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alternative, Ancient, CLWG, design, games, History

What you missed at CLWG in September 2011

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Three interesting games and a load of cake! We started with Peter Merritt’s 1814 political game which looked at how Napoleon’s Marshals dealt with the oncoming defeat of France and the transfer of power. Following that Andrew Hadley brought out his game about the Athenian invasion of Sicily. We then finished with Rob Cooper’s game about the seizure of the Mecca Grand Mosque in 1979, complete with head-dress.

1814 and all that

Peter put on this game to try out some ideas about how you could run a game about the decline of the French First Empire. The players were mostly Napoleon’s Marshals (although Jim Wallman was Napoleon). There was an interesting mechanic of collecting cards to show which of the likely candidates for ruler of France you could evidence support for (five in total, including Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Bernadotte, Napoleon’s son and A.N.Other-Bourbon). The decisions per turn were relatively simple, and the operational game was quite abstract, so no real need to pay attention to it as a Marshal.

We had a good post-game discussion for this, helped by Jim’s notes which he’d made as Napoleon was under-worked. I’m not familiar with the actual politics of the period, so will confine comments to some of the mechanical aspects rather than the rest of it. There could be an interesting game to be had with the Marshals deciding to attribute their actions to either military or political activities (with enough actions per turn to be able to do a little of both when required). Without a played Napoleon the Marshals have to work collaboratively initially to keep France in the war long enough for them to build some support for a likely new ruler. They also need to try and choose (as a small faction) how to prosecute the war in a way that will bring their chosen favourite to the top of the list for the allies.

One of the ways to modify the current game to support this would be to explicitly get the Marshals to club together in the Paris crisis phase to work collaboratively to deal with the crises, perhaps using a hidden card in the pool way to resolve it, like the Battlestar Galactica board game. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to play BSG each crisis has a value and a suit (colours in BSG) that are needed to resolve it. Cards that don’t help add to the difficulty of resolution (allowing players to secretly sabotage things). This would allow them to either club together to resolve things while they want to prolong the game, or to swiftly end things when the time has come for Napoleon’s end.

Added to this there could be some stacked decks with support for each of the candidates, allowing players to take cards to suit their chosen candidates. It would also support attempts to get rid of support for other cards and having a broad range of cards for dealing with crises but at the players choice rather than being dealt completely randomly.

On the operational side, I broadly agreed that the map could be further simplified from a point to point system to a track for each of the main armies, although possibly with some cross over points to allow forces to be shuffled from track to track. The mechanisms could be relatively simple, some sort of stacking limit for the allies, units move one spot at a time (or even the die roll mechanism allowing 0,1,2 spaces according to weather, command allocation etc). Any track with Napoleon in it would remain static (assuming Napoleon is supported by troops and the odds aren’t too great against the French) but with the cost to the Marshals that Napoleon in the field makes it harder to keep control of Paris. Some simple battle rules to show whether or not contested advances happen would also be useful, and then one or two French Marshals could probably handle the whole thing on their own (although others may be required to allow sufficient military actions to happen).

Lastly the end game piece probably needs some thinking about, and perhaps a way to be influenced by the players.

Athenian Invasion of Sicily

I didn’t quite catch the proper name of this game. Andrew Hadley continued his series of ancient Mediterranean themes games with this one about the Athenians invading Sicily around 415 BC during the Peloponnesian war in the late 5th Century BC (431-404 BC). We were randomly dealt some key characters from the Athenian assembly and given a few pages of background telling us what happened, key arguments for and against the invasion and some intelligence of the cities on Sicily and nearby (allegiance, attitude to Syracuse, military forces etc). We then engaged in a debate to agree a plan, commit force levels and appoint command.

Once we’d sorted that out we began a campaign, although time pressure (and having a third game to play) meant that we had to wrap up relatively early into the execution of the plan. There were some interesting aspects to this, but in a lightly implemented way. There were pre-printed cards with a variety of words (one per card, e.g. Treachery) which could be used to get a +1 to a relevant die roll. Only one of these could be used per turn unless the action was planned, committing you to it regardless of other events. There were also some personal bonuses, e.g. +2 military for generals. Each situation was assigned a difficulty score by Andy to be beaten on a d12 plus any bonuses. For our small game this didn’t present any problems, but in a larger game there would need to be more guidance on probabilities and scores etc to ensure consistency and players being able to resolve some of it themselves.

Certainly this was a fairly workable and enjoyable game that needs a longer time slot to do it justice.

Seizure of the Grand Mosque (1979)

Our third and last game was a kriegspieled scenario run by Rob Cooper about the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 (on the first day of AH 1400) by some Islamic dissidents claiming to be the followers of the Mahdi.

In the scenario we were all playing either members of the Saudi royal family (and by extension the Government) or, in Jim Wallman’s case, the senior cleric on the Ulema and spiritual adviser to the King. Daniel was King Fahd, Richard Hands as the Crown Prince, Peter Merritt as the second in line, Dave Boundy as the Minister of the Interior, Andrew Hadley in command of the Saudi Arabia National Guard (SANG) and myself as the Defence Minister. Giles also arrived about now, but decided to observe rather than participate.   To add flavour and get us all into the appropriate spirit for our characters Rob had brought along some headgear, you can see the pictures that Daniel took on facebook. We also had to stop every now and then for prayers, underlining our devotion.

There is a good account of the historical events on wikipedia, and I’m not going to repeat that. However the scenario opens with a group of Islamic dissidents (variously numbered from 30-40 up to about 500) seizing control of the Grand Mosque during prayers, locking the gates and shooting some policemen. At the time there were somewhere in the region of 50,000 pilgrims inside the complex, which is vast, several hundred metres across in each direction.

The Saudis have two initial problems, the first is that they don’t have appropriate resources close enough to respond immediately, it takes time to assemble a response force. The second problem is that violence is not allowed in the Grand Mosque, and also the Ulema (the religious council) are unsure whether or not the chap claiming to be the Mahdi is an apostate, or the real thing.

So there was a soft start to the game, during which I ordered up all my airborne special forces and also a company of tanks and some APCs just in case. Although the latter would take some days to arrive.

The first response was from the police, being locals. All they could do was herd the fleeing pilgrims away from the Grand Mosque. Any time that they went close they got shot at from the minarets. Shortly afterwards some of the local SANG turned up and tried unsuccessfully to approach the Grand Mosque. About six hours in a company of my Airborne turned up and set up Observation Posts all round the Grand Mosque to see where the terrorists were positioned. We also tried to get some helicopter recce done, but the terrorists used a .50 cal on the helos, so they quite reasonably gave that up as a bad job.

A family conference call took place while all this was getting under way. There was a unanimous agreement to censor all media and cut off all communications with Mecca other than official government lines. We also refused to even acknowledge to the outside world that there were any problems.

Also after some deliberations the Ulema decided that we could use force to eject the terrorists from the Grand Mosque, although we had to be careful not to damage the Grand Mosque and also to avoid harming any of the pilgrims inside. Certainly attacking the minarets to take out the snipers was off the table.

By the following day we had a few hundred police, a similar number of SANG and just over a Battalion of Airborne forces. So I decided to make an attempt on the long gallery which was a panhandle to the main part of the Grand Mosque complex. This meant that there was some cover from fire on the approach to it from the street on the outside as it was in dead ground from the minarets. Waiting until dark we brought each of the minarets under small arms fire while two companies of Airborne forces made their way into the Grand Mosque. Initially things went well, an entry was effected using explosives and both companies passed inside, when radio comms were lost because of the thickness of the walls. Follow on SANG and police were then met by the survivors of an ambush retreating back out of the complex. Apparently the supposed ‘Mahdi’ had ambushed them, he had been seen to be immune to small arms fire, escaping being hit under intense fire, and also had been picking up grenades and throwing them back.

By now we were coming under pressure to get the Grand Mosque cleared in time for Friday prayers (it was Wednesday night that the first assault went in). The Ulema decided, after much more deliberation, that while the Grand Mosque was inviolate, this only really applied to the original area and not the entire complex. So the only area we couldn’t use violence in was the central courtyard.

Early on Thursday morning another Airborne Battalion arrived, as did two companies of APC mounted infantry. The tanks were en route on transporters and were due for early afternoon on the Thursday. SANG and the Police also had their commandos in Mecca as well. The gloves were off, which the family council reluctantly agreed. My Airborne support companies used TOW missiles on the minarets and each of the three doors. Not waiting for the tanks to be ready, we put APCs through each of the main gates and followed through into the complex en masse. This co-ordinated response seemed to work and we rapidly gained control of the complex, although it was clear after an hour or two that we didn’t have the number of prisoners (or bodies) that we had expected, and that some of the notable personages were missing.

It transpired that they were in the undercroft, which fortunately was on a suitably massive scale that we could use the APCs to break through the barricades to get into. At this stage time stood against us and Rob hand-waved the second stage of the game to get us to a wash-up where he told us how we’d done compared to real life. Surprisingly to us it turned out that my ‘gloves off’ approach had been far more restrained than had happened historically!

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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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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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CLWG, design, games, History, Scottish

Inspiration – Glencoe & Dinosaurs

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

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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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CLWG, design, games, WW2

Preparing For War – Onside Report

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British evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk
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Rather than run a conversational design session at the November meeting I decided to try and do something that was at least vaguely playable. My reasoning was that I’d been somewhat frustrated at the conference with discussions of games that looked like they could actually have been played, and I’d felt that perhaps by playing it we could have tested whether or not the perceived problems were actually real.

Anyway, I did a sort of role-playing game about re-constructing an infantry company after the evacuation from Dunkirk. John Rutherford was the first person to arrive (after me) and so I cast him as the first officer to report to the village in Devon I’d decided to put the company in. Chosen only because the OS map of Devon/Dorset was the first to hand when I was collecting materials for the game, they might equally have ended up in Scotland! John’s character, 2/Lt Robson was a recently commissioned officer who had been sent to France within days of being commissioned and then evacuated a few weeks later.

On arrival in the village by train 2/Lt Robson discovered that he wasn’t expected, and nor was his company! He set about contacting the local policeman, the vicar, chair of the parish council and other notables in the village.

Staying overnight in the village pub he established that the company could be billeted on the Mill when it arrived. Within a day the remainder of the company arrived by train under command of the Major (Jim Wallman). Shortly afterwards Lt Hanse (Mukul) and 2/Lt Duff (Dave Boundy) reported for duty. The company was swiftly sorted out into platoons and sections, on the basis of sharing out the experienced men and the good NCOs as well as those with dodgier records.

The first few weeks were played out in organising the company, the accommodation, acquiring weapons, worrying about area of operations, responsibility for guarding bridges etc and also getting everyone to do lots of drill. Having worked all this out and got to the beginning of September I moved to monthly turns where the OC set the training priority and each month I asked for volunteers for Officer training (and later on Commandos) as well as setting some small incident for resolution, e.g. scrounging a coal lorry, or the Christmas do. If I was going to run this game properly I’d do some more research on some of these things and ensure that the players had some better background. As it was I was making it all up as I went along, including the mechanisms, so it was in areas no doubt thinner than it ought to have been, and probably quite ahistorical.

On the whole we managed to pass four and a half hours playing the game before I drew it to a halt so that we could have some discussion. For me the main point is that there is a game in all of this as there are many decisions to be made. Largely it is a building/development game in its purest sense, although what you are building/developing in this case are your soldiers. Probably the best way to improve the game would be to make a small card for each soldier which could be updatable with their stats, rank etc. That would simplify record keeping as the platoon commanders can just keep those in front of them organised into sections etc. The platoon commanders could also have a mechanism for developing people which would give them some decisions about how to improve their platoon, and also about how to interpret the OC’s training priorities.

We had some discussion at the end about leadership styles and now these should affect the development of a platoon/company. This certainly needs further thought, and I think it could be a good way to develop things, but I’m not sure exactly how it ought to impact on the game mechanisms.

If I do get further thoughts from people then I will do something on this.

One thing I am conscious of was not having a well thought out mechanism for exercises, partly this was because I didn’t think we had enough time to break into a proper wargame. My inclination would be to play this sort of game as a campaign, and play each exercise as a largely kriegspieled wargame using the figure resolution of the combat mechanisms (which I did prepare, but didn’t use and I think I’ll need to re-do in the light of the outcome of the session).

On another point, we semi-randomly picked 6th Battalion DLI to be the battalion that we were part of. A quick look at google afterwards showed that 6 DLI were a territorial battalion and went to France with 50th Northumbrian Divison in early 1940 and then were evacuated through Dunkirk, they went to North Africa in April 1941 (when we finished our game) and then fought through the rest of the North Africa campaign, Sicily & Italy. They came back to the UK at the end of 1943 and were in the assault troops on Gold Beach on 6th June 1944. Probably one of the few battalions to have been at the sharp end all the way through the war.

Here is the spreadsheet (Open Document Format) that I used to speed things up during play (although this will be printed onto cards before I next try this game). Company Roster.ods

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CLWG, design, games

CLWG Design Conference 2009 Reports

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Onside Report – WW2
Mechanisms

I lead a discussion on
whether an operational research article could be used to produce some
mechanisms for running a WW2 wargame with resolution (i.e. smallest
unit represented) at somewhere between platoon and battalion.

The article1
in question was first published back in 1987, so quite venerable. I
came across a photocopy of it tucked into an old copy of British Army
Training News from the saem time period. I have subsequently found
PDFs of a slightly different version of it, along with a follow-up
article looking at urban combat.



Offside Report – Come
One Come Eorl

Andrew Hadley brought
back the Scottish component of this game for another try having
modified some of the mechanisms from the previous playtest. We didn’t
really play the game as we spent a lot of time talking about the
mechanisms and it sorting out in all the players’ heads what it was
all about, why the mechanisms worked the way they did and what we
were supposed to do.

For me there is clearly
a very good political/military game that should make an excellent
megagame, but it was clear from the session that we had that some
people are going to struggle with the game as it currently stands.
There needs to be some more elegant mechanisms around calculating
income, especially where there are sub-kings etc. It might also be
possible to dispense with influence completely as a separate token
and just make it part of game play, the title cards could just allow
certain activities to be done.

Without the benefit of
playing more than one turn of the game it appeared to me that the
sole use of influence was to get political actions done in the
‘parliament’ phase of the game. Obviously there needs to be a limit
to the number of actions that the High King can introduce, and this
limit should change as power is centralised (or de-centralised).
Bearing in mind that each title allows a player a vote (so players
tend to have multiple votes) then the influence of the High-King is
naturally limited by needing to keep at least some of the players on
side. But if they are the only person that can propose
actions/decisions then that gives them some leverage also. However
this doesn’t quite work if you want to be able to build up influence
over a period of time or if you want to trade it between nations.

Overall I’d like to
just play the game for a bit and then try and de-construct it to give
feedback. One of the things that I sometimes find frustrating is that
we talk too much about the mechanics, the briefings etc when we ought
just to be trying the game out. The talking means that the game
doesn’t actually get played as a game, which means that I don’t think
that we get to test it properly. Only by giving things a reasonable
chance are we going to see the second and third order effects that
the combination of rules, player decisions and luck have on the
outcomes, and whether this is an acceptable game. Sure there is
validity in discussion and working through things in slow time, but
we do need to be clear (i.e. the game presenter should say what they
want) when putting on sessions on whether we want to try mechanisms
or whether we want a design discussion. As participants we need to
respect the session presenter’s wishes and do our best to make it
work that way, even if we think it is fundamentally broken. It
doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t tell the presenter what we think
during the session, but we should try and work round our issues.


Agincourt Logistics

Jim has been
commissioned by the Royal Logistics Corps museum to produce a
training exercise for recent recruits to give them some understanding
of the history of logistics and how the predecessors of the RLC were
involved in moving and supplying armies. The scenario given was
fairly straightforward from our perspective, but would certainly
offer the opportunity for someone unfamiliar with logs planning some
challenge. There was a finite limit (20) on the total number of units
to be taken (including the pack horses) which drove some decisions
about force composition (although not size for us as we’d take up to
the maximum with extra pack horses and supplies).

The choice was between
knights (needing food & fodder), archers (food & arrows),
pioneers (food, fodder & maybe pioneer stores), the siege train
(two fodder and food) and pack horses (fodder). Each of the pack
horses could carry 12 units of supplies and there was a choice
between food, arrows, fodder, pioneer stores, and tents. There were
multiple solutions to the problem, which is always good, and some of
them got very complex (particularly Jerry’s optimised reducing
horses).

The game met the design
constraints as far as CLWG players went, and in fact we seemed to
have been too generously supplied with pack horses as we had arrows
left after we’d killed all the French, however both times one of the
units of knights was left behind (which was probably a correct
decision as the archers did 95% of the killing). However it is
entirely reasonable that another group might take 3 knights with them
which would add to the logistics burden and force some harder
decisions about load mixes. The first group to do it also had to
starve the soldiers because they were delayed en route, although if
they’d had a different mix (another day’s worth of food instead of
some arrows) then they might also have been fine. Both of us
immediately discounted artillery and tents reasoning that that they
weren’t needed on a forced march and would just slow things down.

My intention is to try
this on some of my work colleagues (they’re all business analysts
with little understanding of military history). I think it will be
interesting to see how they approach it.

Second Life

I had a shot of playing
with second life in the Sunday morning session. Overall I was pretty
impressed with the engine and what you can do in it. However it was
also clear that it is for people with large monitors and hefty
graphics cards. My little 10″ netbook only just gets to sneak in on
the ‘low graphics’ setting (despite being brand new).

There is a chance that
I’ll stick a better graphics card in one of the computers at home
which has a larger screen, but since I tend to buy desktops second
hand I’m not too sure whether or not this is something I’ll get round
to soon. However I will probably have a go at one of the CLWG second
life gunboat sessions sometime in the not too distant future. All
depends on whether or not family commitments allow a couple of hours
on the computer.

Minions of Evil

Brian Cameron started
off a design discussion about how we might create a game out of being
the evil players. He had observed that traditionally the heroes are
reactive and that the evil geniuses have a plan which they want to
execute to achieve some narrow aim, e.g. world domination, or
accumulation of riches.

We talked around a lot
of ideas, largely there seemed to loads of opportunity to create a
sufficiently detailed background to set a game in, whether
comic-book evil genius, some relatively real world evil (e.g.
corporations, mafia etc), an illuminati style game or even something
set historically. There was a general consensus that whatever the
scenario each evil genius should have some sort of fatal flaw that
would lead to their downfall and that there ought to be a specific
(but possibly unidentified to the players) nemesis.

One of the ideas that I
was quite taken by though was the idea of trading off how far you
were willing to go to achieve a rational objective for additional
character flaws and irrational objectives. This fitted into another
idea of evil merely being a matter of perspective. The example quoted
was Magneto from the X-Men who is fighting for mutant rights, which
if you are an oppressed mutant might well seem like a heroic
perspective. A more real example was Churchill, who ordered the
sinking of an allied fleet and also invaded a neutral country. For me
the morally grey area would make an interesting game as it would
allow the players’ choices to determine whether or not they were
truly evil or simply misunderstood. Also I tend to prefer complex
half-tones to black and white. There is probably some scope for a
game about corporations which covers this ground.

Players would represent
key investors in a corporate portfolio on a global basis. In their
individual player briefings they would have some objectives (possibly
self set at the beginning of the game) to determine what they were
looking for as a rational outcome. Examples might be: control of
media; political influence; vast riches; domination of a particular
market. There would then be a trade off between legal and moral
constraints (or otherwise) and the starting resources. The fewer
constraints you had the easier it would be to operate in certain
areas, but at higher risk from government institutions.

1David
Rowlands, Degradation in Combat

CLWG, design, games

CLWG Games Weekend 2007 Reports

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Some reports from the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group (CLWG) games weekend.

Siege of Yendor Tryout

Jim put on a session to try out the mechanisms for the upcoming megagame. We spent some time trying to bring down a section of wall, and also seeing whether or not it was possible to directly assault the wall without first undermining or demolishing it.

Jim’s Breeding Idea

This was a design session rather than a game, but we gave it a good go none the less. Jim had come away from the Light of the Trees megagame with an idea that it ought to be possible to do a sub-component of a game about breeding heroes using some real genetics theory. The main aim was that, like in real life, the players managing the breeding programme wouldn’t actually know what the actual genetic make up of their characters were. Over time those players that were keeping an eye on things and using the evidence that they were accumulating would be able to make some educated guesses about the best pairings that would drive their breeding programme in the direction that they wanted to take.

We all started off with a single individual each, although without worrying about whether that individual was male or female (as this was thought to over-complicate things). The idea was to work with a bloodline rather than a series of individuals, although each generation would be split into separate individuals representing the main lines. This was felt to be necessary to allow the breeders an opportunity to selectively breed those with the correct traits with individuals from the other bloodlines.

The fact that we rapidly bogged down was fairly predictable as we tried to track several individuals. There was a fair amount of mechanical detail involved in generating the offspring as well as the players not having enough information to make good decisions about which individuals to breed with which others. There would have been a better handle on it if we’d played out a bit more of the game before moving into a general discussion of the issues, approach and suggestions of how it could all be achieved.

As a design session it was very thought provoking, and I carried on thinking about it for almost a whole week, on and off. Jim’s conclusion from the session was that it probably wasn’t practically possible to achieve what he set out to do. At the time I would have agreed with him, but a few days of thought have changed my mind on that.

I come to this with more than a smattering of background, I studied “Genes, Organisms & Evolution” as an undergraduate, the course forming a major part of my degree. That said I’ve forgotten most of the detail in the intervening 15 years since I graduated. However the text books are still on a bookshelf nearby.

I think that the general premise that Jim was trying to attain is a sound one and that with some streamlining and appropriate background that it can be achieved. The key is to stick with Jim’s bloodline idea and not get drawn into dealing with individuals, except where heroes or other primary characters are required, and these Heroes should have nothing to do with the breeding stock, although their characters will be determined by it.

The key assumption I am working on is that that this is a sub-component of a game that plays over generations rather than a game in itself. As part of the background the designer of the main game needs to make some decisions about how many characteristics need to be tracked, whether these have any inter-relationship or are independent and also how often he wants particular characteristic levels/attributes to feature.

For example let us assume that a game designer wants to track both personal bravery and intelligence in the hero bloodlines. He might decide that these will not be related to each other. For bravery he might decide that there are four possible states, Heroic (no morale required), Brave (positive modifier to morale), Normal (no modifiers) and Cowardly (negative modifiers). Of these outcomes he might want Heroic to be quite rare, Brave to be common but not a majority, Normal to be the majority position and Cowardly to be less common than Brave, but more likely than Heroic.

Taking the assumption that bravery is a hereditary characteristic how does this translate into genetics?

Well you could specify three variants of a bravery gene (alleles are they are known), H, O & C. HH would be the Heroic types, HO the brave, OO and OC the normal and CC & CH the cowards. In these cases the H allele is recessive (so only those with two copies are heroic). The C allele is also recessive, but dominates the H allele. The O allele is dominant over C but not over H.

This takes you into a method of at least allocating a characteristic based on genetics, but it doesn’t address either simplicity of recording it nor of proportions. Not all genes are evenly distributed in the population. Those that confer survival advantages propagate more widely and those that lead to disadvantages rapidly leave the gene pool.

In this case you would expect O & C to be widely distributed, possibly equally. H is likely to be less frequent as though it confers an advantage when hunting it becomes much less advantageous once farming is available, and in fact becomes a positive disadvantage over time. If 10% of the population carried the H gene then 1% (i.e. the proportion with two copies of it) would be heroic. If the O allele was 50% of the population and the C allele the remaining 40% then you would have a distribution as follows:

H (10%)

O (50%)

C (40%)

H (10%)

1 (Heroic)

5 (Brave)

4 (Cowardly)

O (50%)

5 (Brave)

25 (Normal)

20 (Normal)

C (40%)

4 (Cowardly)

20 (Normal)

16 (Cowardly)

Heroic

Brave

Normal

Cowardly

1

10

65

24

Let us also assume that there was a decision to track intelligence as a numeric score also with three alleles generating a score when summed. The alleles being 0, 1, 2. These would be distributed as 10%, 80%, 10% in the general population.

Tracking Bloodlines

The method I thought you would use to track each bloodline is a table with each of the attributes to be tracked down the side and the alleles to be tracked along the top. Each allele would have a score between 0 and 10 to show its relative proportion in the population of the bloodline. An example of this is shown
below.

Bravery

H (r)

O

C (r)

Bravery alleles

1

5

4

Intelligence

L (0)

M (1)

H (2)

Intelligence alleles

1

8

1

In each generation the player running the breeding would be given some feedback of their bloodline’s characteristics. In this case they would be told that they were of average intelligence and not especially brave. The breeder player would then make a decision about trying to improve the bloodline either from the general population, another player’s bloodline (with the specific approval of that player) or from within his own bloodline.

The general population bloodline should be determined before the start of the game and remain constant for the duration of the game. Player controlled bloodlines are very likely to change over the course of generations as the genealogists recommend good matches for strengthening the bloodline based on observed characteristics of other bloodlines.

Breeding from the General Population

There is a general assumption that there are other bloodlines that the genealogists are aware of but which are not part of the played groups. These probably represent the minor nobility or some other class that the main bloodline knows but are lower than those represented by player teams. When breeding from these it is assumed that the characteristic which is sought to be improved is always manifested in the individuals that are to be added to the bloodline for breeding purposes.

Using the general bloodline track (see example above) the umpire checks whether the person has one or two copies of the appropriate gene. In the case of characteristics which are recessive then there are always two copies of the gene. (e.g. If you were trying to breed heroes into your bloodline then you would start off with two copies of the H allele to breed in).

For each of the genes recorded (i.e. Bravery and Intelligence in these examples) you would determine which alleles were to be incorporated into the new bloodline. Roll 1d10 for the copy to be imported (except where we have previously determined that recessive characteristics give an exact gene). We’re already getting an H from the hero, we need to roll 1d10 to see which intelligence allele will be passed on. This is most likely to be an M result.

These alleles will then displace one of those in the general bloodline. If a 2 is rolled for the Bravery gene then the new H allele displaces an O allele. Another 2 for Intelligence has the new M allele displace another M allele, so no real change. The new bloodline track looks like the example below.

Bravery

H (r)

O

C (r)

Bravery alleles

2

4

4

Intelligence

L (0)

M (1)

H (2)

Intelligence alleles

1

8

1

The feedback to the player would be that the family was of average intelligence and above average bravery, although with a larger number of cowards than one would expect. (There are now 4% heroic, 16% brave, 32% Cowardly). This might prompt an attempt to breed out the cowards, harder than might appear as the C allele is largely recessive.

What this system needs is a proper game to sit within. Ideally one of dynastic succession and involving at least a bit of individual character impact on the outcomes. Sadly that isn’t something on my current project list.

Religion in ‘Hapsburg Ascendant’

Brian started off a discussion of the role of religion in games set in the 17th century, particularly his upcoming megagame. His wish was to get some roleplaying of the religious motivations that were what made the 30 years war happen and to get the players to warp their rational decision making process (if you can describe wargamers as rational) to fit the religious mindset prevalent at the time.

We had a fascinating discussion, aided by Arthur having a stack of relevant textbooks to hand in his classroom. We talked around the issues of not giving perverse incentives and not making it too easy for players to work out how they got advantages from religious behaviour.

The conclusions that we came to were that each of the major sects needed to have its own set of rules, that there ought to be a league table so that there was a visual incentive to act correctly (this being a lesson from the Sengoku megagames) and that once a defined level of behaviour had been reached that there ought to be a direct umpire driven reward for the correct behaviour. The reward needed to be strong enough to show that it was ‘God’s work’ but also not so strong that it caused problems. Also we felt that because ‘god works in mysterious ways’ that the players should not get to determine what might happen if they had their god’s favour.

Orange or Lemon? – Onside Report

This game was intended to show the political goings on in the attempt to get a revolution settlement in Scotland following on from the English parliament’s declaration of Prince William of Orange as their King in February 1689 (new style).

The game we played was a highly entertaining roleplay of some of the issues and certainly gave a good flavour and reached, more or less, the historical outcome. I certainly enjoyed it immensely, and I think the players did too.

I designed the game with almost a board game like level of mechanism for winning the support of the non-played members of the Convention (which is essentially an unofficial Parliament as it had been called by Prince William of Orange and not King James).

Almost none of those mechanisms were tested in the game we played, but it worked as a game anyway – almost a proof of the old saying that you could stick a bunch of CLWG members in a room with some game money and an a game would break out. Instead of money I gave them a map of the Edinburgh High Street and an idea. I’ll leave it to the players to tell you how the game actually went.

In terms of future development I will refine the player briefs (I was still working on these when I started the session and a couple are not yet fully complete). This will improve player understanding of the period and importantly make their personal objectives a bit more tailored from the generic ones of:

  1. Stay alive.

  2. Ensure that the clan/family remains in being and in control of its territory.

  3. Increase your/the clan wealth (either through plunder or by increasing territory).

  4. Increase the influence of Clan Cameron.

  5. Have your King accepted as de facto sovereign.

  6. Ensure that your enemy is diminished.

For the lowlanders you can replace ‘Clan’ with ‘family/heirs’. These do work, but there need to be a couple more triggers to get some of the characters to get stuck into being active. There is also a need to explain the general apathy of the population in their support for the King who has antagonised most of them in the last decade, even before he became the King.

Blitz Firefighting

An end to the weekend with an extended bout of firefighting during the London blitz. This game actually started at the same time as my session and I joined in when we’d finished playing Orange or Lemon? I ended up as one of the LFB professionals sent along to bolster the firefighting force.

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CLWG, design, games

CLWG Offside Report – November 2006

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There were three
sessions at the British end of the November ’06 meeting of CLWG; no
doubt Daniel and Nick will enlighten us separately on what we missed
at the continental meeting. In order of appearance the attendance was
Trevor, Mukul, Jim, Brian, John, Peter Howland and myself. The
sessions were:

  • Torchwood.
    A Victorian roleplaying game run by Brian Cameron

  • Starship
    Marine. A classic figure game run by Jim

  • Remember,
    Remember. An old favourite re-run by both Jim and Brian covering the
    gunpowder plot of 1605.

Torchwood
(Brian)

Brian started this off
with a short clip from the end of the Doctor Who episode that had
inspired the game. The episode (titled Torchwood) involved the Doctor
saving Queen Victoria from a werewolf in the Highlands in 1879. At
the end of the episode (after QV has knighted and then immediately
banished the Doctor and his assistant Rose) there is the scene that
Brian showed us. QV says that there are clearly otherworldly enemies
out there and she wants Great Britain to be able to deal with them,
and with the Doctor should he reappear. To achieve this aim she has
the ultra secret Torchwood Institute established.

To work out the finer
details of how the Torchwood Institute should be set up Brian had us
as a hand picked group of Privy Councillors to form some
recommendations to Her Majesty. The Torchwood Committee was chaired
by the Duke of Cornwall (Trevor) with the Earl of Sutherland, Lord
Taunton, Sir Hardly Worthitt (Secretary) and Sir Rupert Effingham
(Page of the Back Stairs).

Arrayed in comfy chairs
we set about the task of establishing how Torchwood should be lead,
what it should do, to whom it would report and where the money would
come from.

There was much
entertaining discussion over the right sort of chap to provide the
necessary sort of leadership for the institute. Taking as read that
he’d been to the right school and wasn’t the sort to have gone to
University to become a dangerous intellectual (or worse still, a
liberal) the chap was to have a modicum of intelligence. He needed to
be an excellent judge of character so that he could recruit the right
people to get the job done. Lastly he needed to be of stout heart and
high in moral fibre (good for the digestion don’t you know). It was
felt that the best place to go looking for all these sterling
qualities was in the Admiralty. A check round those present suggested
that Admiral Hood was the soundest chap we could think of.

The conversation moved
on to discuss the merits of having other sorts of chaps as deputies
to the good Admiral to make sure that he would be well advised. The
committee agreed that it was vitally important to have a theologian
on the management of the institute and also a General. There was much
discussion on the merits or otherwise of engineers and the scientific
mechanical sort. It was resolved that a natural philosopher might be
useful as a deputy but that the mechanical aspects should be left as
humble servants. General Flashman VC, known as a stouthearted, loyal
and brave subject was selected as a suitable chap to provide military
expertise to the Institute, it also being remembered that he had been
involved in political activities in his younger days. The choice of
theologian was to be referred to Her Majesty’s chaplain for a
recommendation but that would need to be someone well versed in
divinity as well as being devout.

On the matter of
exactly what the Institute would do we recommended that there should
be a collation of information on strange phenomena, probably through
setting up a journal of some kind to collect these stories and paying
readers a bounty for submitting those that were felt fit to print.
The Institute should also be involved in investigating reports,
perhaps using some of the most advanced and modern methods being used
currently by the Special Irish Branch, whereupon it was felt that one
of their suitable chaps should be seconded to head such a section in
the Institute. There needed also to be a research arm to look into
the phenomena to see what we could learn about them and how to deal
most effectively when they should turn up. This latter point lead to
the need for an arm to respond to any incursions or clean up
otherworldly evidence after the fact.

Funding for the
Torchwood Institute would mostly come from the Admiralty Vote via the
Royal Dockyards. There would be some money from an endowment from Her
Majesty and the Institute would engage with loyal and trusted
entrepreneurs to ensure that there would continue to be sufficient
funds should there be problems in the future with obtaining money by
Vote whilst maintaining absolute secrecy as to its purpose.

As regards secrecy it
was felt that with the exception of the Torchwood Committee, the
Leader of Torchwood and his immediate deputies, there was to be no
acknowledgement to those involved of the exact scale of operations.
Each operation or arm and each area office would be kept in isolation
of each other. Those involved would only be told as much as was
necessary for them to do what was asked of them and the reports would
all be submitted to the Torchwood Committee by the Admiral as
required. There was discussion of telling the government of the day.
The prevailing view was that it would be only be appropriate to tell
Ministers of the Crown that came from the upper House and even then
only if it directly pertained to their responsibilities. Should Her
Majesty require one such to be briefed then she could perfectly well
have him admitted, as a Privy Councillor, to the Torchwood Committee.

Whilst not perhaps
covering every question with a detailed answer we had produced a good
basis for proceeding and what remained to be done could be achieved
by our chosen leadership once they had been formally appointed.

Starship
Marine (Jim)

The CLWG session
happened to coincide with the Full Moon in November. Usually there
are a group of us, mainly but not exclusively CLWG members, that
gather on a full moon to play in a campaign being run by Jim and set
in his universe. Currently we are playing the part of a group of
mercenaries. Rather than attempting to run two sessions in close
proximity Jim brought along some starship marines and a deck plan for
a merchant ship for us to have a training mission prior to our next
mission as mercenaries acting as starship marines.

Brian was nominated to
be the Group Commander in overall command, Trevor was his 2ic and
John Rutherford, Mukul and myself were the squad commanders. Jim and
Peter Howland ran the defending forces.

The ship was all on a
single deck with three concentric sets of rooms with two circular
access corridors running round them, each of these circular corridors
had two short linking corridors. There were two main airlocks at
opposite sides of the ship with two much smaller emergency air locks
at ninety degrees to the main airlocks. The control rooms (main
control and power controls) were in the centre of the ship. There
wasn’t a direct route from any airlock to either power control, you
would need to traverse at least a quarter of the circle between the
link corridors, however there the two link corridors did line up with
the main airlocks.

Brian’s plan was a
relatively simple one. My squad would go in first and secure the
entry point while blasting the doors on the access corridor. John’s
squad would immediately follow through and make straight for the main
control by the most direct route. Mukul’s squad would follow John’s
squad and deal with any resistance that had been bypassed. Once
John’s squad had moved though mine I would take my squad round the
outer corridor and make for the power control room. The Group HQ
would remain in the main airlock area and provide fire support as
necessary.

Our plan largely
ignored what the enemy might do. In itself this could have been a
problem, but the feeling was that it was a straightforward operation
and there wasn’t anything that could go wrong provided that the
defenders weren’t too numerous.

On entry my squad moved
rapidly to the doors (which the defenders had left open in an attempt
to sucker us in). We put demo charges on all the doors within reach
and took up defensive positions. Sure enough one of the doors closed
cutting off a third of my squad from the rest. This was combined with
three enemy marines appearing in other doorways slightly further
away. A short fight ensued in which one of my marines was hit and in
return two enemy were downed. The third ducked back inside a room and
closed the door.

We duly blew the other
doors and placed a demo charge on the door of the room the enemy
marine had disappeared into. John’s squad moved through my
position, Mukul’s came in behind and we moved to cover the trapped
enemy marine.

The next turn saw half
of my squad dealing with the enemy marine and the other half
progressing up an empty circular corridor to the next link corridor
to get to power control. John’s squad also moved towards power
control and met some of the crew attempting to dispute their
progress. The results were no as one-sided as we would have liked,
but John’s squad wasn’t slowed much (although he did take a
casualty).

John & Mukul met
the main enemy resistance and slowly overcame it in a spectacularly
bad display of shooting from both sides. My squad continued round the
ship and down the link corridor where we found some more crew and
took another casualty when we looked round a corner.

As we massed on the
outside of the door to power control to burst in after blowing the
door John’s squad was just breaking into main control. Yet more
appalling shooting all round kept this indecisive enough for my squad
to take a third casualty from some grenades as well as taking down a
fourth enemy marine in return. Almost as soon as we blew the doors on
power control the ship’s captain decided to surrender as they had
just lost main control.

Remember,
Remember (Jim & Brian)

This was the last of
the three games. The players were all plotters in the Gunpowder plot,
although with varying degrees of ardour in their wish to come to
blows to improve the lot of Catholics. There was a copious amount of
briefing, a few pages on the general background, a page on the main
characters of the plot and then a couple of pages of character
briefing for each player.

The game started off
quite well with some in character conversation about our level of
grievance and what we could do about it. All the players skirted
around the suggestion of blowing up parliament and it took some time
before that was agree upon as a solution (and in fact there were a
couple of points where I thought that we might well do something
completely different).

Having resolved that
was what we were going to do we came up with a plan and then
allocated some plausible roles to the plotters. As my character had
been well educated and fought on the continent I was deputed to go to
Flanders and attempt to buy gunpowder. This I duly did while others
sorted out other aspects of the plot. Mostly what I did at this stage
was join Jim in planting fireworks in the card model of the Houses of
Parliament that he had been constructing while we were chatting
earlier. We also did some testing of fuses and powder trails to make
sure that it would be safe when we tried to set the whole thing off
later. Obviously the people at DTI who regulate firework production
have decided to stop people doing what we did as it was only with
extreme difficulty that we managed to ignite the contents of a
firework.

On returning to the
other plotters I found that there was disappointing progress on the
tunnel that we had been attempting but that a coal merchant who had a
cellar under the Houses of Parliament had suddenly decided to shut up
shop. We duly moved our wine importing business into the cellar and
made a habit of greeting the two guards that came round every night
to check all was well with a tankard of wine. This was a blatant
attempt to make them less worried about searching the cellar
thoroughly and more interested in getting their free drinks.

As the time approached
we moved the barrels of gunpowder into position over several days. At
the last minute the date of the opening was changed. Guy Fawkes
(played by Mukul) was a bit perturbed by this but I insisted that we
should stay and carry on with business as usual until it was time to
make things go bang. This might have been a mistake on my part. On
the night of the 4th of November a whole group of guards
came round to search the cellar, not including our usual two drinking
chums. It was obvious as soon as the arrived that they weren’t
randomly searching and that giving them all some wine wouldn’t
prevent them from searching. Realising that there was no escape for
me anyway I threw an oil lantern on the barrels of gunpowder and then
drew my sword to buy enough time for the fire to catch properly. The
outcome was a huge explosion.

As games went this one
was pretty one sided and it might have been more fun if both
protagonists had been player driven. However I did enjoy it a lot and
felt that it was pretty good as an educational tool to explain the
plot. I also felt a real moment of uncertainty when the state opening
of parliament was postponed. We’d gone to some lengths to ensure
that the plot remained secret, avoiding writing the letter that was
written in history to warn the Catholic Lords not to attend.

As an excuse to build
things and then blow them up it was second to none. We took Jim’s
lovingly constructed Houses of Parliament (complete with fireworks in
the cellar) out to the end of my garden and got Guy Fawkes (Mukul) to
light the blue touch paper before we all retired to a safe distance
to watch the fireworks go off. There was about a minute of coloured
lights and not much else until Mukul said, “It hasn’t really gone
off much”. This was almost immediately followed by a very
spectacular shower of explosions that made us all move further
back…

CLWG, design, games, WW1

Hot Blood & Cold Steel – onside Report

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This was a design session on how to do a WW1 skirmish game, focusing mainly delivering a participation game for Jerry Elsmore’s 50th Birthday con. I’d already done a first darft of the rules but wanted to talk through some of the principles about what I wanted to achieve.

I found the discussion particularly useful in clarifying my methods for running a participation game at a show. Gone is the idea of having all the action in a static circle of squares that represented all that could be seen (I may do this at CLWG sometime as I still like the idea, although it would be too time-consuming for being run at a show). I did get some ideas for making changes to the terrain though so that it would only become clear when figures entered the square in question.

Also useful was the discussion on how to simulate disorientation and when that might be appropriate. This means that I have some ideas for retaining the confusion that can happen when patrolling at night, especially when shooting starts.

The next version of the game in a complete and playable form will be around at the January meeting and again in February so that it will have had a couple of outings by the time Jerry’s birthday convention comes round. Any volunteers to help run the game on the day will be more than welcome.

In the meantime the draft rules (which are an evolution of Jim’s Starship Solder rules converted to work with 2d6 and have a WW1 flavour) are on the web. http://www.cold-steel.org and there is a fledgling mailing list (using my usual server) at list@cold-steel.org (send a blank e-mail with ‘subscribe’ (no quotes) in the subject line).

Also if anyone has photos (preferably aerial ones) of trenches or shell craters (regardless of period) then I wouldn’t mind if you could send me some scans. I need to make up a stack of terrain cards for the game and one of the things that impressed me at the conference was Jim’s use of laminated card pictures for counters. I reckon that terrain cards made up the same way would look pretty good.

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