The Apogee of Touangoo?

The next few turns of the campaign were fairly quiet. A full-strength army moved about the map, cities submitting cheerfully and gladly to my rule. Truly, I thought, I cannot be far off actually winning this campaign. My personal rating was in the teens, the city count approaching half the cities on the map, and I had avoided capturing Manipur, which would have provoked the Mughal army to invade. I was nearly a distinctly regional hegemon.

I did, unfortunately, lose a third of the army to a famine, which was a shame, but by 1534 these were more or less replaced, I was only an infantry base down. The southern cities were falling into my grasp, and all was well with the world. My personal rating was hitting 20, heights unheard of in the past.

The latter part of 1534 raised a problem, however, in the shape of a random event. This was that the city of Mrauk-U rebelled, with external aid. Not only that, but when I appeared before their walls demanding their obedience, they refused. Not even a personal rating of 20 could persuade them (I needed to roll over 11 on a D20 and failed).

A few dice rolls established that the allies were 2 contingents of Moguls, six bases in total, consisting of a base of shot, 3 cavalry, 2 bows and a light horse. If you are about to object that that is seven bases, you are correct, because I drew a Jack on the cards for the forces, which indicated that I had to draw two extras.

The Mrauk-U forces were 4 elephants, 1 artillery, 1 bow, 1 cavalry and 5 infantry, plus their general on an elephant, of course. The enemy on the table, thus consisted of 20 bases.

A bit of pondering led me to call in some allies from my vassal cities – Pagan and Ava. These were 4 foot, 1 cavalry and a bow unit, giving me with the general and my own 11 bases a force of 18 to tackle the problem. This is not, I thought, going to be easy.

Deployment can be seen above. Somehow I managed to roll a wood in the centre of the field, which was occupied by all of the enemy’s firepower, except for the artillery which is on the hill on the far side (and did not hit a thing all game, snigger). The enemy cavalry, over whom I have a slight advantage, is deployed to block mine, with a trap set of me with bowmen lining the near edge of the woods. The enemy's plan was to hold with their cavalry and in the centre while using their enormous elephant advantage to get into my infantry block before it captures the wood. My plan was the inverse – to get into the wood with my infantry before their elephants arrive, holding them up with my bowman who you can see looking rather lonely on my left.

The above indicates that both sets of plans proceeded more or less as outlined. The elephants are menacing my left flank, although my archers are in the safety of the wood. My infantry are within striking distance of the wood, although the left-hand column has been recoiled by the shooting, which will, as it happens, in due course, cost me dear. On my right, nearest the camera, the cavalry are engaging in a standoff, just outside charge distance.

In an effort to keep the pressure up, I moved both my cavalry and infantry up. The infantry blew away the shot and archers in the wood, as you can see, while the cavalry did not do too badly (or at least, not as badly as I expected) against the charging foe. My elephant intervened against one enemy base, and my extreme left held firm. On the other hand, the enemy elephants have got into my delayed infantry column, which looks (and is) messy.

Both sides were starting to reel from their losses, and the forces were getting scattered. As you can see, my infantry contacted by the elephants have vaporised, and the elephants have just charged, en masse, my skirmisher base. Talk about overkill. The skirmishers have understandably routed. On the near side, the cavalry combat has tiled slightly in my favour, as I managed to charge an isolated base and see it off – it is fleeing in the bottom right of the shot. My infantry have moved through the woods and assaulted the waiting enemy there. The column with the general was successful, but the other were pushed back. Fortunately, the sensible enemy infantry declined to charge them, so it became a bit of a stand off.

At this point, however, the morale of my army hit ‘withdraw’. The enemy was not in much better nick, admittedly, but I had lost the battle. Casualties were high: 1 skirmisher, 2 cavalry, 3 infantry and a sub-general for me, while 1 shot, 1 bow, 2 cavalry, 1 infantry and a sub-general for them.

This was a bit of a mess as a battle. The best I could do, I thought, was to get my infantry into and through the woods, out of the way of the elephants. This indeed, turned out to be the best plan, but the disruption by bow fire of one of my columns left it vulnerable to being stomped on, which it duly was. I thought I had made a mistake in allowing my cavalry to be charged, admittedly, and it probably was an error, but in the longer run the combat was fairly even, especially when my elephant got involved. As often happens with cavalry combat, the results left neither side in a particularly good place to continue the fight.

More broadly, of course, I could be in some trouble as far as the campaign goes. Not particularly because of my personal reputation, although that has dropped by 4. 16 is still pretty good. The problem is the 7 bases of the army which have been lost. I will need to divide these up between the allies and myself, of course, but even so, the loss of 4 or 5 bases could be a major issue, as I only get one back per year. It could all be downhill from here.

Richelieu and Olivares

I have been slowly picking up on my wargame-related reading, after my sojourns in Simone Weil and Reality, and finally got back to this slim volume:

Elliott, J. H., Richelieu and Olivares, Cambridge, CUP, 1984.

This is another work I remember from being impoverished, and I concluded that there was never a chance that I should read it. However, umpteen years later, the advent of the internet and second-hand bookshops thereon, selling off ex-library books on the cheap, means that I have obtained a copy. And worth reading it was.

Now, I am no expert of France and Spain in the 1620s and 1630s, which is when both gentlemen were at the height of their powers. From a wargamer’s point of view, however, the interest is more in the 1630s with the cold war for Italy, including the Mantuan Wars, and then the start of the war between the two countries in 1635. There is, of course, a lot more to it than that.

The historian's interest is, of course, somewhat different. Richelieu and Olivares were the chief ministers of Louis XIII and Philip IV respectively, and both had their problems in staying in power. Richelieu was regarded with hostility by a group of courtiers around the Queen Mother, called the dévots. This group believed that France’s foreign policy should be aligned with Catholic Europe against the Protestants. Richelieu, of course, famously allied France with the Dutch and the Swedes against the Empire. This led to such excitements as the Day of Dupes, in which Richelieu nearly lost power, but emerged triumphant.

Part of the reasoning behind Richelieu’s foreign policy was the fear of being surrounded by Spanish and Hapsburg territories. Olivares, it would seem, had no such concept, but was trying to gain Spain a sort of peace with honour, at least with the Dutch. He believed that this was only achievable by close cooperation with the Hapsburg Emperor, who should support Spain’s war with the Dutch. While Ferdinand was quite happy to cooperate with the Spanish in the events that led to Nordlingen (1634) he was a bit less keen to invade the Low Countries. All the powers, after all, had their own internal problems to deal with.

Richelieu dealt with the major problem within France’s borders, the semi-independent Protestant Huguenot, in 1628 at the siege of La Rochelle. This included the attempted intervention of both an English fleet and a Spanish one. The English failed, which led to the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham. The Spanish arrived too late. This was more or less the tone of Olivares’ time in power; the Spanish were always scraping around for resources of men and money to defend the Empire from assorted enemies. There was never enough, and this led, indirectly, to Olivares’ downfall. From the 1620s he had pushed for a union of arms across the Empire, including all the semi-autonomous regions of it – Naples, Catalonia, the Americas, Portugal as well as Castile. As it was, the main burden fell on Castile which was becoming bankrupt and depopulated. However, the result was that Portugal, Catalonia, and Naples all rebelled causing even more problems and leading to the retirement of Olivares himself.

Richelieu, after 1630, was probably more secure in the confidence of the King, although neither man could count themselves as wholly safe in power. On the other hand, the great lords of France had a tradition of rebellion and revolt, rather than loyal service to the crown, which was a problem that Olivares did not have. Thus the King’s brother and mother were, and remained a problem, whether living in France apparently reconciled to the King, or in exile hostile to Richelieu. Given that Olivares was interested in causing dissent in France, of course, they offered a cheap way of attempting to undermine Richelieu. The fact that the conspirators were not actually that good at conspiracy (or that Richelieu was very good at blocking them) to some extent did not matter. The Cardinal had to spend a fair bit of time and energy watching them and nipping any dissent in the bud. This also led to some summary trials and executions, which led to Richelieu’s reputation as a tyrant.

Both men would, in fact, have preferred to spend their time on internal reform. Both kingdoms were hotchpotches of semi-autonomous regions, directly controlled crown lands and various jurisdictions. Both regimes needed money, and that only came from taxes – ultimately at least: loans had to be repaid sometime. Both countries needed to increase trade and industry while breaking down internal barriers. Some efforts were made in these directions but any reform became impossible with the advent of warfare between them.

Richelieu is often regarded as the winner of the contest. This is perhaps a little unfair on Olivares, who played a perhaps weaker hand with skill and determination. As Elliott points out, after Richelieu died, France was convulsed by unrest which led to the Fronde. He did not leave a well-ordered, obedient, and quiet country, but one seething under the burden of war taxation. The weak government, albeit under Mazarin, was open to noble revolt and the nobles duly revolted.

Spain, of course, suffered more revolts and the Empire partially collapsed. Catalonia and Naples were restored to it, but Portugal was lost. While Elliott does not go into it, the loss of Portugal was a strategic decision by the Spanish high command – Catalonia and Naples were deemed to be more important, so the Spanish did not really give any attention to Portugal until 1660.

The results of the comparison could probably be described as a score draw, which is more the most historiography ascribes to Olivares and less than it give Richelieu. The real interest of the book, however, is in the career parallels of Olivares and Richelieu. The latter gets the kudos for making France great again, and the former gets opprobrium for the dissolution of the Spanish Empire. Neither judgement is above criticism, however. History is, after all, contingent.  

A Close Shave

I admit it. I failed to read my own campaign rules correctly. I was merrily into about 1534 without a care in the world, happily gobbling up more and more Burmese cities. Then I realised that I had misread the rules for cities resisting my invitation to become part of my kindly empire. If they drew a picture card, this did not count as 10 points against me, but as 10 PLUS another card. Resistance was going to grow, which is probably just as well otherwise the campaign would have got really boring.

So, back to 1531, and my empire was reduced to 3 cities plus Toungoo. I did receive an infantry base from the reserve, the one I lost against the raiders in the last turn, so my army was up to full strength. The first roll of the turn indicated that the random event was first this time, so I drew for it. Hm. ‘Vassal rebels with external aid’. A few dice rolls indicated that the rebel city was the newly conquered Prome. Clearly, they were unhappy about their new status within my gentle rule. They also had rather worryingly, Chinese allies.

I confess to having some fairly negative feelings in advance about this game. I think the problem is that my own Toungoo army does not have many in the way of elephants, and they are the Panzer divisions (for want of a batter expression) which mash up the enemy so the foot and cavalry can pick them off. At least, that is how I think the army should run, but experience is showing me something slightly different.

Still, the Prome army turned out to have 3 bases of elephants, 4 infantry, 2 bows, 1 artillery, and 2 cavalry, while the Chinese allies (only one contingent thankfully) had 1 cavalry, 1 bow and 1 infantry. The terrain I rolled up had a lot of hiding place for ambushes, as well, which was also a bit scary.

The terrain had a central hill, woods, two villages, a stream and some rough ground. The playing cards indicate possible ambushes. The enemy have deployed next to the hill, with their bowmen nearest the camera at the front. Their plan was to place the bows on the lower slopes of the hill to annoy my cavalry, while the elephants moved around my side of the hill to flank the foot or moved forward to crush the cavalry. Their cavalry, meanwhile, would outflank mine and roll it up.

My plan was to hold the left with the horse and hope that they could tie up the bows, elephants and cavalry, giving me a chance on the other flank. I had called in some allies – 3 infantry bases from Pegu, and so the plan was to use the infantry to smash through the centre, before any outflanking moves came to light. As a nod to sophisticated tactics, some of the infantry was to penetrate the woods on the far side and attempt to outflank the hill. As I said, I was rather nervous about this and expected a defeat.

The plans developed as outlined. On the far side, my infantry are moving forward, while the skirmishers have sprung the ambushes, revealing another cavalry base, a bows and another infantry in the village. The enemy bowmen are moving onto the hill, while the cavalry are getting around the rough going in the foreground. The elephants are getting into position and the artillery has opened fire on my brave troops.

Quite a lot of things happened in a fairly short space of time. My infantry moved into position as Prome’s deployed, and my cavalry deployed to face the enemy’s. Their elephants decided to ignore the cavalry and move towards the centre to threaten my foot. My only change was an all-out charge, but actually, the enemy got the drop with the foot, but they refused to move. Next turn, fortunately, I got the tempo and charged both horse and foot home. On the left of the shot (now taken from behind my lines) you can see the cavalry action is going in my favour, just about. In the centre, the leftmost infantry have routed their opponents, while the right-hand foot (with the general) have administered a bit of a pummelling to their foes. In their bound, the elephants desperately tried to make up ground to intervene in the infantry fight. It was still touch and go as my victorious foot would pursue their opponents, in disorder, and are hence elephant bait, especially as they would be hit in flank.

I was very, very, lucky. Enemy morale had slumped (on a bad roll) to ‘fall back’ which gained me some time. I won the next tempo roll, and my foot pursued the enemy, the routed bases of which burst through the line of archers, sweeping a base away. On the other side of the centre, my foot defeated their opponents and, pursuing, contacted the artillery base which was destroyed. I won two of the three cavalry combats on the left, which gave them another two routed bases. The end-of-turn morale roll was critical, and came out negative for them, which meant that the army routed.

Phew!

They lost 7 bases, and I did not lose any. But as I hope the narrative shows it was very close: the enemy elephants are within charge move of the flank of my disordered, pursuing infantry. That infantry would have been on a roll of 1+1d6 against 9+1d6 if the elephants had got home, let alone any damage done by the charge itself. Plus they would then have started to sweep away the rest of my infantry next to them. As my general was there as well, that would probably not have been survivable.

Even now I can feel the anxiety as I carefully measured distances in the centre, and whether my pursuing infantry would contact their artillery base (just), as well as carefully re-reading my ‘routers bursting through friendly troops’ rules. As noted above, I cannot guarantee I always read the stuff correctly, even if I wrote it.

Still, Prome is forced to re-submit to my rule, which might be a little less kindly than before. Perhaps I need to deport the population and sow the fields with salt, just to make a point, like the Romans did. Or maybe I am a bit more kindly than that. Maybe….

Nellie Saves the Day

I suppose it would be only fair to show a picture of the map of the Burmese campaign.

The dark blue pin shows where Toungoo is, the light blue pins indicate the cities that have recognised my enlightened rule. Well, except Prome, of course, which I had to introduce to enlightened rule at the point of a spear (see the previous post). The above is the result of the first move, in the 1530 turn.

The second part of the turn is the random event. I hoped for nothing much to happen, which is quite likely this early in the campaign, as I do not have too many vassals and so on to revolt. Unfortunately, this was not to be and I ended up with some pesky raiders attacking my easternmost city, in this case Toungoo. Now, in the original Aztec game the raiders were Chichimec, which meant that they were almost all skirmishers. They were not really a threat, but difficult to beat. In this campaign, they are from Lan Xang, and consist of 8 infantry, 2 bows, and 2 skirmishers, which look to be quite a handful.

They were, indeed, quite a handful. My side of the table was fairly featureless except for a hill. Their side, however, could have been made for such an army – a village, woods, a hill, and a stream. The raiders deployed with their foot blocking the gaps and archers in the right-hand woods, and skirmishers in the village. The playing cards, as ever, are potential ambushes.

I decided to deploy all my infantry on my right to crash through their defences. This would be backed up by my elephant and general. On my left, the cavalry would mask the village, wood, and the rest of their infantry. What could possibly go wrong?

I imagine you have already guessed what could go wrong: bad dice rolling (for me) and good dice rolling (for the raiders). The shot above shows a few moves into the game. My infantry have gone in. On the raider’s left the first column is doing its job. The column with the general, however, has been bounced, while the raiders have had sufficient tempo to start to switch the rest of their infantry from their right to the left. Meanwhile, the bowmen in the wood have disrupted my cavalry. Humbug.

A move or two later and the raider infantry on their left have fled, pursued by my rightmost column. The infantry whose charge failed, however, have been charged in flank by some raider infantry and destroyed, their tormentors move pursuing (red counter) while the rest of my infantry is attempting to recover their poise. My cavalry, or some of it, anyway, is now sweeping around the village to take the enemy from behind.

A bit later still. My infantry have pursued across the stream and are in disarray. Their triumphant infantry has started to rally. My cavalry has charged their central infantry (and general) from behind and been bounced. The cavalry are now hors de combat for a couple of turns. On their right, the skirmishers and bowmen are now playing hunt the shaken cavalry base. On their extreme left, however, I have moved my elephant base up behind my skirmishers, and, as it says in the title, Nellie is about to save the day.

The picture shows the end of the game. Nellie has charged the raider infantry by the woods in flank and they are now routing. The rest of my infantry has now recovered their poise and are ready to advance, while the cavalry are recovering. The raiders have been forced to turn their central infantry around to face the cavalry. Even my detached cavalry base has recovered from its shakiness and is limbering up to make someone’s day a misery, hopefully not mine.

And that was it. The raider’s morale went to withdraw, and so they did. I was too relieved to pursue, and it was unnecessary anyway. With the loss of a single infantry base I had triumphed over the raiders, although it was a close-run thing. The raiders were a tougher opposition than I expected, I confess, and if the elephant had not intervened decisively, I am not entirely sure how it would have finished.

Still, a second scraped victory in the campaign, and my personal rating is up another notch. My losses are a single infantry base, so that should be restored in the spring of 1531 so while I had a narrow squeak, no long-term material damage has been done.

I do think, however, that I am still learning how to handle this army. I thought, when I pulled the cards for it, that the main advantage I had was in cavalry, but the experience of these two battles suggests that the major strength is in the infantry. While, admittedly, they rolled terribly in this game, they were not that useful, and in the previous one, they were, in fact, attacked by enemy infantry and only just fought them off. The elephant is a useful unit both defensively, as last time, and offensively, as this. In this game, I could, possibly, have led with the elephant to crush one side or the other of the enemy infantry, which could have then been exploited with the cavalry coming from reserve.

I suppose the other thing I am still adjusting to is the fact that this is a campaign. I feel I have rather fought these two battles as I would one-off wargames, throwing everything into the fray in an attempt to win outright, rather than making sure I preserve force and the army overall. It is a different balance in a campaign between trying to win and preserving units and force. Obviously, the attempt to win is still there – I do have my personal rating to reckon with – but I also need a viable army to back me up. Not everything can be won by reputation alone.

Still, I have survived my first year as ruler. On to 1531….

The Forging of Toungoo

A while ago I mentioned that I had tried out a campaign set in 16^th Century Burma, but it had not worked terribly well. Still, I got a wargame out of it, so not everything was a disaster. While the campaign mechanics were too complex, I do like the odd elephant on the table, and when a photograph of the battle came around on my screen background, it raised a smile. So that was encouraging.

After some pondering, I decided to have a go at a rather simpler campaign idea. This dates back to somewhere around the year 2000, when I wrote an article in Miniature Wargaming based on the rise of the Aztecs. More recently, I revived and slightly modified the campaign for the Siena series in the Italian Wars. The modification involved the addition of rules for someone trying to assassinate me.

For this sort of city-state warfare, it seems, the general idea works well. There are basically two turns per campaign year, one is a random event such as a famine, revolt or invasion, and the other is as the player determines. Battles are fought if cities to which the player moves do not submit, if there is a revolt or invasion, and so on. This is all controlled by dice and playing cards.

I spent a morning or so reviving the rules and transferring them to South-East Asia. This was mostly working out the composition of the random events table and who invaders might be. This turned out to be Mogul Indians, Siamese and Ming Chinese, which seems fair to me as some of the eastern peoples were Chinese culturally.

The first turn die roll indicated that it was my move to start with in 1530. I therefore attacked Prome, my neighbour to the west. While their submit roll was not too high, nevertheless they refused to become my vassals and a wargame had to be fought.

A complication (or refinement) of this system now is that the armies are drawn randomly. I drew 7 tribal foot, 3 cavalry, a skirmisher base and an elephant. Prome drew 5 tribal foot, 4 elephants, 2 bow and a cavalry. I was quite morose at this, I confess. Elephants are very powerful units on the board, and little can stand in their way, as the last wargame demonstrated.

I was daunted, but as I had implemented some rule changes after last time to reduce the total dominance of the nellies a bit – I had slowed them down to infantry pace from cavalry – I thought that I might have a chance if I could get my cavalry into the enemy infantry. This is the joy of random systems, I suppose. They throw up totally unexpected situations which the solo wargamer has to work out how to deal with.

The set-up is above. The army of Prome is to the left, deployed up to their centreline (as they are the defenders). I initially deployed them further back but wanted to get the archers onto the hill nearest the camera (hence the general’s elephant with them). My brave lads are deployed in a fairly compact formation on the right. My plan is to get the infantry onto the hill where they might have a chance against the elephants, and get the cavalry into the opposing infantry as soon as possible. The playing cards (there are, in fact, three on the table) were ambushes set by Prome. Fortunately, they were all false, as it turned out.

The game was played on the day of Storm Darragh here in North Yorkshire, so the room was dark and I was suffering from a lot of flash splash or, alternatively, camera shake. So the shots are not terribly good, but hopefully give enough to sustain the narrative.

Prome got their archers onto the hill, but then they were too far away to affect the action. The general had to rush off to get the elephants moving against me. The enemy infantry (the cheek) moved up and charged my cavalry. This looked bad, at least initially, as the cavalry were forced back by the shock. However, they did rally magnificently.

On my left, one column of my foot charged the Prome cavalry, downhill, and routed them. I also moved myself up to support the cavalry and moved my central column up to support the cavalry. Meanwhile, my elephant which was hanging around at the back, moved into place to protect my flank from the enemy elephants. A bit of a forlorn hope, I felt.

The above picture shows the scene towards the end of the action. I have just managed to rout two of the annoying infantry bases in the centre, and one of my cavalry bases has managed to bounce a rouge elephant. On my left, a remarkable event has happened. My lone elephant base, charged by three enemies including their general has, in fact, routed one of them. The others, after the unsuccessful charge, are in some disarray.

The end was not far away. My cavalry charged down the hill at the remaining Prome infantry and routed them, while my elephant turned against one of the enemy. This resulted in the rout of the Prome army and a hugely unexpected victory for Toungoo. Prome lost 7 elements, all 5 infantry bases, a cavalry and an elephant base, to, well, I lost none.

I confess to a huge slice of luck. My elephant should have gone down to the charge of Prome. The odds were stacked against it, but it rolled a 6-1 on the combat dice and pushed its immediate foe back. This left said foe on the back foot and without its supports, who had just gone doubly terrain-shaken post-charge. My nellie followed up and on another good roll routed it. Similarly fortunate, my cavalry base blocking the other elephant managed to get away with only being shaken.

In short, it was a damn close run thing. But most empires need a bit of luck to begin with I think. I’ll have to see what the random event brings.

Ethics and Wargaming

The last post on the blog managed to obtain some reaction, so it is probably worth pondering a bit further. I suppose I need to clarify some of my own thinking on the subject and attempt not to set up any straw men for reasoning about wargame period, army, or action choice. I suppose, first up, I should say I am not questioning anyone’s choice of wargame, as I hope the following might suggest.

Firstly, it is worth saying plainly that I do not think that there is a particular ethical problem with choosing any particular wargame project. I cannot see how anyone could have an objection to wargaming any particular historical period or army. History shows, after all, that any country, tribe, or whatever engaging in combat is liable to have to make some moral judgment, and some of those are going to be dubious. Burleigh’s Moral Combat, reviewed here, makes such a point. In the Second World War the Allies, with limited resources, had to decide where to deploy them. On the whole, they stuck to plans that would bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. They may not have always succeeded, of course, but that was, in Burleigh’s view, an entirely laudable aim. Bombing railway lines to disrupt transport to Auschwitz would have diverted resources and lengthened the war costing more lives, and probably would not have particularly slowed down the Nazi slaughter of Jewish people. After all, Auschwitz was not the only way they had developed of exterminating people.

In some moral philosophy, there are rights and duties, which are fine and dandy until they start to bump into each other. If the Allies had the duty to finish the war as quickly as possible, and the Jews had a right to protection from the enemies of the Third Reich, with a concomitant duty on the Allies to execute that protection, then in a resource-limited world the two demands are in conflict and one has to be chosen. It is no wonder that the consumption of alcohol and cigarettes by the leaders of the Allied powers increased radically during the war.

Not that WW2 is the only arena where moral issues come to the fore, of course. Similar considerations reverberate through history, at least for as long as leaders have attempted to justify their actions to their people or some sort of nebulously defined ‘world opinion’. The bottom line is, more or less, that the leaders have to have a degree of support from their aristocracy and those lower down the social order in order to get anything done at all, let alone declare war.

With respect to wargaming, however, we do not have any of these ethical concerns around us. We can place a 1943 German army on the battlefield happily without particularly worrying about what it was they were defending. Similarly, with such warfare as that between the Wallachians and Ottomans in the 14^th Century (or so, I forget the exact dates of Vlad Tepes). The game is the thing: impaling captives on sharpened logs and watching them die slowly is not part of any wargame I know, or would wish to be a part of.

It gets a bit more tricky with Science Fiction games and their ilk. As someone mentioned, players of these games often take a stance that suggests in historical games someone has to play the ‘bad’ guy, while in their games, as they are fictional, there is no moral problem at all. To some extent that is correct, of course, but it also is not bombproof. Science Fiction, often, is based on our current reality. Thus an SF game based around fascist states warring with each other is, in my view anyway, no better than Germany v Russia in WW2. The former, however, might be slightly more worrying to the neutral observer.

Still, overall, I do not detect an ethical problem here. I do detect, as I have said before, a matter of taste. Working backward, I do detect a lack of taste in some SF RPGs I have played – this is often disguised as ‘darkly humorous’ but can disguise, at least, tastelessness. It is not, however, unethical to play such games, I think.

Thus, the Russian Front in WW2 is also not unethical, although it might upset some people worried that such a wargame disguises the murderous nature of the regimes involved. The point is surely that history happened and it cannot be undone. As a side issue, of course, the current concerns about slavery and colonialism run into similar problems: they happened. It is what we do with the facts of the happening today that counts. History is never, it seems, wholly a matter of the past.

Sidestepping into the present, the original question was posed about current events in Ukraine and Gaza, and whether it would be ethical to wargame them. I am not sure about the ethics of wargaming present wars: as with history, the events have happened, even if we do not like them. On the other hand, I can quite see how some people would regard such games as being in very poor taste.

Taste is a funny thing, however. Imagine you are on a crowded bus, a few stops from your destination. The people around you start to engage in various unpleasant activities: urinating, defecating, engaging in sexual activity, and so on. Suppose that these activities slowly get more unpleasant, and ask yourself: at what point would I get off the bus and walk?

The point here is that offensive activities, such as those engaged in by the other passengers, do not actually cause us harm. Similarly, a wargame based around Ukraine is not actually going to cause anyone harm, but it might cause some people offence and, hence, by those people, be classified as tasteless. As with the bus example, is this just a case of deciding where to get off and walk? Or is there a deeper issue about representing current events?

I’m not sure I know the answer, but I’ll stick to pre-1745 wargames just to be on the safe side.

How Soon is Too Soon?

Normally, this blog is written a bit in advance, maybe a week or six. But not at the moment. I have been busy, as I said before, and wargaming has, while not taken a back seat, has certainly had to be fitted in around other things. Thus, this week, I had no particular ideas except the half-formed Hamptonshire campaign. Fortunately, as supper one night, the Estimable Mrs P. asked a question which saved the day, as it were:

‘How soon is too soon to wargame something?’

I asked for some clarification, and it turned out she was wondering whether anyone was wargaming Ukraine or Gaza. Well, I have not seen any such game, at least so far, except in professional gaming circles, but that is, after all, their job. But I dare say someone is at least considering Ukraine even if it is not being actively wargamed yet.

It put me in mind of some of the posts from the early days of the blog when I was wondering what the ethical implications of wargaming were. As far as I recall, there are none, in particular, but there are plenty of matters of taste. At least, there are ethical matters about behaviour, such as whether to cheat or not, but not about the choice of wargame subject, which is a matter of taste. The difference is, I suppose, that taste varies while ethical considerations at least make a claim to be objective. Whether or not they are is a matter of opinion, of course, but that seems to be the difference.

So, to return to the question, how soon is too soon to wargame something as a hobby game? I tried to avoid the question, of course and observed that I do not play anything post about 1745, but that was not permitted as an answer. I hazarded ‘about the last 100 years’, so included nothing which is in people’s living memory, more or less. That actually puts World War One in the frame, and I am unsure if I would really want to wargame that. I have seen, of course, very good and interesting WW1 games, but it just is not to my wargaming taste, I suppose.

However, I have dabbled in World War Two wargaming, such as the Siege of Malta game which is in that book (for the record, the Allies lost Malta and, presumably, the Suez Canal was cut). That was a more pen-and-paper game than one which included getting models out, however, and I still harbour suspicions that, except at a skirmish level, WW2 is best played in that way. I know that there are some operational and strategic level games out there which use models, and I think that is a good thing, but they are heading more to the pencil-and-paper resource management level of the game anyway.

So, having brought the wrath of all right-thinking WW2 wargamers down upon my head, what about more recent warfare. Korea is certainly done, of course, and can be regarded, I suppose, as an off-shoot of WW2 – the equipment, except jet fighters, was more or less the same. Vietnam is a bit more tricky, of course, with lots of airmobile units, helicopter gunships, and mass bombings, aside from charming ideas such as Agent Orange. Again, it is a matter of taste, but for me, wargaming counter-insurgency operations is heading into the tasteless, because civilians are heavily involved.

So too are more recent conflicts, many of which are Co-In in nature. For example, recent activities in Iraq and Afghanistan were certainly counter-insurgent operations, and while I have seen them wargamed, do not really seem to have caught on. Perhaps it is because the home countries of many wargamers lost, or perhaps because insurgents and terrorism make somewhat less than good wargames. I am not sure, and time will tell.

Arrival at some conflicts possibly gives us some pause. The Falkland Islands I have seen wargamed, but not all that much. Perhaps it became too politicised too quickly for many wargamer’s tastes. The assorted post-colonial wars are occasionally done, but most people, understandably, prefer some sort of imaginary game rather than the brutal reality of, say, Biafra or the death squads in Central and South America. For example, I did rather enjoy the board game Junta, where the rules stated ‘the coup starts with the traditional naval bombardment of the Presidential Palace’. But it was set in an imaginary banana republic.

There might be a geographical element to this. Playing a wargame of, say, the siege of Londonderry might be straightforward in Germany, perhaps less so in Ireland, or at least, it might raise some uncomfortable present or recent realities and interpretations. History is often the political present, after all. It is here that transfers of historical events to other canvasses, locations and time periods can, I suppose help, but that raises questions, I suppose, as to whether our historical wargaming is historical, or whether we are simply feeling pressured by current political and cultural trends into avoid uncomfortable historical truths.

Many years ago Paddy Griffiths published some articles on uncomfortable wargames, raising the question of whether we dare wargame something, or whether we did not because they simply made bad games. His main example was the WW1 Western Front, which, he felt, made a bad game. Of course, since he wrote (in the 1980s I think) wargame design has moved on and the games, as games, can be good ones. But as WW1 slips from memory into history it is probably worth asking again does it make us uncomfortable? Do we try to take on more recent historiography of the war and the front and suggest that perhaps the interpretations available 40-odd years ago have changed, and that ‘lions led by donkeys’ as a judgment is a bit harsh on the high command.

Fortunately, I do not have a sufficient grasp of World War One to say, so I am only posing a question. But I think it is worth posing: how soon is too soon to have a comfortable wargame?

What do you think?