COW 2026

 As the (hopeful) end of the PhD hoves into view (I've got about 6 months left), I really ought to start blogging more again. We'll see how I go....

Wargame Development's Conference of Wargamers was held at Cranfield Management Centre for the first time on 10-12 July. We had to move from the wonderful Missenden Abbey as that was being put up for sale, and whilst Cranfield is very much a modern conference centre and so lacking in a bit of character it more than makes up for that in having lots of very usable space, a lovely atrium area for general mixing, and, crucially for that weekend, very effective air conditioning. I took 3 games along and got to play in another half dozen or so. Here's a quick summary of what I did and saw.

Captain Scarlet and the Leperons

This was my game for the Friday night after dinner slot - so something fun rather than serious. It came about for two reasons - a discussion of Captain Scarlet late night at the last COW (and the discover that 28mm figures are available), and a wish to show people the custom card mechanic of Buck Surdu's Albedo Combat Patrol. So what better scenario than Spectrum fighting rabbits uplifted and reanimated by the Mysterons! The game went down pretty well I think, and reminded me just how good the ACP rules are. I might well do a modern version (and even finish the Anderverse version I started), and I also worked out how to build a simple Javascript app to replaced the cards during development (and even afterwards for those so inclined).

Captain Scarlet surrounded by dead rabbits

Lt Green takes a bead on the advancing rabbits

Recce Strike

I didn't get to play this, but its a version of the game used by the British Army to look at the recce strike model - where you aim to defeat ~66% of a force before it reaches you through a combination of ISR, drones and Fires. Lovely big operational map and some neat mechanics. All units are represented on the map as "task forces", with actual task force composition off map, and of course some are dummies.

Brick By Bloody Brick

This is my PhD game on tactical urban combat - so around reinforced platoon level. It uses a tile set to lay out different urban environments, and manoeuvre units are typically half-sections or specialist teams. UAVs are actively portrayed - as movable on-table units for ISR, and single effect counters for FPVs and Bombers. It uses a bucket of dice model, with doubles causing damage, or problems. There is also a mechanic for causing collateral issues such as civilian harm, fires, toxic gas release and rubble. Read more at the Brick By Bloody Brick home page. Game went down very well and I'm aiming at releasing it in the autumn.

Airstrike Landstrike

The venerable Seastrike game was one of the hits of last years conference (I think we amassed over a dozen copies - and I've since bought my own), so one of our members has decided to start extending it into a Joint game, with air and land components - each with their own card deck. Very much a work in progress but what he had so far worked well and shows a lot of potential. We also went down a rabbit hole talking about the Joint rules that used to appear in the back of the Armies and Weapons magasine in the 1970s/80s (translated version of an Italian magasine), and which were published in Italy as a book called Alfa-Tau (and which we may have tracked down a copy of).

The Perfect Battle - The Battle of Aliwal, January 1846

Something a bit more traditional for the after lunch slot on Saturday, a battle from the Anglo-Sikh wars played on a gridded table and with the author's own rules (derived from his Taiping Era rules). Serious BOD (17 was the most I think), lot loads of fun. My cavalry managed to reach the far table edge - which is always a good sign.

RUCKUS

My third game for COW, this was my PhD game set at brigade/battalion level. Again it uses tiles to generate different urban layouts. Everything works off 1D6, and all the key rules and charts are on a 1 page QRS. I finally achieved my goal at COW of playing a sizeable urban engagement in less than an 2 hours. More details on the RUCKUS home page, and it should be out by the end of August.

The Earth Prepared

This was more a "happening" than a wargame, as, representing different nations and factions on Earth (I was the Elon Musk characters intern!) we plan for an incoming alien invasion. A game full of lovely props and wacky ideas.

Checkpoint Zulu

Last session on Saturday night and a complete change of tone. This was essentially a map TEWT (Tactical Exercise Without Troops) run by a Finnish reservist about being on stag at a vehicle checkpoint outside of a Finnish airport as tensions between Russia and Finland rise. The real insight was not so much into the VCP duties as now to do them in the sub-zero temperatures of a Finnish winter!

Labyrinth

This game of the "global war on terror" has been on my to buy/play list for ages so it was great to be able to try it out. I was on the Jihadi team, but the US made very short work of our presence in Afghanistan so we were forced to move our operations to the Philippines, and start up cells in London and Paris. It has the potential to be a very dark game, but the mechanics are excellent and its a lot easier to play than Twilight Struggle which sort of kickstarted this genre. Now moved to the top of the "to buy" list, and also some ideas I might borrow for Centennial.

Le Kriegspiel

The final session on Sunday morning, and the last session of the Conference, was a fascinating presentation by a French Army Officer (and head of their wargaming team) on the history of professional wargaming in France, and the modern state of play.

A superb weekend as ever. And in 2027 I might actually be out of the PhD and might be a) able to put on something other than urban games and b) not put on so many games so I can play more of other peoples games.

The conference gallery is up on the WD web site at https://wargamedevelopments.org/conferences/cows/, which also has details about how to join WD if you'd like to take part in next year's COW.

Cityfight2024

 

At VCOW this year I ran Cityfight2024, a massively simplified (and updated) version of the 1979 SPI classic Cityfight. It's a platoon level hex-and-counter game but designed to be played double-blind, so ideal for remote play. I set up each board  on its own Google Slides document, and the players all had voice comms via Zoom. It's a bit like Battleships, except the "ships" can move every turn!

You can find out more about the game on my PhD Wiki.

My control set-up, one screen per side

Red's view of the battle

Blue's view of the battle

Prepping Vertical Dropzone Commander

 For Wargame Development's VCOW virtual conference at the start of February I'm planning to do a "vertical" wargame, where players (Pl Comds) get a table-level web-cam view of what is going on as they try and fight through the city. Played through DZC a few times and done some 1985 stats for it. And here's a couple of images from the technical testing. Will test with some remote players next week.

Chieftain on the prowl - pity I haven't got the Berlin Brigade urban cam

The two platoon cams, plus an overview cam

Onside report after the event.

Christmas In Hell v1.5

 

I first came across the Battle of Ortona in a brief discussion about mouseholeing in Anthony King’s recent Urban Warfare book. My interest was really piqued though by an episode of John Spencer’s Urban Warfare Podcast from the Modern Warfare Institute (MWI) at West Point where he interviewed Jayson Geroux (a Canadian and now also at MWI) about his Masters Thesis on Ortona. The battle occurred as the Canadians raced up the east coast of Italy late in 1943 trying to get to the Gustav line, which ran from Rome to the east coast. The Allies thought it terminated at the Arielli River, and so thought that Ortona would be a minor mopping up operation. But having taken 2 days to cover a few hundred yards they realised that Ortona itself was the eastern anchor of the line. It really did seem to be the archetypal WW2 urban battle with combined arms, narrow streets, mouseholeing, fires, flame, boobytraps and snipers; and all fought over 7 days in Christmas 1943. Not wishing to reinvent the wheel I did a quick Google search and found that High Flying Dice Games in Canada (run by Paul Rohrborough, a friend of Philip Sabin) did a game – Christmas in Hell (CiH). I duly ordered it and thought it might be a good game to take to COW as I only had a couple of months to get something ready.

My first play through was a bit of a disaster. A long exchange of emails for clarifications with Paul improved things on the next run through, but there were a number of elements that I thought were getting in the way of a good game. And needless to say the more I started modding it the more changes I wanted to make – hence the gradual shift from v1.1 to v1.5! By the end I think the only things remaining from the original game were the events chits drawn for the German AI (this is fundamentally a solo game), the close assault rules, and the rubble! The rubble was why I stuck with the game rather than chose something else. It has a really simple way of representing the way in which a town (and particularly historically Ortona) becomes choked with rubble when it’s the subject of a full-on fight, and how that rubble really impedes mobility. The other thing I really liked was that when I’d played other random chit based solo games (such as Battle for Ramadi and The Battle of Hue – both from Tiny Battle Publishing) there were different pots for each chit type – so it was very consistent (and boring) in what you’d be up against. CiH’s single pot meant that things were more random (odd sometimes but that’s fine), and the use of dummy chits and different number of chits dependent on when you where in the battle all added to the variety.

The main changes I made to Christmas in Hell were:

• The map. The CiH map is a fairly abstract collection of buildings that sort of give some sense of the shape and density changes in Ortona, but without actually looking like it. Using a contemporary aerial reconnaissance photo and Canadian sketch from Jayson’s MA (and some useful clarifications from Jayson himself) I hacked the Open Streetmap map of modern Ortona back to something like its 1943 version.

• The grid. CiH covered the town in about 35 areas in an irregular grid. Ever since I saw Storm Over Arnhem it struck me that irregular grids were the way to go with urban games. However the grid bore no relation to the underlying terrain, and even included big green areas that in real life are cliff-sides and were totally unusable in the battle! It also struck me that any urban grid should separate the main thoroughfares out into their own long areas, so you get the variety of fighting along those main routes (which in Ortona were the only places that tanks could go) and the more close-quarters fights in the side-streets. So I did a new map with about double the areas, and with tank symbols to show which areas tanks could move in, and fire into.  I also gave each area a Protection Value (PV) to represent the density and solidity of the buildings in the area.

• The unit scale. CiH uses platoon manoeuvre units, each rolling typically 4 dice in combat. There are 8 companies involved in the main fight – 24 platoons. The CiH grid gives you a frontage of about 5 areas, so that’s about 5 platoons per areas (20 dice!) before you add tanks and machine guns! Quite apart from all the dice the board gets VERY crowded. The accounts of the battle are very much Company based, and so I decided that that made sense of the game, 25% less counters and dice at a stroke.

• The fire combat system. CiH had separate rolls for anti-tank and anti-personnel fire and then an extra roll when using tanks or anti-tank guns to see if more rubble had been created. I kept forgetting to use the anti-tank rules, and even in the Bath Spa play test I kept forgetting to use the rubble rules. So I came up with the idea of having a single roll but using white dice for HE/AT and green dice for small arms. The number of dice (starting with green) then get reduced for Protection Value and Rubble. When rolling the dice (5s for Infantry hits, 6 for tanks/guns) any double increases rubble by 1, and any triple or multiple doubles by 2. I’m pretty happy with the system as one throw takes care of something that needed 3 throws in CiH, and all seems pretty elegant. 

• Six Pounders. The Canadians in CiH only have MG counters, not 6pdrs, even though the German’s get Pak counters. This seemed odd as the histories of the battle, and the quotes from participants are full of praise for the 6 pounders. They were man-handled everywhere, over rubble piles too bit for tanks and even up onto 2nd and 3rd storeys! They were described by one soldier as "anti-rubble, anti-sniper and anti-house" weapons. So in re-doing all the Canadian counters I added in the 6 pounders.

There were a lot of other smaller game changes, but I think those were the main ones. The two other things I added were more about the narrative of the battle. 

Ortona is nicely contained both geographically and narratively, and the fact that Christmas happens mid-battle just adds to the story. So for each turn (morning, afternoon, night) I did a short piece of narrative, mostly drawn from memoirs, of the battle, and usually tied to some specific game mechanic or phase. 

Christmas needed something special. A famous photo of the battle shows the soldiers of the Seaforths sitting down as a big square table in a ruined church for Christmas dinner. There are debates about the true provenance of the photo, but there is no doubt that the dinner did take place. But the Loyal Eddies were told by their CO to have a shorter and less sumptuous dinner just behind their positions, and some section leaders refused to let their men go anywhere lest they got killed (as some did coming back from the dinner). So I gave each player a set of 4 options for Christmas day – a big dinner, a small dinner, staying put, or attacking as normal. Once revealed those who went for dinners would have to suffer a one or two rounds of mortar fire, whilst those who go on the attack find that everything is at -1 as the soldiers’ hearts just weren’t in it. 

Note: Having just played Storm Over Arnhem I realise how much Christmas in Hell owes to that game, not just the area map but also the close combat system and a few other mechanics. That said the AI and rubble are all CiH's home and the rubble in particular makes it feel "urban" in a way that Storm over Arnhem doesn't acheive.

So how did it go on the day. I had five players, a CO for each of the Loyal Eddies, Seaforths and the Three Rivers’ Shermans, and two  assistants for the German AI.

It was the first in-person COW game I’d run and whilst I knew it would be a push to get close to running all 15 turns in 2 hours I really should have guessed that a COW group would spend far longer discussing things and asking questions than we did in our play test. In the end I think we only just got to Christmas day – so at least we could have the session with the Christmas cards! The rules were a lot more complex than those of the other games I played at COW (a lesson for the future), and so learning them on the hoof took more time – but certainly people were picking them up by the end. I’d decided that it would be nice to have rule summaries and counter legends around the edge of the A1 map, but in practice the areas were already quite small, and that meant even less space for them, and the suggestion that next time I use the whole of the A1 for the map is one I’ll certainly follow. Alex had a useful keen eye for where the very compressed QRS lacked clarity and also identified some other rules improvements (such as it being successively easier to de-mine an area).

Overall though I think that everyone enjoyed it, and I think it certainly gives a good feel for how a town soon becomes choked with rubble as you fight through it with heavy weapons – reducing any ability to quickly move forces between axes or to respond to infiltrations as we had happen towards the end – and that I think was really the objective and focus of my game rather than any other particular aspect of urban combat.

As for the future I’m likely to develop the game in two ways. The first is to turn it into a more generic set of urban rules, particularly for WW2, so as to use with other smaller urban battles. I might also aim for a 6 turn limit, so Ortona would be played in day turns, shorter battles still at 4 hours, or even 2 hours. The second is to make it more abstract so it’s a fight for “anytown”, and use a card-based system to generate a random street to fight down, but with otherwise the same mechanics. That could give a nice introduction to urban combat that can be played quickly (and even competitively) in 30 minutes or so. Perhaps I’ll take that along to COW2023, because having run my first COW game I certainly want to run more. 

My thanks to Graham, Alex, Alan, Ed and Ed for putting up with the fiddly counters, for all the constructive advice and for being patient with a novice GM!

Bibliography:

Chiavini, R. Christmas in Hell. [Game]. Canada: High Flying Dice Games. Available at: http://www.hfdgames.com/ortona.html

Geroux, J. (2021). Italian Stalingrad: The Battle of Ortona. [Podcast] Interview with J. Spencer. Urban Warfare Podcast. USA: Modern Warfare Institute. Available at: https://mwi.usma.edu/italian-stalingrad-the-battle-of-ortona/

Geroux, J. (2021). The Urban Battle of Ortona. Masters Thesis. Canada: University of New Brunswick. Available at: https://unbscholar.lib.unb.ca/islandora/object/unbscholar%3A10433

Gooderson, I. (2008). Assimilating Urban Battle Experience – The Canadians at Ortona. Canadian Military Journal, Winter 2007-2008. Canada: National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. Available at: http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo8/no4/doc/gooderso-eng.pdf

King, A. (2021). Urban Warfare. London: Polity.

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

VCOW21 - Conference and Gaming Report

WW2 Brigade Commander via Zoom

This last Friday/Saturday/Sunday was the weekend of the Virtual Conference of Wargamers, and event usually held physically in the summer by the Wargame Developments Group. I've never got to COW, but last summers VCOW was a cracker so I was really looking forward to this 2nd VCOW, and it sounds like it will now be a regular fixture, running every February - wonderful.

This VCOW had a lot more sessions, and a lot more of those were games. Having watched several US wargaming conventions on Little Wars TV recently it seems that VCOW (and I expect COW) has more in common with those than UK wargaming shows, and certainly than a more conventional conference (except perhaps Connections).

Lecture wise there was an excellent double-header opener looking at Counter-Insurgency wargames, the second being given by Brian Train, creator of the Afghanistan boardgame A Distant Plain. There was another excellent presentation by Nick Riggs on his PhD work looking at how we model (badly) tactical actions. The conference kicked off with a virtual battlefield tour of Brecourt Manor (of Band of Brothers fame) by someone who conveniently lives just down the road from it.

Game wise this is what I managed to fit in between Friday evening and Sunday lunchtime:

• Seize Warsaw - a Brigade level blind kreigspiel on Discord and ConceptBoard on the German assault on Warsaw on 7th Sept 1939 - I never fired a shot but the Germans did well
• The Six Week Naval War, 1789 - a country level blind kriegspiel of naval conflict between Britain, Spain and France - we got well beaten as the French 
• Lockdown and the Portable Wargame - a talk on the Portable Wargame by its designer Bob Cordery and then the chance to play in out in a Zoom'd ACWesque encounter in 25mm - we won narrowly but I must admit the rules seemed very abstract
• In the Heart of America - Buffalo hunting as a native American with a great card mechanic and 54mm sized toys (just). Would be a great demo game at a show.
• WW2 Brigade Commander - Brigade level open wargame with Zoom on a 6x6 hexon grid with 6mm models - superb and my battalion took both the objectives! Will run my own games so watch the blog.
• Politics By Means of Pointy Sticks - Ancients game using Zoom and the One-Hour Wargame rules (and 15mm?) - great fun, superb narration and we won again! Again will play my own games.
• Papal Conclave 1492 - a political game with Zoom and lots of Zoom breakout rooms for secret (and not so secret) meetings, great fun (and I didn't get elected Pope!)

And here are a few more photos - Zoom's not very exciting I know!

Politics by Means of Pointy Sticks

The Portable Wargame

Nice TTS Op Martlett DLC being used for a wargaming PhD (!)

A superb conference with a great range of games. Roll on the main COW (in some form) and VCOW 2022.

Virtual Conference of Wargamers

On the weekend of 10-12 July I had a great time virtually attending Wargame Development Group's Virtual Conference of Wargamers usually held at Knuston Hall, but due to COVID held on-line. I've never managed to get to the physical event, so whilst attending virtually wasn't ideal at least I got there!

Since I'd been writing an article for the Nugget (the WDG magasine) on Remote Wargaming I thought I'd also put it up for a VCOW talk - so I got to present as well.

Anywhere here are the highlights of the weekend - I've done offside reports for each for the Nugget, and once they run my Remote Wargaming article in Nugget I'll post a copy up here.

Events were held on a mix of Zoom and Skype.

• The conference kicked off with a virtual battlefield tour of Landsdowne, led by John Curry (of History of Wargaming Project fame), with deft use of Google Earth and Google Streetview, and Zoom breakout rooms for syndicates to discuss options
• Several interesting talks on professional wargaming and the history of COW/WDG
• An SF skirmish game called Hadleys Hope where our team had to try and fix a transmitter and find out what happened to the previous team. Tom Mouat had the tabel set up in his house and gave us a ground-level Zoom view to work from - all very blurry and hard to spot attackers in amongst the terrain. Our characters were primary coloured meeples (see top) so easy to spot. Worked very well.
• A virtual ECW TWET (Tactical Exercise Without Troops) for a disguised Battle of Cropredy Bridge - again Google Earth/Streetview, plus on-site photos and sketchmaps and breakout rooms. Again worked very well (and helped I'd wargamed it in January)
• An Age of Sail Naval Wargame (see below) run by John Armaty’s - I was on the Spanish side trying to sink a convoy or capture and avoid the Royal Navy. As with Hadley Hope John had a hex grid table and 1/3000th models, but this time we had a fixed overhead cam view. The grid made movement and firing nice and easy. Great game, narrow Spanish win I think - I certainly captured a merchantman.  
• Interesting lecture contrasting professional and recreational wargaming
• Unfortunate Differences - a cut down professional strategic game of a dispute in the China Sea over some islands between the Chinese, Japanese and Americans. I was the Chinese Navy commander under strict instructions to keep my carrier safe whilst our subs did the dirty work. In fact they didn't need to as the Japanese ran a sub aground on the islands which trying to land Special Forces - right in front of our crack team of social media student influencers!
• A nice discussion about what we'd all been up to in lockdown, and which different parts of the hobby we were taking the time to explore
• A great presentation by John Curry on storming a medieval castle - drawing on an exercise done by a group of re-enactors. 

All-in-all a great introduction to COW, and I really must get there in person next year.

As an aside, what is interesting is that of all the "virtual" events I've been to in lockdown in terms of professional work this was actually probably the best - with everyone fully engaged, no real passive participants, and great use of a variety of technologies. No surprise really given how great Connections (another professional wargame conference) last year - with both having an emphasis on playing games more than just talking about things.