COW 2022

The COW Sign-Up board - the whole thing is run on pretty much unconference lines

I finally made it to COW - the Wargame Developments Group's Conference of Wargamers. This year it was held at the Defence Academy, which meant that not only was there enough space for any members who wanted to to come, but we also had free run of the equipment halls between sessions. 

I played in 5 games, and ran my own game - Christmas in Hell v1.5 on the Battle of Ortona which I'll cover in a separate post. I also watched a few others which I'll note briefly at the end - followed by some pics of the kit.

Raven 2 is Down

My first COW, my first COW lawn game – it had to be done! Ian Drury did not disappoint with a fun game played out on what passed for a lawn on the edge of the car park. One of our pilots was missing in Vietnam and we had a fine array of 1/72nd scale model aircraft to use to go hunting for him on the gridded lawn. Pesky North Vietnamese kept on popping up, sometimes with AA guns, and soon we forgot about the search and just had fun trying out all the different ways that Ian had found for us to try and hit targets with, including Nerf guns, ping pong balls, darts and chucking paper balls over the back of our shoulders. The NVA flak managed to take two of our aircraft down, and the bail-out was beautifully simulated by throwing a model pilot and parachute up into the air to float down somewhere in the jungle. Back on task we located the downed airmen, and gave covering fire as the Jolly Green Giant came in to pick them up and fly them back to safety. Great fun!

Bailing out!

The only thing missing perhaps was a bit more agency from the player side. Although we had a nice search grid to work with the discovery of the pilot was based purely on a card draw – our track was only important in working out who was firing at us. It would have been nice to have had more of a battleships approach and call out a target square on our track, fight off any AA and then see if it revealed anything – particularly as the NVA seemed to be converging on a location but we couldn’t do anything to improve our search as a result. All of that though didn’t detract from a fun way to kick off my first full day at a COW.

Raven 2 Secured!

OFFSIDE - Space Jack

Space Jack was Mike Elliott’s straight forward SF RPG lite/skirmish game based around the hijack of a spaceship which bore an uncanny resemblance to the Serenity and even had a pilot dressed in a long brown coat! Our gang of hijackers decided to go a bit meta and start a game of Traveller in the lounge as a way of settling in and waiting for a moment to attack. After a few turns our leader called out “I’ve rolled a 20” (obviously never played Traveller!) and that was our signal to attack. Unfortunately, the Captain raced back to the bridge and managed to get the ship to perform somersault after somersault to keep us off balance. With the bridge and engineering beyond our reach we decided our best bet was to head down to the cargo bay, hunt for the contraband which we were after (and found first go) and then make our escape in one of the ship’s boats. 

The brown-coated captain!

With locked bulkhead doors and anti-hijack software running we never really stood a chance of taking the ship down. Like so much “classic” SF the scenario lacked a cyber component which would have let us counter the crew in a different domain and may have added to both the fun and the “realism” of the game. The weapons were also decidedly on the non-lethal side – shotguns missing at point blank range – but I’m sure players had no wish to die too quickly and be out of the game.

OFFSIDE – Petrograd Nights

Petrograd Night’s was Russell King’s "entertainment" on the Russian Revolution. Just as with the lawn game I knew that for my first COW I needed to play some sort of “political” game and this fitted the bill very nicely. I’d initially thought about being a Liberal, but then decided it might be a bit more fun to play the Mensheviks, a good choice as it turned out. The game revolved around the leading faction trying to pass their (or a) policy agenda, with the rest of us voting for or against, and calling the mob out if we were unhappy with how things were going – cue Tim Gow with some nice 1/32nd scale (or thereabouts) rioters and a bit of Petrograd pavement. At the start it felt like things were going a bit off track. For a start the initial deal of the cards gave the “right” an overwhelming and almost unassailable majority, so the Constitutional Democrats led the agenda setting for all but the last turn. The other issue was that parties seemed to be free to vote for whatever motions they wanted – there was no need to be true to their faction’s beliefs – so most just started chasing the roubles they got for being on the winning side of the vote – although in the end the roubles proved next to worthless. However, it was all good fun and it was with the penultimate turn we found that we had the same number of votes as the Constitutional Democrats – but they kept power as the incumbent. So on the last turn we decided to take a gamble on burning our 7 card, only a slim chance of anything higher, but if we didn’t we stood no chance. The Constitutional Democrats did likewise – an even bolder move on their part – and in the end we drew the higher card and had the opportunity to actually form the Government. We’d inherited the Democrats agenda but there was little we could do about that. To secure the premiership all the parties of the left were on our side, but we needed to swing the Liberals to get the majority. Some quick shuttle diplomacy, some donations to the Dacha needs of the Liberal leaders (helped along with a generous donation from the Bolsheviks) and we got our majority and the Mensheviks duly formed the government! Overall a great after-dinner game, the enjoyment of which would have been only marginally improved by playing it somewhere that had ready access to some vodka!

OFFSIDE – Nevermind

Nevermind was a simple offset-square and counter game of a 1950s nuclear missile and bomber attack on NW Europe and the UK. The initial IRBM strike took out several forward airbases and Nike SAM sites with the aim of punching a hole in the defence for the bombers to storm through (SAM sites had 0 range). As the bombers came on I scrambled my aircraft to intercept, but given that they only re-armed on a 6 I needed to keep some back for the second and third wave. As it was the fighters did there job pretty well, almost too well, and by Turn 4 there wasn’t a bomber left in the sky. Mind you we’d meant to be playing the Night rules, but in the scramble to get counters on the table I forgot to check for the bold (?) for all-weather (or the italic for supersonic), so I probably didn’t give the Russians (commanded by Nick) a fair fight. Nick was also somewhat hampered by the fact that the older aircraft only had a duration of 3 turns, by when they’d hardly passed over the Iron Curtain and certainly weren’t about to cause East Anglia any problems before they disappeared in a puff of umpire’s smoke.

OFFSIDE – There’s Something Wrong with Our Wargames Today

John Curry gave an excellent talk on what is wrong with our wargames today – for some strange reason all three of his PhD students were in attendance. As someone who’s been playing wargames with the Ukrainian Army for the last few years John’s in a pretty unique position to look at how wargames match up to reality, and it had been fascinating on Saturday afternoon to sit and watch his Ukraine 2022 wargame. My main takeaways from his talk were the problems (and dangers) of predictive validity, the use of over-optimistic heuristics compared to tried and tested real-world data and the perennial lack of consideration for logistics. Dr Curry’s prescription for trying to improve things included:

• Thinking and considering the unthinkable (aided by a red cell that is brought in from an outside organisation so it owes nothing to the sponsor); 

• Rigorously checking any challenge that the next war will be different, basing design on historical practice, informed but not driven by the present;

• Thinking more about people and morale, and of course logistics;

• Being aware that whilst new technology can help it is often underwhelming when it actually hits the battlefield.

One of John’s parting shots was that if a wargamer and an analyst disagree then the wargamer is probably right as she or he has had to build a model and work with it.

One of the interesting comments made in discussion (by Steven Aguilar-Martin I think) was  that wargames are about building the contours on a map of the future. They don’t tell us exactly what the future will be (i.e. they are not predictive) but they give us some idea of the landscape that the future will occupy. And to draw those contours and build that map you need lots of repetitions – and anything which means more wargaming is fine in my book!

Games Watched But Not Played

 

John Curry's Ukraine game - as played with Ukrainians prior to 2022

A rather lovely Pirate game

Warlord "Epic" scale Waterloo - really just so people could see it

Tom Mouat's "Twilight2000" style RPG of Ukrainian Territorials in 2022. Nice use of Google Maps.

The Equipment Hall

Just a few shots of the collection of modern armour and artillery at Shrivenham - with permission to climb all over them.

A T72

The dismounts in a BMD are meant to fit in there!

Spartan next to a BMP1

Rear of a BMP1, yep could get 8 people in there, just.

Rear of a BMP2, real tight fit for the 7 dismounts!

BMP2 on left, BMP1 on right

Another view down that BMD hatch!

BMP2 with BMP 1 and Spartan behind