First game of the '18 Season!

Well, 2018 is underway, New Years Resolutions have already been trampled into the dust, and gaming has started.

Even though -like many gamers- I'll play just about anything, from Science Fiction-themed skirmishes to RPGs to quirky boardgames, it's historicals that I feel are what it is all about. For that reason it didn't really click that the new gaming season had started until a few days ago, when we played the first historical wargame of the new year.

The battle chosen was Batyn, from 1810.
No, I hadn't heard of it either.

However one of our usual gang of malcontents has a beautifully painted Ottoman army he wanted to put on the table, and the only way to make that happen was to sit down and develop a scenario himself, and....Batyn it was.
Or Batin.
Or Vatyn.
Good luck transcribing 19th century cyrillic script.
The rules obviously were Volley&Bayonet, and here they showed one of their strengths: even though there's only sketchy information on the Ottoman army that fought the actual battle, V&B's coarse-grain approach allows one to put together a reasonable order of battle for gaming purposes. The Russian order of battle was a little easier to put together, apparently.

The setup was simple (here's the wiki entry for the battle, with a short account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Batin ) . The Ottomans are deployed to defend the approaches to Batyn and the city itself, and the Russians aim to drive through those defenses. Historically the Ottomans were routed rather quickly, and the scenario was designed accordingly, with victory not being judged on if the Russians plow through them but how fast they do so. The battlefield had a river running through the middle of the table (I think this was a tributary of the Danube, but hey, it wasn't my scenario), Batyn and its city walls on one corner of the table, and assorted woods, hills and villages.

I held joint command of the Ottomans, and we deployed to defend the three locations that controlled access to the city, with a battery of artillery as the main strongpoint in each.
On the left, the bridge in front of Batyn:

In the center, where a ford allowed units to cross the river:

And on the right, around a cluster of fields and villages that (we hoped) provided some sort of defensible position:

The orders were, in effect, "hold on to your hats!" (turbans?) since the troops were generally of mediocre quality and fighting prowess.

The Russians, commanded by a triumvirate of experienced players, had a simple plan: attack everywhere, and exploit where you punch through.
They fared somewhat poorly on their right, where terrain chanelled them into frontal assault after frontal assault, which they kept up with grim determination.

They threw most of their light troops into the woods in the center, where they slowly overcame the Ottoman skirmishers after a fair bit of chasing them around in the undergrowth.

But they put a big effort into a left hook, throwing well-organised attacks forward and pushing back the Ottoman defenders.


The only thing we could do -besides praying to the dice gods- was to make use of our cavalry reinforcements, which certainly were an impressive sight.
 

Throwing them against the advancing Russians did slow down their advance, and we got a moment of glory when the cavalry swarmed over the Grenadiers leading the assault and wiped them out.

However that turned out to be a brief interlude. Mounting casualties exhausted the Ottoman units defending the right flank, and the Russians pressed on relentlessly, rolling up the center as well, and reaching the walls of Batyn.


At the end of the game only one of the Ottoman commands was in any sort of fighting shape, the rest had completely dissolved, but we were consoled somewhat by the fact we had done better than our historical counterparts.

The game was eye-opening in some respects. It was the first time we had units on "brigade" (3"x3", the Russians) and "regiment" (3"x1.5", the Ottomans) bases fighting eachother, and they do make for a very different feel to each army. Kind of shows how the game system is flexible enought to accommodate widely different militaries with the same framework, too.

I guess we'll be seeing those turbaned figures more often in the future.

Putting Physics into your Gaming, Part 2

Recapping from Part 1:

We defined our Wavre scenario by its Initial and its Boundary conditions.

Our Initial Conditions are

Time	French Army	Prussian Army
3pm	Grouchy's Wing	Thielmann's III Korps
	On Table	Behind the Dyle

The Boundary Conditions are

Time	Early afternoon 18th June to mid-morning 19th June
Game Map	the Dyle and the terrain Northwest of it
Victory	French decisively beating the Prussians

As discussed in Pt.1, this did not promise the game we wanted for our 200th anniversary refight. The players' mindset would not reflect that of the actual commanders, the action would have suspense but would be somewhat static, and we'd have the pause in the game that represents the night of the 18th-19th. So the idea was to explore what tweaking the Initial and Boundary conditions would change in the scenario.

The first thing to start playing with was the Inital Condition in time. The "literature review" had included some rather detailed accounts of the campaign, both recent (like Hofschroer's Wavre, Plancenoit and the Race to Paris, or Pierre de Wit's waterloo-campaign.nl ) and older ones like 19th century German studies on military history which have been digitized and are available online, so a rough timeline of where everyone was on the 18th and 19th June was easy to work out. Looking at the Prussian units' positions earlier and earlier in the day showed a more vulnerable deployment, with II Korps still Southeast of the Dyle and moving  through the III Korps, a move that had been completed by the time the Napoleon Returns scenario starts. That looked like a more interesting situation, the Prussian player would have to choose between fighting south of the river or withdrawing across it, and when. This is much closer to the dilemma Thielmann, the commander of III Korps, faced on the actual day when he saw the French appearing on his heels as he was preparing to march to Waterloo with the rest of the Prussian army. The only problem with the idea of using an earlier deployment was that the French would be off map!

Therefore it was time to tweak the Boundary Conditions as well. The question was simple, where would we have to move the borders of the game map for the French to arrive on it while the Prussians still had a significant part of their forces deployed on both sides of the river? The first French unit to make contact with the Prussians was Excelmans' II Cavalry Corps, acting as scouts and vanguard for Grouchy, so their position was going to be the guide. Working with Volley&Bayonet's one hour turn interval on a larger map, what emerged was a new setup, with a starting time of 12:00 and a board containing roughly equal stretches of both banks of the Dyle.
Here's the new map:

It still contains the most important geography of the battle, Wavre and Limalle and their bridges across the river, the high ground behind the town and the woods opposite and on the other bank. We've exchanged the wide stretch of ground beyond the town in the Prussian rear from the Napoleon Returns map for a large area to the southeast of the Dyle. The length of the river to be fought over is roughly the same, but now it's placed centrally on the table.
What changes significantly is the forces deployed on the map:

The Prussians have some additional troops (7th and 8th Brigades, the rearguard of the II Korps), but they're on the far bank with the river to their backs. The III Korps is not yet deployed to defend all the river crossings, and one of its brigades is actually marching away from the battlefield- on the actual day, a confusion in orders saw them marching with the II Korps to Waterloo. And the French are....nowhere to be seen! Excelmans' cavalry is on table, but the rest of Grouchy's troops will be arriving in the next few rounds in the enlarged area southeast of the Dyle. The early arrival of the French and the more mobile nature that the new setup leads to mean that there's plenty of action before nightfall, so we can limit the duration to the 18th June.

The only change to the Victory Conditions (the final Boundary Condition) was to define it more sharply. Since V&B includes a measure of "division exhaustion" to show units no longer being able to function offensively, the side that would exhaust more enemy units would be the winner.

Our game has been redefined!

The new Initial Conditions are

Time	French Army	Prussian Army
12am	Excelmans' Corps	Thielmann's III Korps
	On Table	Northwest of the Dyle
	Grouchy's Wing	II Korps Rearguard
	arriving as reinforcements after 1pm	Southeast of the Dyle

The new Boundary Conditions are

Time	12am to 8pm of the 18th June
Game Map	the terain Northwest and Southeast of Wavre
Victory	Exhaust more of the enemy divisions

And the changes seem to have worked. The game (actually played on the 20th June 2015!) saw the Prussian II Korps rearguard quickly legging it across the river, their compatriots in the III Korps rushing to properly set up to defend it, and the French racing forward to benefit from the confusion and trying to choose where to throw their main effort while still on the march. It was a fluid, intense game, and great fun.

So....yeah for Physics, I guess. Or, given that it was a close French victory, Vive la Physique!

Putting Physics into your Gaming, Part 1

The title, of course, has been selected to put the readership to sleep. But it is a fair description of a very personal approach I've adopted over the years.

In this approach, "putting physics into your gaming" does not mean things like detailed ballistic simulation in your arrows' and cannonballs' trajectories, or exaustive modelling of ground pressure to see if your T-34s can pass through the mud without getting stuck. It is more a mental and analytical process.

I'll try to explain (or, if there is too much, to sum up) using a Wavre scenario as an example, developed for the local event marking the 200th anniversary of the 1815 campaign. This battle is the poor relative where games of that eventful summer are considered. Waterloo was decisive for the fate of Europe, Ligny was Napoleon's last battlefield victory, Quatre Bras makes for a nice small game and gets a lot of attention in the english-speaker-dominated wargames world due to the presence of the British army, Wavre...has nothing catchy like that to offer. The only high stakes attached to the battle -if Grouchy's French will get through in time to help Napoleon at Waterloo- have no tangible presence in the action itself, which features a Prussian rearguard defending three bridges over an otherwise impassable river from its pursuers- as the historical action, a lot of the game is a series of frontal assaults in the teeth of hard resistance, not the most exciting of tactical problems to solve.

So, how to make this overlooked event an enjoyable game? This is where we start putting Physics into the mix.
First thing is a "literature review", i.e. getting your paws on as many accounts of the battle and campaign as easily possible. This builds an understanding of the greater context of the campaign, where the battle fits in it, and stocks up the memory banks with information that working on the scenario will utilise to shape into ideas. For some folks this will probably include looking at other people's scenarios for the battle, my preference is not to actively look out for them. Volley&Bayonet has a rather abstract and high-level approach to representing units and terrain compared to most other more traditional sets, which means they're not very easily compatible (although the past few years have seen several new sets imitating V&B's abstract approach, so that's changing). All the games for the anniversary would be based on Napoleon Returns, the V&B supplement on the campaign, so there was at least one in the pile of things to read anyway.

The second thing Physics contributes is a problemsolving process. In late high school and as a young undergraduate, teachers and professors were drilling particular techniques to use when trying to solve a problem or excercise. And more often than not the first steps were to determine Initial Conditions (=what your system starts like) and Boundary Conditions (=what are the limits, constraints and final states of your system). Solving the puzzle consists of determining either the Boundary Conditions that will result from the Initial Conditions ("If I release a lead ball from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, how fast will it be travelling when it hits my research assistant standing at its foot?") or the Initial Conditions that will bring about the desired Boundary Conditions ("How fast must I launch a rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome to escape Earth's gravitational pull?").
Does everyone understand this jargon so far?

Erm, yes, possibly. Those who are still awake are probably wondering what all this mumbo jumbo has to do with designing a game scenario. The answer is...well...everything:
Initial Conditions are how you start your game, Boundary Conditions are how you frame your game and how you frame winning the game.

Let's see this in action. What are the Initial Conditions? The scenario in Napoleon Returns begins at 3pm on June 18th. It's not unreasonable, since that's the time Grouchy's forces were complete and deployed (a bit of rummaging around online as I was writing this post shows most Wavre scenarios kick off at 3-4pm, probably for the same reason). The Prussians start deployed behind the river Dyle, in position to defend all the possible crossings.

How about Boundary Conditions? There are two kinds. The first are physical: the actual boundary of the map and the game's duration and ending time. The second kind are imposed: the game's victory conditions. Starting with the physical ones, let's look at a very simplified version of the scenario map (adapted from the more detailed one in Napoleon Returns):

It's a fairly large table, each square being 1' (=33cm). For a good part of the game the action takes place in the lower right corner, where the dark oblongs represent Wavre and its nearby villages, each of which borders a bridge over the Dyle river (the dark straight line). Marking the two armies' positions at the start of the game -Prussian blue and French tricolore- gives us this:

As to time, the game runs in two large phases, one lasting until nightfall on the 18th and second until 10am on the 19th. Historically, the French managed to get a foothold on the far side of the Dyle as darkness was falling on the 18th, and started pushing back the Prussians on the 19th until 10-11am when they found out about Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.

You can see how the I.C. and the B.C. define the game: the Prussian begins in a strong position and sits and waits behind the bridges, while the Frenchman keeps throwing his troops at whichever is less defended. If he breaks through, he has ample room to maneuver behind the Prussians or move off the left table edge to help Napoleon at Waterloo, and the Prussian is then faced with the dilemma of holding on the the other crossing points or abandoning them to cover his rear (...that could have been phrased better).
This not a bad game, there is a fair bit of action and tense moments, but the first few rounds will see the defending players simply sitting there and throwing dice to see if their soldiers are holding off the French or not. For some -although by no means all- this may seem

and in my view it also doesn't put them entirely in the mindset of the general they're representing. On 18th June 1815 Thielmann, the commander of III Korps, had been ordered to follow the rest of the Prussian army to Waterloo and was in fact carrying out those orders -some of his units had even started to move off- when news of serious numbers of serious Frenchmen approaching forced him to stand his ground at Wavre, redeploy and defend the riverline. Here he starts hunkered down ready for a defensive fight, against significantly superior numbers (call that an additional informal Initial Condition, if you will).

The final Boundary Condition is how to win. Not unexpectedly, this is for the French to decisively beat the Prussians. Napoleon Returns gives a bit of leeway, allowing the group running the game the flexibility of defining their own specific victtory conditions- however this could result in unwelcome ambiguity if the players are inexperienced or prone to vagueness themselves.

Part 2 (following soon) will describe the changes to the Initial and Boundary Conditions that resulted in a much different scenario- and a very enjoyable game.