Albuera - 16 May 1811

 

I really ought to post here a bit more, especially having left Twitter, but seem to be using LinkedIn for most work and even work/PhD adjacent hobby stuff - which currently doesn't leave much else. But certainly might be worth documenting some of my XR work here. Will see what I can do.

The Rose Hill Wargaming Group had a great game of the Battle of Albuera (1811) on 22-23 Feb 25. Three big tables giving 20' x 14' of playing area and relatively small forces meant that there was plenty of room to manoeuvre.

 
The game started on blinds, but it was soon apparent that Soult was going for the historical option of the southern flank and the two hills. Beresford had other ideas though and went onto the offensive, storming across the Albuera and catching an extended French northern wing in the flank. Beresford followed this up with crossing over the river just south of the bridges and gradually beat the French back through the olive groves and back up the Seville road! All this though meant that the Spanish had to hold the southern flank more or less on their own. There was a big cavalry battle around the two hilltops, and then the infantry clashed - right on the northern hill as per history.

 
As we left it on Saturday night we thought it was all over for the Spanish, there was even an extreme flanking move by the French onto the western table, but come Sunday morning the Spanish held firm, but paid a dear price in doing so. By lunchtime the French had lost their third Brigade and were about to lose a fourth, and so as per the scenario Soult decided that trying to reach Badajoz was too expensive and it was time to return to Seville. The Allies won a Marginal Victory, their own losses being too great to claim a Decisive Victory. Some bragging rights ensued as we'd more or less switched the commands over from Fuentes de Onoro, which the British won, so some people (no names) had two wins in a row!

We're now planning our next game, which will be Salamanca, with around 3000 20mm figures on at least the same size table - so we'll probably need twice as many players. It will probably be on 21-22 Feb 2026 - so if you'd like to provisionally book a place let us know.

The full photo library is on our Facebook page, but here are a few choice ones.

Quite like this "panoramic" shot of the Spanish and French lines clashing

Another shot of the main fight, looking N to the Spanish line, ENDEX positions

Spanish infantry holding the line

We start the games on blinds so that intentions aren't clear

More Spanish heading into the fight

Note the rain sign - tiles were periodically hit by rainstorms - as happened in the battle

The Portuguese getting in on the action too!

Blake reflecting that the day has gone well

Mixed Reality for Wargaming - Very Initial Experiments

 

In October I upgraded from my trusty Oculus/Meta Quest 1 to a Quest 3. Whilst the VR support of the Quest3 is only a marginal improvement (on the already very good) Quest1, the big step forward with the Quest3 is its Mixed Reality (MR) capability. By Mixed Reality we mean the ability to overlay virtual objects and information onto the physical world - but in such a way that the virtual objects are aware of, and respond to, the physical world layout. So for instance if you threw virtual dice onto a physical table they would bounce and roll across the table, and then probably fall off the table edge and onto the floor! 

Mixed Reality

The Quest uses a process called video pass-through. Existing Mixed Reality headsets such as the Microsoft Hololens and Magic Leap deliver Mixed Reality through projecting digital information onto a visor which the users looks through to see the physical world with the virtual overlay. By contrast, with the Quest the user is looking at a stereoscopic video screen which uses camera on the front of the headset to show the physical world, and then then displays the digital information on thew same screen. The Hololens and Magic Leap suffered from two big problems - they had a very narrow field of view and they either needed a relatively dark room or had to darken the physical world view in order to get enough contrast to see the digital information. The Quest3 solves both of these, the FOV is the same as in VR, so about 120 degrees, and it actually prefers more brightly lit rooms.

So what does it look like. This photo at the top of the page is the introductory game in Quest3 where a spaceship falls through a hole in your room's ceiling, lands on the table below it, and then starts spewing little furry aliens which start bouncing around the room and which you need to shoot - and each time you miss and hit your rooms (physical) walls the (virtual) walls begin to disappear and reveal an alien landscape behind!

Mixed Reality Wargaming

But what about wargaming? If you've played Tabletop Simulator you'll know that that already delivers a 3D wargames table - complete with models, terrain, cards and dice - but you only "see" your opponents as icons - there is a limited sense of being in the same room as them. With MR, you should be able to have that same virtual tabletop experience, but you can put the table top on your own (empty) physical table in your gaming room, and your opponents can be a mix of people physically in the same room as you (but wearing their own MR headsets) and people in remote locations coming in via the Internet (and wearing their own MR headsets and seeing the virtual table set up on their physical tables).

The nice things about MR wargaming, just as with Tabletop Simulator, is that you don't have to code any rules, you just need the various 3D assets - models, terrain, dice, cards etc - and then let players manipulate them just as they would in the physical world, and consulting physical rules (or digital copies) as and when needed.

My initial experimentations in this area are all about proving the concept, so I'm not trying to bring in a full game, just proving that the technology can do what is needed. There are likely to be 4 stages:

• Proving it for solo play - i.e. only I am playing - but I get a fully configurable virtual wargames table (ideal for urban wargaming experiments)
• Proving it for remote play - I'm at home and my opponent is in their home
• Proving it for local play - I'm at home and my opponent is in the same room as me
• Proving it for hybrid play - ideally with 3 locations and 4-6 people spread between them (if I can find enough Quest3 owning wargamers!)

First Experiments

Seeing as no-one has yet built (to my knowledge) a wargaming MR app, and I didn't want to have to write the code myself, I first needed to find an app that would let me import, place and move objects in MR. I drew up a long list of potential games/apps that I might be able to co-opt to my needs, but luckily the second one I tried - Arkio - did exactly what I needed. Arkio is designed for architects and  lets them import 3D models and share and explore them in MR, and crucially also has simple in-world build and annotation/measurement tools. So using Arkio and one of their demo cityscapes I brought in a T72 model (bought for $7 on Turbosquid) and moved it around the table, both using the controllers and just with my hands. For good measure I could move the model yacht in the model too.

And here's moving the objects by hands:

A very basic demo, but enough to prove that the concept of solo wargaming in MR is completely viable.

One issue I did have though was that when I first brough the T72 into MR I was expecting it to be something like a 1:35 scale model, whereas it came in as a 1:1 model and completely filled my (relatively large) wargames room!

If you're going to play a game in MR then its good to be able to use the physical rules as it saves you having to work out how to import them. The video quality on the Quest was not only good enough to do that, but also good enough to use your smartphone or tablet - so PDF rules would be OK. 

Of course its useful to have things like QRS sheets in world - so I converted a PDF document into an image and brought that in-world. Since this is MR you can of course put things anywhere, even hanging in space, and resize them as you need them.

A key capability is to be able to improvise within the game/application so you aren't limited to what's been already imported - this is vital to provide a flexible environment for game prototyping. Luckily Arkio has the tools to support this - the simple buildings in the video below were built using the in-world tools.

Another really neat feature of Arkio is that you point your controller at a point in the model and then be teleported into that place at "human" scale so you can view the whole model in VR. Ideal for sorting line-of-sight issues!

And finally, this need not just be for miniatures gaming but can also be used for boardgames - in this case Littoral Commander. If the cards were moved form the physical to the MR space you'd then be able to place them anywhere around you - no more running out of physical table space!

So that's it for the initial look-see. Next task is to try and get the stage 2 test sorted, and maybe bring some more assets in start working up a playable game.

Academic, Hobby and Professional Wargaming - all in one week!

In the last week I’ve spoken at an academic wargaming event, spent the weekend playing a big hobby wargame, and then run a couple of my wargames at a professional wargaming event! I guess this is the life I’ve chosen for myself now. I bet my ten year-old self playing his first wargame would never have believed it - or thought it even possible!

Starting the week, on Tuesday I was on a panel at KCL for their Wargaming Week, talking about urban needless to say. I was back there again on Thursday for practitioners workshop on academic and professional wargaming. I’ve never thought about Positivist and Post-Positivist  perspectives on wargaming (or anything else) before.

On Tuesday it was time to get the toy soldiers out for a wonderful 20mm Battle of Borodino in Francis’ barn. I started of defending the Flèches but was moved to. Crumbing left wing on Sunday. I understand the final result was a marginal Russian victory as we managed to retake the Redoubt.

Then on Sunday night it was straight over to Bristol ready for DSET - the Defence Simulation, Education and Training conference and exhibition. On the Monday they had a Wargames Fair at which I ran my Festung:Orotona game (above), and then on Tuesday I ran Rubble Town - a 20-30 minute beer-and-pretzels game using the same core mechanics as Festung, Both seemed to go down well.

Now I’m back home the focus is on getting City and CEMA ready for COW, and making some progress with the Metaverse book. I might even find some time for a wargame for some relaxation!

NATO Division Commander - AAR

Last March  I bought a copy (well two copies)  of NATO Division Commander, which I'd lusted over back in the early 1980s. I managed to play the introductory scenario (focussed on Fire and Movement) relatively soon after, but it wasn't until July/August that I made a start on the first proper scenario - having reduced the rulebook to an 8 page QRS! Those first two turns didn't go too well, just so much to think of and so much clutter on the map that I struggled to get back to it, but dutifully left it out on my table, and even preserved the set-up when the tables went down for the Talavera game. 

With a backlog of "hobby" boardgames building up (Storming the Gap, Operation Dauntless), and a gap in figure wargaming whilst I painted up some ECW I decided to finish the 9 turn scenario. I started again last week, at about an hour a turn, and finally finished last night. By the end I was at about 30-40 min a turn (and remember the US only have ~ 9 fighting unit counters and the Soviets ~18!), partly because a may have been skipping less interesting activity but hopefully more because I'd got the QRS down to 2 pages.

The Soviets just managed a substantial victory (11VP vs a threshold of 10!), mainly by flowing round the US flanks and legging it for the exits hexes. A mad dash by 25TR and 28MR on Turn 8 from mid-board saw the whole of 7GTD exit the board. The US did lose 3 combat units (so ~ 33%) and most of their recce, and their HQs were looking very precarious by the end.

My play set-up, with the Mk2 PACs, one per side

So what were the good and bad points of the game (and bear in mind this is based on only 1 proper play):

The Good

• Fatigue - the accumulation of fatigue in a non-deterministic way is nice, and emphasises the need to units to take breaks rather than fighting 24hrs per day
• Intel- the need to get intel on a target before engaging with fires works really well, and how you allocate to sectors, and the slight bonus it gives you in combat (yet another table). Of course it would come into its own in blind play.
• CSPs - the general application of Arty, Engrs, EW and CAS works pretty well - particularly the way each point is available for each phase in most cases. But see below.
• The Night turn every 3rd turn again works well, restricting movement but making attacks marginally easier
• The idea of Modes is cracking, and how they change  movt/cbt/ISR vulnerability. But see below.
• The combat sequence is actually pretty straight forward, but just a bit to complex, and see below.

A 6 counter stack (just one unit plus modifiers!)

The Bad

• It takes a lot of CSP points (mainly EW/Air) to grow permanent OpInt to the point where OpInt gives good results. The US have a LOT of air so get there quite quickly, for the Soviets it's almost mid-game. Was Soviet ISR really that bad?
• Calling Fires "Counter-Battery" is just very confusing!
• Fires are very ineffective, especially with low INT (which would be OK if not for the point above). A whole Div Arty Group can fire on a single target and not do any real damage!
• The Mode change system with CPs is horrendous. The numbers asked for are deliberately high (ie beyond what you will have in a turn) so forces you onto the next table - why not just restructure that 2nd table. I replaced it with a move penalty, but may go for a simpler SP option if I play again as it forces you to use HQs properly.
• The need for 4 CRT tables, of which you consult 2 or 3 for each attack is several too many.
• Its not clear what the difference is between the 5MP Hasty Attack and bein gin Hasty Attack mode. 
• HQ's seem relatively immune from attack, which is odd given the emphasis on C2. That said I didn't play the active EW rules which can disable HQs, inhibiting their SP/CSPs and placing units OOC.
• Like any hex game it suffers from hex play - getting your attacking units just so around the target. That said at least its a differential CRT.
• Counter stacks can be tall - 6 counters! See photo. I think I'll push most onto a PAC/rosta next time.
• Overruns should be more vicious, -3 or -4 rather than -2. As it is even small 1 or 2 str units have 6 T/O but lose max of 2 per cbt even in an overrun so can hold up a huge force 

My Mark 1 PAC

Conclusion

Do I like the game enough to play another scenario as-is? Probably not. The issue to me is that it has all these great C2 innovations, then gives you a relatively complicated combat process, so you get two complex games for the price of one. And the board clutter really doesn't help.

What's next

So to "improve" the game, or at least the game experience there are a number of things I have in mind, some minor, some major. Roughly in order of size:

• Use PACs/rostas to track most unit values - just leave Mode on the table.
• Upgrade Fires
• Upgrade overruns
• Make HQs more vulnerable - keep them on the move (we used to move at least every 24 hrs at Bde).
• Simplify the combat tables
• Introduce a streamlined SP/mode change system

And then I need to start playing the EW and Ammo rules, and then the Commander rules!

It will be interesting to see how more modern games like Dauntless and Storming the Gap compare.

And that second copy? I might now finally find the time to put it on eBay (it's all sorted and ready) to recoup some of that initial outlay!

Finally, here's the turn-by-turn photos.

Initial setup

End Turn 1

End Turn 3

End Turn 4

End Turn 5

End Turn 6

End Turn 7 - first Soviets off

End Turn 8 - Soviets off the board building

End Turn 9 - Endex

Prepping NATO Division Commander

 

When I bought NATO Division Commander in March I had a HUGE box of counters to sort through. There were effectively two copies of the game, but luckily most of one set was unpunched, but I needed to a) find all the punched counters from set 1 and get the counters from set 2 sorted so I could start playing. Well that job is finally done! Set 1 can now be prepped for sale on eBay (and hopefully recoup some of the price I paid), and Set 2 is already being laid out ready for the first proper scenario. 

Note the large black box of counters I had to sort!

I played the introductory Attack on Fitzlar scenario but that was a bit toy. I've also produced a ~6 page QRS that has all the tables and rules on it. I'm certainly not playing CBRN, Commanders or Ammo in my first game, I might even miss out the CPs (but will do the CSPs), so we'll see how it goes. I'm also doing modern "1 page orders" schematic sheets for each side so as to try and play the game/tactics "properly". 

Just look at how all the "status" counters (grey and orange) outnumber all the combat counters!

A few things I really like about what I've seen far are:

• HQs have a real purpose, and vulnerability. There's even Tac, Alt and Main (where I spent my 20s!)
• CSPs nicely abstract Fires and Combat Support, and there are also specific EW rules
• Units have modes which reflect their combat stance
• Units have up to 6 levels of damage - a far cry from the old counter-flip
• It's a differential CRT, not a ratio one
• It actually has ISR - it can be played with two maps (hence two copies of EVERY counter!), but even with one map you are forced to gather intel in order to target units with fires.

If it works tolerably well I plan to update it to 2020+ and start to add in some of the more modern tech and see if I can change it into MDO Division Commander!

 

Philip Sabin's "Simulating War" Wargames

 

As part of my PhD I've finally read Philip Sabin's Simulating War, and more to the point played all the games in it. Sabin's book was one of the first professional wargame books I bought 5 or 10 years ago, and it opened my eyes a bit to this world of "professional" wargaming.

All the games are ones he uses on the courses he teaches (or taught), so they are designed to be played in 60-90 minutes, have a maximum of about 20 counters and no more than 3-4 pages of rules. All the assets are in the book and also available for download at https://groups.io/g/SimulatingWar/files. I set up most of them in Powerpoint as it was the quickest and easiest way to play them. Here's some pics and some quick thoughts on them.

2nd Punic War

This is meant to be played multi-player and heavy on the diplomacy - and it does feel like a cut-down version of Diplomacy - and probably no bad thing at that! In solo play it was all over in 2 turns when the Carthaginians managed to get a toe-hold in Southern Italy.

Rome Invicta

A more operational level game of the Roman Civil War. Sabin has the concept of nested games, where he gets students to play a strategic, operational and tactical game on each theme so they can better understand how a war works at different levels. Think I only played a couple of turns of this as was OK but nothing special.

Big Week

A game of WW2 strategic bombing. The Allies have to get their bombers to the target and home again whilst protecting them from the German fighters. A really nice little game. A clever innovation were the "Pollard" markers, dots on the four sides of a two sided counter which gave 8 strength states (or in this case endurance/turns left).

Hell's Gate

This is a nice operational simulation of the battle of the Korsun Pocket on the Eastern Front. The ration based CRT meant you were always looking for big points densities, although as the CRT was one sides you could attack at 3:2 as no loss, and hit on 6+. I tried to cut the German supply lines with a quick drive from the East, but as the German's shrink their perimeter it becomes almost impossible to keep their lines cut. A nice touch was the chioce to make a combat limited or all-out, the greater risking some own loss. The limit per hexside and the dense target rule did something to alleviate over-stacking. The ratio CRT and hex & counter model still means it feels like you could be fighting any period though. In the end the German's held on an got a reasonable victory. Certainly worth replaying a few times to try and find an optimal strategy - but a bit of an attrition-fest.

Fire and Movement

Ever since I had the honour of playing this on-line with Philip Sabin himself umpiring I thought I really ought to get it set up on Hexon with some 6mm figures, so this was my chance. It worked incredibly well, and like the other "small-grid" games I played at VCOW showed just what a good game you can get in a small space. All the rules are finely balanced, so there are continuous choices to be made, and fire hitting two hexes, as well as all units in a hex really dissuades you from bunching! The Brits only managed to geta couple of units to the baseline, so a German win I think. Definitely a permanent option for my portable wargame set-up, and I've done a 1pp QRS to help play it - but most rules are learnt pretty fast.

Block Busting

This is the "urban" version of Fire and Movement, same basic rules but with added LOS and cover for the buildings. Fire into open hexes is DEADLY though, which makes crossing the street a real problem. In the end I found that the Brits just had to wait for the German luck with the dice to run out one turn, leaving all the Brits unpinned, they could then pin all/most of the Germans and get a platoon across, and hopefully roll up a flank before the Brits lost the initiative with their own poor dice rolling. Don't think its as good a game as Fire and Movement.

Angels One Five

This is Philip's game of tactical fighter combat, with the British trying to intercept German bombers this time. Each counter is just a flight (I think). The rules are quite complex, with multiple flight levels, gaining and losing speed as you dive and climb, controls on turns etc. After 3 moves I decided it would be a lot more fun just to play Wings of War, and I think you'd learn as much.

Kartenspiel

Tucked at the back of Simulating War in an Appendix is this little card/dice game. Each stack is a Napoleonic Corps, and as the force commander you allocate your cards to each Corp as you wish each turn, but in secret. For the turn you face each Corps of against it's opposite number, picture cards counting as cavalry and then each roll a dice under you "hand" score (Cav=2, Inf=1 basically) to see if you inflict any damage. There are some extra rules around cavalry charges, and like Hells Gate you have the option of a defensive/low risk strategy or an aggressive/high risk one. A great little game and I've scanned the relevant pages into my phone so if I've a deck of cards on hand I can always play it with someone.

Storm Over Arnhem AAR

 

STARTEX

Storm Over Arnhem was one of the first games I bought when I started the PhD - its area based layout just seemed spot-on for urban to me. When I set Christmas in Hell up at COW someone immediately said it reminded them of Storm over Arnhem, and everyone seems to view the game fondly. Having played it I can see why - and the heritage is certainly clear in Christmas in Hell- several mechanics are the same, but CiH adds the rubble and solo mode - of which more later.

Mid-game

The game played pretty well and quickly, about 3 hrs I think for a first run. mechanics were soon picked up, but as ever point density ruled, with a 10+3 unit limit per area there were some quite big numbers. Firing was based on attacker - defender scores and difference taken as retreats or losses. Best/worse AV/DV were used, plus +1 for supporting units.  Close combat was D6+AV > 6, so both very similar to CiH. Arty was nice and simple.

In the end the Brits put up a stiff resistance and still held most of the VP areas at the end.

ENDEX9

My big issue with the game was that apart from the map I had no feeling of being in Arnhem or even a town. If you'd replaced the map with a nice green field network it would have felt and worked exactly the same. I think there were two main reasons for this:

• First, it drops you straight into the action late in the day - so there is no sense of the initial landings, the fight through the town to the bridge, and the fighting on the bridge - so most of the real signature events of Arnhem weren't there. When I first saw the board I thought that was where my para's would land and then I'd have some sort of break-in battle, but no, they are mainly for German reinforcements. I think to get a sense of "Arnhem" you probably need to play a larger scale game (must find one to test - suggestions?), or extend those outer zones to include those other parts of the battle.
• Second the rules pay no attention to the urban what so ever - its doesn't matter if you're on a building square or a park square everything is the same. This is where I think CiH really shines - the rubble really gives you the sense of a town falling to bits as you fight through it, and where I think CiH v1.5 shines even further with different protective values for each area and tanks being limited as to where they can go.

So nice to see the heritage and a few bits I might re-steal (arty for instance), but otherwise I think that my CiH v1.5 is a better evolution of the model for an urban game.

My "academic" review is at http://taunoyen.com/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=wargaming:phd:aar:aarstormoverarnhemah.pdf

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