Fighting Talk #3 - Grids on the tabletop

What do you think of figures games on a grid?  Are they just boardgames with prettier counters?  Do the grid markings detract from the look of the table? Or are they a convenient way to save time and avoid fiddling with rulers?  Movement and range measurement are simplified to just counting spaces, but are also contrained to specific directions by the shape of the grid.

This topic seems particularly relevant after my last report on a gridded game [link].  Obviously that grid is as ugly as anything, just like my figures and terrain, but there are plenty of examples on the internet of subtle grids and beautiful models.

Grids seem most widely used in naval and air wargames.  Perhaps the lack of specific terrain features lends itself to using a grid?  There's no need to choose specific buildings just because they fit neatly inside one grid space.

On land, there are three options for the relative size of grid spaces and units: one unit fills a grid space, several units can fit within a grid space, or units span multiple grid spaces.  The fine-grained grid (with a unit spread across multiple spaces) allows a closer conversion of distances from rules with free movement, but then forces units to align to the grain of the grid.  This seems to be the least popular approach, but I've seen it used for linear formations on land (e.g. Strength & Honour or Morschauser's original rules) and for naval games (e.g. the Portable Ironclads Wargame) where a ship fits in two spaces (fore and aft).

Image (c) David Crook

Multiple units in a grid space are more often seen, such as To The Strongest!, most Peter Pig rules or Phil Sabin's Lost Battles.  In some games the grid also forms part of the command and control system, where an order can be given to all the units in a grid space.  Effectively it's a way of affecting all units within a command radius, but without any measuring.

The Men of Company B, rules by Peter Pig RFCM

Do you get a lot of arguments in "free movement" games, when pieces are nudged, or when a unit ends its movement exactly 3mm short of the enemy's range to open fire?  I've played with people whose 6" moves were always 7" long.  Only played with them that one time, mind you.  

There are also rules that insist the players must not measure any distances in advance of announcing that a unit will move or fire, so the players have to practise guessing distances by eye.  That's a philosophy that has no place on a gridded table, where any distance is trivially easy to measure by eye.  There are also rules that use random movement distances (e.g. move 1-6 inches based on a die roll), but those are trivially adapted to a random probability of moving into the next grid space (e.g. on a 4" grid, roll 4 or higher to move one space).

What shape of grid works best (square or hexagonal, or maybe some other option)?  Square grids are easy to draw and allow 8 directions of facing (to the sides and the corners), but have the unhelpful property that diagonal moves are longer than orthogonal ones by a difficult ratio (the square root of two).  Hexagonal grids allow 6 directions of facing and movement which are all the same distance, but create a significant bias in the directions of movement.  Forming a line in one direction runs straight along the hexes, but 90 degrees from that direction and it's a wavy line that steps forward & back.  The forward hexes can be attacked from three neighbouring spaces, creating weak spots in the line.

Arty Conliffe's Crossfire is a special case.  It allows free movement by an unlimited distance into the next area of terrain.  I might argue that this is a gridded game with an irregular grid, the same shape as the scenery pieces.  It could be the perfect compromise, with no need for rulers and no need to mark spacing on the table.  Sadly it only works with a very busy table.  There have been attempts to adapt it to pre-gunpowder battles in open country (e.g. [this] and [this]), but they have resorted to measuring distances (either with a ruler or with base widths).  There may be an alternative with a grid of open terrain spaces (each maybe a hexagon 6" on a side), so that "the next terrain piece" is actually a fixed distance.

My own background of board wargames means that I am very comfortable using a hex grid, except that they are difficult to draw accurately on a tabletop for games with miniatures.  A square grid is now my favourite, counting orthogonal moves as 2 steps and diagonal moves as 3 steps.  That's close enough to the accurate distance.  This feels great for age of sail naval battles, with the wind blowing either from one of 8 directions and allowing ships to travel maybe 6 steps in a turn.  Does anyone else remember the Strategy & Tactics boardgame Fighting Sail that used this system?  There's a great game report here [link]. 

Fighting Sail

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.

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.

Fighting Talk #1 - The Hobby Spectrum

One source of friction in our hobby is that there is not a single hobby.  Like the name of this blog, it includes both toys and games.

A panzer

At one end of the spectrum there are modellers.  They make and collect models of military subjects (soldiers, tanks, aircraft).

A panzer division

At the other end are boardgamers.  They play games on military subjects, using counters to represent the armies.

In the middle are the miniature wargamers, playing games with model soldiers.

Beyond the spectrum are the railway modellers and poker players.

It surprises me how many individuals don't acknowledge this range of interests within a single hobby.  People posting on discussion boards frequently assert that their favoured part of the spectrum is the entire hobby and tell people with different preferences to shut up with their "off-topic" posts.  Modellers ridicule hex & chit gamers and demand people post pictures of what they have been painting, while the insult "nogames" is thrown at anyone who is modelling but not playing with their models.

My own interests started with models (Britains, Timpo and Airfix 1/32 scale), with me telling stories about what they were doing.  My grandchildren do the same sort of thing with their Duplo people.  A school friend introduced me to simple skirmish rules when we were 9.  SPI boardgames took over my attention 2 years later.  And then D&D at age 14.  So my interests have always been games, with the modelling aspect being just an incidental thing to create the pieces that go on the table.  Usually that's just a quick slap of paint onto some models and get on with the game.  Since I turned 18 the role-playing games have mostly been "theatre of the mind" with spare dice representing the characters and painted models optional.

By the way, there does seem to be some sort of magic, where a model represents an actual person in a child's mind.  Children will talk about what the man in the blue hat is doing and why he is going to drive the ambulance now.  I suspect that some of this spills over into miniature wargaming, which may explain why figure gamers find cardboard counters so unsatisfactory.

Where is your natural home on the spectrum?

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.