Fighting Talk #2 - Skirmish games vs proper battles

Another source of friction in the hobby is the preference for skirmish games or large battles.

A skirmish, Amazons against Egyptians

Skirmish games are nothing new.  In the sense that one model represents one man, some of the oldest rules like Little Wars are skirmish games.  The men move on individual bases and single models are removed as casualties.  Featherstone's War Games describes 20 models as a regiment, but in all other ways those rules provide a skirmish game.  This style of game is suited to the close actions that probably don't make it into the history books: raids on supplies, a clash between patrols etc..  In terms of numbers, it becomes cumbersome to handle more than about fifty individual models per player, although Featherstone seemed happy with 150 or so.  The Too Fat Lardies describe some of their rulesets as "large skirmish" to distinguish this size of man-to-man fighting from small skirmishes between a dozen men in total.  At the upper end Charlie Don't Surf expects a full company on the table, so around 150 men and vehicles.

One corner of a battle, regiments contesting a road junction

The battle game also has a long history, going back to the 19th Century Kriegspiel.  Here the focus is on the behaviour of "units" at whatever level they would act independently on the battlefield, for example Napoleonic battalions.  The ground scale is key, with a battlefield maybe 3 miles wide on a six foot table (that's 880 yards of the field in 12 inches of the table), so that a battalion frontage of 100 yards would be around an inch and a quarter on the table.  Movement distance and range for shooting are all dependent on the ground scale and the length of a turn; how many turns should a battle take to play out, assuming it lasted maybe 8 or 12 hours of a day?  Classic kriegspiel used wooden blocks for the units, but a base with figures on top does the same job, although there won't be as many models as the men in a battalion.  This is the basis of Charles Grant's The War Game or John Tunstill's rules.

There are pros and cons to any approach.  The small skirmish needs few models and can cope with more complexity and detail in the rules and procedures, but will never reflect a conflict of historical significance.  It also tends to create mixed forces at an unrealistically low level: if the 23rd Foot sends the light company to take an objective, that would be dozens of infantrymen dressed and equipped identically; they would not send four light bobs mixed with one cavalryman and two highlanders.  Kelly's Heroes and Sharpe are works of fiction.

A large skirmish, American rebels forming up for a fight

The large skirmish needs bigger forces and risks a game that runs out of time before achieving a result.  To represent a significant battle using individual men would quickly become unmanageable.  Using one model to represent 20 or more men in the field is no longer a true (man-for-man) skirmish, and is better considered as a type of battle game.

The groundscale approach can only fit a relatively small number of models onto a unit's base, leading to taunts of "twelve men taking a flag for a walk".  More confusing is the model of a farm building, which is 4 inches wide and so represents 300 yards on the table and a small village.

Of course there is an option that allows a large action to be represented in a more realistic way, and I have played a few games in a sports hall or similar space which were great experiences, but the effort to prepare them was huge and the game has to finish within a day so the badminton players can use the hall.

Some rules sit in a middle ground, leading to a more confused experience.  Sharpe Practice, for example, allows 24 men to form square.  If that means that the 24 models each represents 40 men, then that's a battalion, which makes sense in square formation, but then how can a single sniper hit 40 men with one bullet?  Is that senior officer accompanied by 39 orderlies and gallopers?

In my own case, I play lots of skirmish games (many described on this blog) and also proper battles mostly as boardgames.  I'm currently collecting forces for battle games with models in a couple of periods.

The discussion boards show some highly polarised opinions on these three approaches. What kind of game do you play, or do you prefer a mixture?

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.