Processes, Outcomes and Campaigns

 You might be relieved to know that I have just finished C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, and a very interesting read it is too, as witnessed by the fact that this is the third post on the subject. There is a lot to ponder here about the world, and even about how I look at my blog. Nguyen’s main target is the reduction of most of our world to easily comprehended metrics. So, for example, when looking for a car, I can decide that, for example, acceleration from 0 – 60 MPH is the most important aspect of a vehicle, and rank my choice by that. I can focus on the single metric because someone has measured it.

But not all of life is measurable and, certainly from a point of view of efficiency, not all of life conforms to creating and meeting the perfect metric. Nguyen’s measure of this is play. When we play, we engage in a process, rather than an outcome. If we play, say, a card game with our partner, we may well try to win, but that is not the point. The aim is, usually, to have fun along the way. Yes, there are occasional people for whom winning is everything. The secret is to avoid them.

Nguyen’s main example of play is tabletop role-playing games. These are rules-bound, at least to some extent, but otherwise creative and free-flowing. The rules give the spur to creativity. A bad roll needs an explanation in the narrative of the game. We have to create one. In this, there are no winners as such, although there can be losers – the dead player characters, for example. But even that is not really an inhibition to the play. The narrative flexes to absorb the loss and the game moves on.

I have written before about narrative in wargames, both here and in that book. I still think it is probably one of the most important and overlooked aspects of wargaming, but I do not intend to try to defend that view here. But the point is that creating the narrative is part of the process of wargaming. After all, I could set the troops up on the table and roll a dice to decide who won. But the reason I do not do that is an interest in the narrative, the process, of how one side won or lost.

This links back to the rules giving a spur to creativity. As recently happened, a perfectly good cavalry attack on a baggage train was repulsed. I had to adapt my narrative of the action to accommodate this unexpected result. The baggage train incident became a heroic defence by the camp followers. Actually, the winner or loser of the action became a little submerged by this aspect.

Pulling back the focus a bit, I could say the same about my 1600-Something campaign. In my experience, your campaign is going well when the system starts producing results you do not expect, in ways which are perfectly understandable, or at least, in terms of the narrative, explainable. The 1600 – Something campaign is entirely run by dice and playing card draws. Aside from setting the system up initially, I am doing my best to simply let it run. The result is a very human drama of failure, unexpected success, and occasional trauma. But it all fits into an overall arc of a narrative, which I can adjust to accommodate the ‘facts’ of the game.

You might well say, ‘that is all very well, but what is the aim?’ A good question, but there is no overall aim. The actors in the campaign have their own strategic imperatives, such as holding or breaking the Spanish Road from Italy to the Low Countries, or, simply, surviving as an entity in the game. But there is no overall aim, no point at which I can say ‘This side has won.’ In this, the process is everything.

Granted, there are smaller aims. As noted, the countries have their own strategic goals. The overarching aim is to have wargames, preferably connected in some way to each other. But as in real life, no-one is really going to win. All I will have at the end of it are some blog posts, a scrappy map of Eurasia with lots of pin-holes in it, and some happy memories of wargames played.

I have no doubt that my way of wargaming is not to everyone’s taste. I do not like the process of painting; I only paint because the Estimable Mrs P. has, and imposes, the ‘no grey armies’ rule. Other wargamers, to judge by their blog posts, take a great deal of pleasure in painting soldiers. That is a positive part of the process to them. To be honest, for me, painted figures is the desired outcome. The process is not fun for me.

Hence, there is no ‘right way’ of wargaming. And that is part of the fun. At the end of the book Nguyen describes the Boardgame Geek website. It has scores for the games, but they are not really the point, at least, not in the way that the score is the point on Amazon. There is a lot of more nuanced comment on the site, and the score is just a gateway towards accessing that. The point is that a good game is a good game from someone’s point of view, which might be playing with a ten-year-old, or simulating Stalingrad in real time. Good is subjective in this sense.

As with board games, so with wargames, I imagine. It is quite possible people are totally bored with my campaign. So be it. I think it's fun. It is possible that I am very impressed when someone shows pictures of exquisitely painted medieval knights (say). But I know that that is not for me. Different parts of the process give different people pleasure. And that is how it should be.

Which might bring me to the number of views that this blog gets, or the number of followers. I could worry that I do not have as many followers as the next blog, or that this or that post gets fewer views than another. But to adjust my writing to get increased numbers of hits is to be what Nguyen describes as ‘value captured’. What becomes important is the number. And I do not want that to happen, especially as most of the hits on the blog are by ‘bots presumably stealing my intellectual property.

But none of that is going to stop me blogging, or wargaming in my own way. And, sometime, I will probably write the rules for 1600-Something up properly, so that, if there is a like-minded person out there, they can see what is going on under the bonnet.

72 Samurai and Other Things

I suppose it is only fair to show a little bit of what is happening on the more wargaming front, after last week’s extra musing on various, arguably more peripheral subjects. So here we go with some things more directly related. And some things which, you could say, are simply fluff.

First off, you can see above the revised campaign map, with all the pins transferred from the old Eurasia-only map. I have not yet populated Africa, but you can see it on the lower left of the picture. Some of it is necessarily sketchy, of course, as the civilisations were largely non-scribal, so there are no real records until the Europeans arrived.

The first printed version of the map was too large for my cork board, and so this is the condensed version, printed out of six sheets of A4 paper and taped together, as you can see. I could have got a larger cork board, I suppose, but that seemed a bit excessive. In fact, this map is the same size as the old one; it just has Africa added to the lower left, as it happens, although the original did have North African states on it.

You might wonder, after last week’s post about the Atlantic World and the slave trade, where the Americas are. Well, I have a cunning plan, I think. If you look closely on the left-hand edge of the picture, you can see some larger boxes. These are labelled ‘Spanish America OBZ’, ‘Caribbean OBZ’ and so on. The ‘OBZ’ part stands for ‘Off Board Zone’, and is an idea I nicked from a board game, I think, although do not ask me which one, as I cannot recall. If you examine the map more closely, you can also see various other off-board zones in Siberia and the Pacific. The idea is that units in transit across these areas can be represented on the map but not intercepted, as these zones are a good deal larger than the usual province-sized boxes.

The idea, then, is to have separate maps of the different OBZs of the Americas, to which forces can move via the on-map off-board zones. I should note, I suppose, that some OBZs have disappeared from this version of the map, specifically the East and West Africa zone, and the Indian Ocean. But I can map the Americas, probably in less detail, and include such things as the fact that the Portuguese sailed from Portugal to Brazil and then round the Cape of Good Hope, rather than down the coast of West Africa, in order to get to the Indian Ocean. Who knows, maybe my Aztecs and Inca will get a run out as Aztecs and Inca, rather than as substitutes for some other forces.

Of course, I would not be a wargamer without accumulating more toys, and an order arrived the other day from Irregular. I had been getting concerned (as you do) that my resources of Japanese were a bit thin after the great rebasing. And so I have ordered some more, and you can see some Samurai resplendent in their undercoat, with faces painted. I was going to do some more but, frankly, it is simply too hot, and the paint is drying on the brush.

In the storage box lid you can see more Japanese, Ashigaru of various hues and some cavalry. Still in the plastic bags are various items, ranging from a couple of trees to a bunch of singly mounted Indian officers, who will be roped in to act as order markers for the sub-continent if the powers there ever go to war, and also will be useful for the Ottomans and Africans. At least, that is the plan.

There are also some Indian maharajas on elephants now in stock, to be used as Indian generals, of course, as I have got a bit fed up with the generals being integrated with the elephant bases. I could, I suppose, have simply removed the general figures from the elephant bases and used them, but where is the fun in that? There are also some extra Chinese bowmen and Boxer figures.

Beyond that, I have also been trying to work on some climate, weather, and time rules. The weather is adapted from Charles Wesencraft’s With Musket and Pike, which needs a bit of adaptation to suit multiple climates. I have not got to the detail of that yet, except to note that my Times Atlas of the World describes a large number of different climates.

I have taken over the wind and smoke rules from my naval actions, and the first wargames with these will appear on the blog in due course (my battle reports are running behind the rule development). One consequence of all this is that I am starting to feel a need to track the time and the number of moves in the games. Up to now I have just decreed that night has fallen when, in rare cases, the action dies down.

Thus, I need a means of tracking this. So far, all the tracking has been done on various strips of plastic card with markers on them. These were originally done for the naval games, and so had naval markers which are smaller than my land game markers. Something, then, needed to be done, as my markers were falling off the tracks.

And so, above we have my new, shiny, ‘tracking table’. Working across, each move constitutes about fifteen minutes (thirty, as I recall, at sea), and so the left-hand column tracks two hours. The second column tracks the time on a 24-hour clock. All I have to do now is work out the rough times of sunrise and sunset in the different zones of activity on the map. This should not be too difficult (I hope), and so all I will need to do is work out the time the action starts and go from there.

The third column is the weather tracker. After each 8-move (2-hour) segment, the weather is diced for to see if it changes, and if it does, the change is recorded here. The right-hand column is, obviously, the wind, from total calm to ‘it's insane to be out in this’. Wind direction is handled using a pointer, which I got from Warbases, I think.

Hopefully you can tell that there is a fair bit of development going on in the background here, as well as the wargames. I am not there with the weather and day/night rules yet, nor the climates, but I have the ideas in mind, so long as they are not too long or tedious to implement. Keeping it simple is the watchword, as well as keeping the tracking of the weather conditions easy, as well as what they mean for the game.

For many, this might seem peripheral. Most wargames, including mine, assume fair weather conditions and enough wind to blow the smoke away, but not too much to cause any problems. For my games, this is going to change. I think.

1600 – Something: Burgundy Again

The basic idea of the campaign is very simple: you move a few armies and have a wargame. How come it gets so complex? I suppose it is a bit like real life. Most of life is fairly straightforward, after all, but it gets very complicated every once in a while.

The current mess in Burgundy is a case in point, but I have also reported on the shambles around the Baltic consequent on Sweden’s financial woes. But, in Burgundy, as reported last time, the French lost to the invading Spanish. However, as reported earlier, the French in Burgundy also had to face a mutinous French army from Languedoc. A few dice rolls determined, firstly, that the mutinous French were pro-Spanish protestors (they might also have been protesting about the French betrayal of Sweden in Estonia) and that the Spanish–French action would be fought out first.

As recorded last time, the Spanish won the first action, leaving the somewhat denuded French to face the mutineers and some Spanish supports. After some consideration and counting, the Spanish came up with a nine-base allied contingent. This is based on the fact that the Spanish army in Burgundy consisted of an army and an artillery train, and was supported from Savoy. An allied contingent of six bases and a support of three seemed reasonable. The allies, therefore, had a twelve base Fronch army plus the Spanish.

The French were weakened from the first battle, mustering but seventeen bases, although they still had the artillery from their train. Most of the casualties were among the cavalry, after all. When you consider that the aim of the campaign was to create lots of twelve-base-a-side actions, you can see that the dice and cards are not really cooperating.

I decided to set up on the double table to avoid the pitfalls of an overcrowded battlefield, as recorded recently. The French are to the right, their artillery on a hill, protected by some infantry. The plan was to attack the Spanish (on the French left, nearest the camera), on the basis that the smaller Spanish army would be easier to break. The French right would stand broadly on the defensive, hoping for some magic from the guns.

Just for fun, I tried some low-angle shots. The above is the best, relatively speaking, and is taken from behind the French gun line. The Spanish are to the left, in the field, while the mutinous infantry and cavalry are ranged before the guns. The Spanish and mutineer foot are Baccus, the French Irregular. The cavalry is the other way around.

The action proceeded fairly slowly, as the French government suffered a tempo point drought. Still, eventually they got moving. The light horse exchanged shots, the artillery missed, and the government's left wing moved forward. The government general (on the hill) realised that he had to move his wing forward a bit to cover the flank of the left wing. If he did not, the red-coated mutineers could attack the wing of the government blue-coats. So, now, the whole government army is in motion, which was not the plan.

Government plans started to go a trifle awry. In the foreground, the cavalry of the left is in position, the Spanish light horse has been driven back, and all is ready for a charge. Unfortunately, the cavalry formation has been disrupted by Spanish musket fire, and the cavalry refused to go in. Still, the infantry of the left is about to hit home, engaging in a firefight with the rest of the Spanish foot. On the other wing, the mutineers have made use of their cavalry superiority to threaten the flank of the government cavalry, while the latter are in contact with the mutineer light horse who, against all the odds, are holding them up.

Assorted crunches came to pass. On the government's right, their cavalry has been charged in flank by mutineers. The infantry is now engaged with the mutineer foot. By the field, government pikemen are driving back their Spanish counterparts, while on the left, the French cavalry is still refusing to charge the Spanish demi-lancers.

Several crises were resolved in a turn or two. On the government's right, the mutineer cavalry started to rout their opponents, while the infantry continued to shoot at each other. Remarkably, the doubly shaken Spanish pike managed to recoil their opponents – a 6-1 get out of jail free card. On the government left, the Spanish light horse saw off their opponents, giving the demi-lancers an opportunity to charge. They refused the first time, but then went home, blowing away the government cavalry and their unfortunate light horse.

At this point, government morale drooped to a withdraw result, leaving the mutineers and their Spanish allies with a victory. I think they were a bit lucky, both with the pike battle in the centre (this is the second time French pike have been duffing up Spanish, only for the game to be called before they win), and with the cavalry battle on the left, which depended on who charged home first. The French could, I think, have done a bit better. Their general stayed with the foot on the centre-right. He might have done better to have controlled the cavalry battle more closely.

As you might imagine, these actions in Burgundy have left the French in some strategic difficulty. While they advanced last year into Luxembourg, the loss of Burgundy is a serious matter, and I am not at present sure where the army there can retreat to. While both actions could have gone either way, the government lost both of them and now has to face the loss of troops and prestige, while having Spanish and mutineers at the gates of Paris.

Still, before trying to work out what happens next, I have to move to something a bit more amphibious, with a Barbary corsair raid on the coast of Portugal. First, up, whether it is a naval, land or mixed wargame….

Bits. And Pieces.

Every once in a while, some nagging questions come calling that make me think that I should write a blog post about them. On the other hand, they tend to be fairly ephemeral, and I usually cannot think sufficiently about them, or I do not have the knowledge and expertise, to take them further. So they remain unwritten about, which is often a shame, as others might be interested.

Anyway, this post, out of sequence and likely ignored, is a compendium of such items. I hope you find something interesting in some of them, at least.

Firstly, I wrote a blog a while ago about the idea of principles, models and algorithms as applied to wargame rules. This was picked up by Jon at Palouse Wargames Journal. I think that I agree with what Jon commented about what I said, and the comments on both pieces are worth reading as well. I suspect that the outcome is largely ‘it is more complicated than that ’, which is fine, but perhaps we do need these ways of thinking about what we are doing in writing rules, creating scenarios, and playing wargames. In this age of artificial intelligence, it might help us to think where human judgment comes in.

Along those lines, I have been reading a little about AI. It is not something I am, to be honest, all that interested in, certainly in my wargaming life. I will happily concede that it could be useful for some things, but, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I prefer to keep computers out of my wargame room, even though 1600 – Something has reduced me to running the campaign moves on spreadsheets. However, my most recent reading has indicated what, I think, is one of the differences between computer and human decisions.

The case in point is the autonomous vehicle. Here, apparently, artificial intelligence can bod along quite happily, and can deal with all normal circumstances. Apparently, the problem arises in so-called ‘edge conditions’. These are those aspects of being on the road where there is ambiguity and human anticipation of certain outcomes. For example, suppose a ball bounces out into the road in front of you. As a human, you quite likely slow down, anticipating that a child may well run after it. This is, it seems, very hard to replicate in an artificial intelligence large language model. Similarly, suppose you see a couple embracing on the edge of the pavement. You, as a human, may well anticipate that they are saying goodbye and one will then step off the pavement onto the road. Again, AI struggles with this sort of thing.

So we are back to the question of algorithms and principles, at least. Principles are fuzzy-edged guidelines which help humans to make a decision, such as ‘if there is a ball, there will likely be a small human around’. These are difficult to encode. On the other hand, algorithms are easy to code and highly predictable and reproducible. If I give you a formula, say force equals mass times acceleration, and some masses and accelerations, you should be able to work out the answer, and it should be the same everywhere, all the time. Thus, in wargame rules, the algorithm gives us a certain value, which we can vary using tactical factors and a dash of randomness. But if I am playing another human, they should be getting the same result. This is not the case with what has been termed a principle, and probably leads to a lot of arguments over rule interpretation.

Still, on to other things. I discovered recently a discussion in History Today about the usefulness of military history. I think it is available freely, and it is worth a look, if only to try to grasp why contemporary military history of little use to contemporary wargamers. There are various views on its utility or lack thereof, but mostly the practitioners seem to worry that it is going the same way in the academy as most arts and humanities subjects. But that is not a discussion for here, particularly.

A few other things have cropped up. As the Straits of Hormuz have been in the news recently, History Today ran an article on the place in late medieval and early modern history, as various ‘crusading’ states attempted to get around the Ottoman Empire to the riches of the east. The bulk of the piece is behind a paywall, but it mentions an intriguing wargame opportunity: a joint attack by Persian and British forces on Portuguese and Ottoman outposts in the Gulf. I mean, given current problems, what could possibly have gone wrong?

Still further afield, I have been pondering expanding the 1600 – Something campaign to Africa, about which more will be said in a while. But I found I could not consider Africa without the Americas, and the Atlantic World includes, of course, the slave trade. As it happens, in the August 2026 edition of History Today there is an article on the slave trade, observing that the first slave on British territory landed on St Kitts on 4^th August 1626 – 60 West Africans shipped in as cargo. I am now wondering whether this presents me with an opportunity, in terms of trade and something to get the powers arguing about, or an ethical dilemma, as to whether such a trade should even be included. I have not decided, but would be interested if anyone has views.

And finally, in the same edition of the magazine, there is a longer article about F D Roosevelt in the 1936 election, declaring to an audience that he hated war. A few years later, of course, he led the USA into the largest conflict that the world had seen to date. I will just end by noting that Harold Macmillan, after leaving office as British Prime Minister, was asked what the hardest part of the job had been. ‘Events, dear boy, events, ’ Macmillan is reputed to have replied.   

1600 – Something: Big Bash in Burgundy

Well, after the cramped, abandoned battle reported last week, I had to try to get things moving again. Bitter experience has shown that even hitherto successful campaigns can falter with such problems, and I did not want that to happen here. The game is too much fun for that (and that is the point after all).

So, now I have a central section of the battlefield, as shown last time, with too great a density of troops thereon, and two edge sections, which were populated in the usual manner by dividing the distribution of terrain table into two. On the French left, there were some enclosures, a village on the Spanish side, and some rough going. On the French right, there was another stream and a wood on the Spanish side.

The forces involved were now properly worked out. The French had eight cavalry bases, two light horse bases, seven shot and five pike bases, and two artillery bases. The Spanish had five demi-lancer bases, two light horse bases, eight shot bases, seven pike bases and two artillery bases. A total of twenty-four bases a side, with three generals (one general in chief and two sub-generals) each.

The picture shows a number of things, not least the problem of taking photographs of 6 mm figures six feet away from the camera. At least you cannot see the poor state of the painting on some of the figures. Anyway, the Spanish are supposed to be attacking, but have set up fairly defensively, largely because they are outnumbered in cavalry. Nearest the camera, you can see a substantial presence on a ridge that runs right to left, peaking where the Spanish artillery battery is. This wing has more infantry support and two bases of cavalry and is commanded by a sub-general. The Spanish were concerned about being outflanked on this side.

The centre is more lightly held by the other artillery battery and a regiment of foot, together with the commander-in-chief. On the far side, the fields and village are held by Spanish musketeers, and the rest of the demi-lancers are lurking out of sight (and cannon shot) behind the buildings (you can just see them in the corner).

The French possibly had a harder task. Their idea was to use their cavalry superiority to sweep across the open spaces on their left and roll up the Spanish centre. The hope was that this would negate the Spanish forces on their right. In the meantime, there would be an infantry assault on the hill, directed by the commander in chief, along with the cavalry and a sub-general on the French right, outflanking it.

Strategically, you might remember that the French have a problem with a mutinous army of rebels in Languedoc approaching from the south. There is a bit of an onus on them to firstly win this battle quickly, and secondly to win with as few casualties as possible. These may well be, in wargame terms as well as historically, more or less mutually exclusive goals.

The French had a bit of difficulty getting going, and only those troops under the direct command of a general have actually moved. On the far side, the cavalry has swept forward, although the French light cavalry covering them has suffered at the hands of their Spanish counterparts. In the centre, artillery bombardments have been taking place to little effect. All the action is on the Spanish left, really, where the guns and muskets on the hill have forced back the initial French assault. If you look closely, in the top right corner, the Spanish cavalry has crept out from cover. This will become important shortly.

Things started to heat up as the French eventually got moving. On the Spanish right, the French cavalry has swung back to oppose the Spanish demi-lancers. I decided on this as I did not fancy letting the demi-lancers rip on the French flank and gun line. However, the French cavalry is now running the gauntlet of musketeers in the village and fields to both the left and right. These did not cause much damage, but they did disrupt the line slightly.

In the centre, the French column of infantry and one of cavalry are moving forward, under cannon fire. Again, however, most of the action is on the Spanish left, with another assault on the hill by the French infantry, the pike of which has just been routed, and the musketeers recoiled. However, more infantry are moving up, and the French cavalry is now outflanking the hill. The main French problem is that their commander-in-chief has become a casualty.

The action proceeded. In the centre, the French infantry column in the woods has been stopped by cannon fire. On the far side, after some hesitation, the demi-lancers have charged home to devastating effect. On the Spanish left, the fighting on the hill is going the Spanish way, with the rest of the yellow-coats being routed.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, above is a closer image of the cavalry fight on the Spanish right, and the deep trouble which the French cavalry is in. The overlap which the musketeers gave the Spanish cavalry by halting one of the French bases has paid handsome dividends, as the French are now being driven back in disarray. In the foreground, the next column of French cavalry is, perhaps rather hopefully, approaching the Spanish infantry line, which is adjusting its position to give them a warm welcome.

And there, I am afraid, the photographs stop. The French cavalry attacked up the hill on the Spanish left and drove the infantry back, despite attempts by the Spanish general to flank them. The rest of the French infantry on this flank were, however, themselves routed. In the centre, combined artillery and musket fire stopped the French cavalry advancing (and they never got the tempo to deploy, anyway). On the far side, two bases of French cavalry were routed and the sub-general there was lost. At this point, French morale went to withdraw, and so, seven bases and two generals down, they did just that.

The post-wargame reflection centred mostly on the French deployment. The Spanish had focused mostly on their wings, and this seems to have been the correct decision. The French changed plan for their left halfway through the game, and switched the cavalry from attempting to outflank the Spanish centre to taking on the Spanish cavalry. This failed spectacularly, although with different dice rolls it could have succeeded. The French right attacking the hill struggled until the cavalry intervened. Better coordination here (my fault, both forces were general-controlled) could have increased the pressure. Perhaps even better, a greater French cavalry presence could have exploited the gaps more. The three bases which were stalled in the centre could have made life even more difficult on the hill for the Spanish, although I suppose they would have deployed more infantry to their left.

So an interesting, if large, game. Now, a rather depleted French force of the 17 remaining bases has to tackle a rebellious French army of twelve, with Spanish allies. I think. My notes say the mutinous French are an army plus an artillery train, but I do not believe that, as I think the second pin in Languedoc is a fleet.

Falling Off the Horse

I suppose it had to happen. Sooner or later in any wargame career, you make a mistake, get confused or forget where you were. The question is, what do you do about it?

I have a case in point, which is the thirty-seventh wargame of the 1600 – Something campaign. This seemed, from my list of actions in Spring 1606, to be fairly straightforward. My note said Spain against France in Burgundy. Both armies have (A + T) against them – army plus train. So I knew exactly where I stood. Two armies of twelve bases, plus an artillery train each, of six bases, of which two are artillery. A total of eighteen bases.

I set to, and rolled up some fairly dense terrain, which led to some fairly lengthy thinking about how to deploy the forces. There were plenty of hills and woods, and not much in the way of open terrain. But I bashed on, as one does, and deployed what, hopefully, would be helpful dispositions.

Then I looked at my notes for the move. Puzzled, I checked the map. Then I looked at my notes again. The actual forces were an army, plus an artillery train, plus support from adjacent armies – the French from the Ile de Paris, and the Spanish from Savoy. So, each side now had twenty-four bases. I dug out another two cavalry, two shot, one light horse and one pike base a side.

Now this was slightly straining my resources, but not too much. I could still delve into my hordes of Scottish and Irish pike and shot foot, and I had plenty of cavalry. But deploying them was starting to become a problem. I ended up with both sides deploying in significant depth, four or five lines.

You can see the problem in the photo above. The French are to the left, with their baggage on a hill behind the stream, while the artillery is deployed to try to command the only really open bit of ground. Even so, they are a bit cramped. The Spanish are, if anything, worse. Concerned about their relative lack of cavalry, they are five lines deep on their right. The artillery is deployed on the hills in the foreground and to command the gap between the woods in the centre. It all felt a bit wrong, but I could not quite explain why.

I bashed on. The Estimable Mrs P was out, and so I pressed the ‘forward’ button, and it commenced. In spite of being the defenders, the French advanced. The Spanish light cavalry and artillery on their left threw back the assaulting infantry on the hill. The Spanish light horse on their right was routed. The French advanced through the woods in the centre. Yet something did not feel right to me.

The Estimable Mrs P returned and, after a while, had a look at the table. ‘Very nice, ’ she said. ‘There are a lot of soldiers on it. ’ In that instant, I had a lightbulb moment. The reason why I was struggling with the wargame was that there were too many troops on it, and no flanks to speak of, nor really any possibility of tactics except ‘advance and get it over with, boys.’ So I stopped.

Some time ago I wrote my first guideline for solo wargaming in that book: What happens on the table stays on the table (see pages 8-9 if you don’t believe me). And here I was, breaking my own guideline. Ho hum. These things happen. The battle was to be dismantled, and I had to have a think.

It possibly did not help that at the same time, I was trying to regularise my rules for setting up a battle. Typing up a process for choosing army lists, determining terrain and deployment, while making mistakes in creating the wargame in real life, is never likely to encourage one, especially as the original process was for a single table. So, just after typing, they needed to be modified.

Still, I am nearly there. The original table has been dismantled. The armies are sitting in a box waiting to be redeployed. And I am trying to work out how to create the edges of the battlefield. The idea is to keep the original (or nearly so) intact and simply add two ‘sleeves’ of terrain to give me some flanks to work with.

So, there you are. I have broken one of my own guidelines for solo wargaming. A good job, I think, that I decided to name them guidelines and not rules, or I would have broken my own rules. I think that had I realised originally that this was a twenty-four base-a-side action, rather than eighteen, I might have thought of extending the table. But, on the other hand, I might not.

Nothing daunted, I will bash on with the campaign. These sorts of things happen, and if we let every mistake, error or disaster hamper us, we would never get any soldiers onto the table, and would become collectors rather than wargamers. And that, I think, would be a rather sad thing. After all, wargaming is a creative sort of hobby, with its rules but also with a dynamism of its own. The 1600 – Something campaign has got momentum, even if this is a bit of a bump in the road.

In campaign terms, the Estimable Mrs P wondered if France and Spain are the superpowers. They are, sort of. Or at least, Spain is, as it is sitting on a massive treasury. It does not, really, have that many troops. The French, on the other hand, have quite a few military forces, and some, but not that much, money. Both sides are committed to the western side of Germany and the eastern corridor of France as part of their strategic objectives are to maintain or otherwise the Spanish Road from Milan to the Low Countries. This is the first real effort by Spain to force the French back. On the other hand, with Luxembourg lost, they still have work to do.

1600 – Something: Swedish Rebellion

And so to wargame 36, number 7 of the Spring 1606 campaign turn. As you might recall, this action arises out of the same financial crisis for Sweden as the last one, just closer to home. The collapse of the Swedish debt system has provoked not only mutiny from most of the armed forces, but also rebellions in Estonia, which has been covered, and Gotland. So, here we are, with a rebel Swedish army facing, well, what, exactly? All the Swedish armed forces in Gotland have deserted except for the artillery train (six bases), so some frantic raising of forces is necessary.

This caused your game master some head scratching. I decided, eventually, to give the Swedish government their train, consisting of two artillery, two shot, and 2 cavalry bases. This would be augmented by a randomly drawn force of six bases of hasty recruits from a random Swedish list. The rebels would consist of twelve bases from the same modified random list. I add the caveat ‘modified’ because I put in the option for the random list to include militia, drawn from my armed peasant bases.

The upshot of this was that the government forces got two artillery pieces, five cavalry bases, four shot bases, and one militia base. The rebels got six shot bases, one cavalry, and five militia. This seemed reasonable to me, given the context of civil strife and tax-related uprisings.

The terrain really did neither side any favours, or, rather, was equally hostile. The main feature was a large wood in the middle of the field, the edge of which was just in the rebel deployment zone. I had several goes at deploying the rebels, who are to the right in the above picture. I tried putting the shot safely in the fields on the flanks, but that risked them simply being isolated and ignored. Eventually, I got to the scheme shown, with the militia in the terrain hoping to ambush any passing government troops, and the shot protecting the baggage train and in the centre hoping to destroy anyone challenging them. The lone cavalry base, with the general, is aiming to stop any outflanking moves aimed at the baggage.

Government deployment was a bit easier. The artillery went on the flanks, aiming at the rebel musketeers (although without much hope of hitting them at that range). The cavalry was to advance and threaten the flanks, while the shot moved up to engage the rebel musketeers.

After a few moves, the government cavalry was getting into position. At the top of the picture, centre right, the government cavalry is now starting to threaten, while the left flank shot, commanded by the general, is advancing. On the government right, nearest the camera, the government cavalry advanced, was shot at, halted in front of the musketeers, and then one base was charged and routed by the rebel cavalry. The artillery, predictably, has not hit anything yet.

The victorious rebel cavalry and their general ran into trouble. They are still pursuing the routed government horse, but are in a situation where there are shot to their flank and artillery to the front. Actually, I was not too worried at this stage, as the cavalry should be able to run down the guns fairly easily. On the other flank, the rebels are withdrawing their shot to the relative safety of the baggage train.

It went badly for the rebel cavalry and general. Firstly, they were recoiled by the artillery, which led to them incurring two levels of terrain shaken, as well. Then they were shot by the government musketeers, and good combat dice for the foot meant that they were routed. This included the general, who was removed.

The rebels were now in a little difficulty. The government foot on the rebel right was closing in, and the cavalry on that side was dividing itself, one base to watch the shot by the baggage train, the rest to look threatening the rebel centre. On the other flank, the rest of the government shot were moving up, while the remains of the government cavalry on that wing were looking threatening. The rebels launched two of their ambushes. One lot sallied forth to prop up the yellow coats, while another jumped out of the woods at the government shot on the rebel right. This latter was spectacularly unsuccessful, the militia being recoiled, shaken, back into the woods.

The coup de grace came from the government right flank cavalry, who charged in against the rebel blue-coats. As you can see above, one base was immediately routed, while the other, made of sterner stuff, was recoiled and shaken. However, the successful government cavalry pursued and hit a base of yellow-coats from the rear, routing them as well. With that, the rebel morale went to withdraw, so they did. Actually, I think they were a move or so away from being routed, as the second blue-coat base probably won’t last another move, and that means the yellow-coat base remaining will probably go as well.

I suspect that this will spell the end of the Swedish rebellion, given that the rebel general is lost. On the other hand, the Swedish kingdom has a lot of rebuilding to do, not to mention key territories having been lost. Still, a win is a win for all that, and so they will have to be happy with it.

Could the rebels have won? That is a good question, and when I was deploying, I was wondering whether a militia army really could stand up to a cavalry one. The terrain sort of helped the rebels, giving me plenty of places to hide the militia. So much so that if you look closely, you will see the central militia in the wood was actually deployed facing towards their own rear. The idea was that they could ambush anyone attacking the shot in the centre. Unfortunately, the demise of the rebel general meant that they did not have to tempo to do so.

Still, onwards. Next up I have to try to sort out the invasion and rebellion in Burgundy.