Probably, hardly any other wargamers aside from me consider going, as it were, global. When I was a young, green wargamer (I am now an old, green wargamer), there was a real trend for setting up your own world, more or less based on this one, and using variants of Tony Bath’s Hyboria scheme. I, of course, tried it, but my worlds and continents never really worked. I was never sure why, but part of the problem was the complexity. Having a cast of hundreds might have worked for Mr Bath, but it was not for me.
But still, one-off wargames can, for some people, pall after a while. And, after all, many, if not most, wargamers seek some variety, skipping quite happily from ancients to World War Two without so much as a temporal dissonance. I decided fairly early on that the period before about 1700 was quite enough for me. All right, I have considered the ‘45 and even the French and Indian Wars, but I have never quite got there.
My original focus was on the English Civil War, which I slowly expanded to the Thirty Years’ War with the figures that were available to me. At least, I read a bit about the TYW. But reading history has a knack of leading you both forwards and backwards chronologically, and, mostly, in my experience, backwards. So I was drawn backwards to the Italian Wars (the board game Machiavelli, which is still a major influence), and some later medieval wars.
With the advent of a wide range of 6 mm figures, I got moving on the broad canvas that DBR’s army lists offered. This was true wargaming on a potentially worldwide scale. Everything (not quite, but nearly) was in those lists from Maori to Aztecs, Siberian tribes to Zimba (whoever they may have been). Ever-widening reading, and some innovations in military history such as Parker’s The Military Revolution, inspired an internet campaign starting in Europe in 1618 and spreading to the rest of the Eurasian landmass. This was a campaign that offered scope for historical match-ups and all sorts of troop types. But it got too complex and petered out.
Over the intervening years I have tried several sorts of campaign types, mostly documented in that book. My solo skirmish campaigns have provided a bit of light relief, but have not really gone anywhere. The future of my 25+ mm collection is under review, by the way. The Armada Abbeys narrative campaign was a success, and led to some really good wargames. This was followed by the Reconquista campaign, which was a lot of fun, mostly in the write-ups with the tension between King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Slowly I drew back the focus and started to allow random events to dictate the campaign process. I reinvented my Aztec campaign for Burma in the 1530s, which worked, although I am not sure the victory conditions were particularly stretching. But still the wider canvas beckoned.
Further developments allowed me to record the relations of multiple powers to each other, starting with the Very Mogul Civil War. With this, the diplomatic table was married to an initiative roll, which ensured that not all actors on the map moved each turn. It also allowed diplomacy and subterfuge to take place, although the rules for the latter were somewhat fuzzy. One thing lacking was some idea of the costs of military operations. Actors were limited by the number of armies they could deploy, not whether they could pay for them, except when raising the forces.
After this, a detailed map of the British Isles was developed for the War of Stuart Succession. This included the innovation of the God On Our Side score, to keep tabs of who, in the public’s view, was the anointed victor. In the Early Modern World, this was important, and although no particular side managed to win the war by getting to 100% GOOS, it did have an impact on the campaign, especially when the Scots started losing. This was married to the diplomatic table to see who was allied with whom. The Spanish won, by the way.
And so to the big one, the real worldwide wargame campaign, 1600 – Something. Of course, this is a return to the original idea of a wargame across the Eurasian landmass, and, as it turns out, beyond. I started with a Europe-only approach, which tested the ideas. Essentially, each actor is identified by four entries in a spreadsheet. The first is in the diplomatic table, giving relations with other powers, the GOOS score, first introduced in the War of Stuart Succession campaign (which does not appear to have a page of its own; I must have been having too much fun with it), and the initiative score. The second entry is a list of controlled provinces on the map. The third entry is a list of armed forces and their location. And the final entry is the financial one.
After a bit of practice and rule writing and refining, I can run a campaign move fairly quickly, in about an hour and a half for Eurasia. The turns create between two and ten wargames to be fought out, and the variety has been huge, from Korea invading Japan to Siberian nomads attacking the Muscovites and Bedouin raiders in Egypt. This is just what I hoped for, and just what early modern wargaming can deliver.
So now, I stand on the brink of adding in Africa and the Americas. The African actors can be treated in much the same way as the Eurasians, but the Americans are perhaps a little more difficult. The indigenous Americans were not, particularly, actors on the international scene. In Central and South America they had already been conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese (up to a point, anyway), and North America was only just beginning to be explored. So, to limit the number of actors, at least to begin with, the Native Americans are being treated as reactors, rather than actors in their own right, unless, of course, they act as the result of a random event. I will have to see how that goes.
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