even those didn’t look quite the same as these ones I found on Somerset County Councils museums page about down hearth cooking.  
 

alternative

Improper Ganda!

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http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/improper-propaganda-posters.php?page=1

A fantastic collection of propaganda posters that have been photoshopped to change the message. Very funny, especially the re-enactment one, and the Cthulhu poster. Worth a few minutes of browsing past in my opinion.

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