A Phenomenology of Wargame Figures

After a bit of a philosophical bruising recently, I have started reading a little again, and have run across phenomenology again. Now, phenomenology is not everyone’s cup of tea, and I would certainly not claim to be any sort of expert in the subject, but something caught my eye in an erudite essay about the difference between a Christian icon and an idol.

Now, those of you of a nervous and/or atheist disposition might have stopped reading at the end of the last paragraph, which would be a shame because I promise not to start ranting about theology, but it just happened that the point about images and their representation was contained an essay about Husserl and icons and idols. I do not know any other way of approaching the subject, but there you go.

The point is that there are, according to Husserl (or at least the writer’s interpretation of Husserl, you cannot be too careful here) three constituent objects in an experience of an object (which may not be present – the imagination works as well) which are intertwined by ‘two different constitutive moments’. Now, as ever when reading philosophical gobbledegook I start wondering how this applies to wargaming. The examples given are of art, so it should be straightforward enough.

The first thing is a physical image, in the example think about a painting. The physical object is canvas, paint, brush strokes, a frame, and so on. In wargaming terms this would, I suppose, be a wargame figure, painted and based. It is metal (or plastic), painted with acrylics (often, these days anyway; does anyone still use oil paints or even enamels?), placed on a base that is itself of a certain dimension, possibly textured and painted itself. That seems fine to me – a physical object.

Secondly, there is an image-object. When looking at a painting a lot more than the paint and canvas appears to us – we recognise an image, a picture of something (something else, usually, I suppose it is not infrequent to have a picture of a picture, but even then something appears to us as other than brush strokes and paint). The image-object is not reducible to its constituent paint and canvas, and so on. In terms of our wargaming figure, the image-object is what we see when we observe, say, an Eighteenth Century fusilier or a Sherman tank. We have no access to the original fusilier, but we have representations of the real people who were those and have reproduced them in the figure, in metal, paint, and so on. This image-object is related to the original image but is not reducible to it. In a similar way, we do not have the canvas of Da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, but we do have a copy of it.

There is then what the image shows to us. A painting of a woman and child is viewed differently when we know something about it. We do not see something resembling a woman holding a child, we see a woman holding a child, in the example, the Madonna and Jesus. Thus in the wargaming example, we see a fusilier of the 13^th Foot (or whatever: I am making this up), not a figure that resembles the original.

So far, I hope, so good. We have an original fusilier of the Eighteenth Century and an image of that. That image is then transferred to a physical object in our world, painted and based as a wargame figure. But we do not see the metal and paint, we see the original, a fusilier in our wargame. The wargame figure resists, somehow, being reduced to a bit of metal and paint. On the other hand, our nice toy solider, with bright colours and varnish, may not really resemble the original muddy, washed-out tunic of a fusilier. This too is termed a resistance: our figure is not the original, now lost to us.

We are not inclined to take are wargame figure to be just a pile of metal and paint. The figure aims at being apprehended as a fusilier, somehow, or at least we, the wargamer, aim at the figure being apprehended as a fusilier, just not an actually existing one at the present time. We perceive a metal object of a certain size and shape, painted in a certain way. But then our imagination kicks in and somehow claims the object as a fusilier.

The image-object is the impression we get when we see a painted wargame figure. The image-subject is the final stage when we recognise it as a fusilier. There is a tension here: we are representing, somewhere along the line, something that does not exist. The original object of our image object does not exist, in that Eighteenth Century fusiliers do not currently exist (if you argue that re-enactors of fusiliers exist, I would agree, but they are still image-objects, not the originals).

There is something of a puzzle here, and the usual word is ‘transcendence’. Now before palpitations set in, I am not suggesting that our wargame figures are gods or even god-like, but that they do represent something beyond themselves, that is, an Eighteenth Century fusilier, not a lump of cast metal painted in a certain way. Even if the scales are different and the animation is absent, we still take the figure as a fusilier, not just a lump, or even an image of a fusilier. We take the figure as a fusilier, even if at another level of consciousness (or whatever) we recognise that this fusilier has attributes that tell us what it is, even though some of them also tell us that it is not that at all.

This works its way up, as well. A bunch of wargame figures represent, somehow, a unit. A load of units give us an army. We operate in a world of image-objects and image subjects, what the things present to us, and what we see them as. And this is even before we get to a phenomenological account of wargame rules….

The Lead Hillock

Those of you with patience and long memories may recall my struggles to reduce the pile of lead in the cupboard. This is the latest report from the front, and I am reasonably pleased with the progress. After all, perfection is for the gods alone. Us mere mortals can only expect to be somewhere in the environs of good enough.

Still, the starting position was not too bad, with nearly 900 figures in the lead pile. This is, of course, way down from the over 2500 I started with three years ago, so I must have painted a fair number of little men over the period. A rough calculation suggests I have, in fact, painted 2129 figures in the period of interest. The reason the numbers do not match up, of course, is because, like most people, I have been buying a few along the way, which, somehow inevitably, find their way to the top of the waiting pile.

Still, the starting position is this:

You can see here the 885 figures to paint this year, which should, I thought, easily be achievable. After all, in the last two years I have painted over 1000 each. It does include Christmas-related acquisitions, to wit: 45 WSS cavalry and 8 big ECW cavalry. The former are Baccus, of course, the latter are Irregular.

Now, some of the painting to-do list was a bit of a no-brainer. The plan with the WSS figures was to heavily reinforce the French army, more than doubling it in size, for a WSS campaign in a day. I already have standard-sized Anglo-Dutch, Bavarian, and Austrians, but the French were, firstly, by far the biggest army and secondly, had the most defending to do.

The next most obvious painting was the Germans, Spanish, and Dacians. The first and the last have graced the wargame table, as you might have seen recently. I am still pondering the Spanish, not only because I am not sure what to do with them (‘Fight the Romans’ of course) but because the reinforcements overflowed the current storage capacity, meaning they are split over two boxes. Bother.

The big figures are for my role-paying or skirmish games, the mixed-scale campaigns I referred to in a recent post. This has sort of stalled at the moment as I have gone back to the Italian Wars, but I dare say it will come around again as the treaty gets towards the Channel ports and attempts to stop it grow in intensity. I have to say that painting big figures is a lot slower than 6 mm figure painting. I managed 5 foot and 2 mounted 25+ mm scale figures in the same time it took me to do 45 6 mm French WSS cavalry. It might be that I am just not very practised with the big ones, I don’t know. I’m not planning to paint any more than I have in stock, and some of the foot figures have been in stock for many years.

Anyway, March sort of represents the midpoint of my painting year, so a bit of stock-taking is on the cards. The painting for the year so far looks fairly good.

The Dacians, Germans, and Spanish ancient figures have been completed, which gives a good boost to the numbers, of course. I am not sure that the style of painting is the same as their older colleagues. I think I slipped up on the shields (or got bored) so instead of a stand having multi-coloured shields they are all the same. Ho hum. Never mind.

As you might have noticed, recently I have been trying out a few wargames. These have nothing to do with what I have just painted, of course. Normal human perversity applies, after all. Mind you, I have been thinking of the Machiavelli campaign for a long time, possibly nearly as long as some of these figures have been in stock. At the current rate, I shall be looking for some more gendarmes, at least. Still, as the Estimable Mrs. P is fond of quoting: ‘All work and no play…’. I have painted now 56% of the total number of unpainted soldiers available (ignoring the plastic medievals for the moment), so I think I need a rest or at least a few wargames.

Actually, I keep promising myself more wargames when the painting is done. The problem is, of course, that the painting is never done. Even if the remaining 380 or so figures get done this year, I am sure I will find some more stowed away in a box somewhere, and then there are 500 or so plastic medieval figures of various origins, let alone being tempted by extra figures to flesh out what I have, or even, the horror, starting a new period.

When I do return to the painting effort, I think the ancient civilians and the ECW generals are probably next up. They should, at least, be manageable. After that, I am not sure. My need for extra Persians is rather limited, as it is for Companions. The Thessalians might get the application of a brush if they are lucky. I am not sure about the Moorish foot. I will have to look at them. Some, I think, date back to the times when Moorish foot were classified as auxilia in DBM, and I am not sure if this is suitable for the current views of ancient Moors. I think some of them are skirmisher foot, though, but again, there are limits as to how many you really need.

It is a similar story with the 25+mm figures. Some more of the cavalry will probably be assaulted with acrylics, and probably some of the foot. I have just finished the peasants (one of which is armed with a pitchfork and shouting ‘Grrr’), but I have a barmaid and a forester to do, as well as a whole raft more of dismounted cavalry. I suppose I shall get to them, eventually.

The Battle of Ferrara

The Machiavelli campaign proceeds apace, sort of. The invented system of activation is certainly slowing things down rather, which it was designed to do, but I have still come to a second, and much larger, wargame, set in Spring 1500.

The picture shows the situation, and the focus is on the northeast of Italy, where the Papal army has entered the state of Ferrara. The garrison has not surrendered, which the Pope found a little irksome, but the Venetians have also gathered around to see off the forces of Peter and take Ferrara for themselves.

Counting up the forces, the Papal States have one army in Ferrara and one supporting, for a total of one-and-a-half armies. The Papal fleet in the Lower Adriatic cannot intervene as the Papal forces are not active at present (in the original game they could have advanced on the Upper Adriatic and removed the support from the Venetian fleet, I think). Given that, the Venetians have one army advancing on Ferrara, one in Mantua, supporting it, and the fleet in the Upper Adriatic also as a support. This then totals one and three-quarters armies.

Looking over the army lists, I managed to juggle them into an order which I could both manage in terms of figures (more or less) and which reflected the original lists scaled up. The deployments are in the next photograph.

The Papal army, defending, is nearest the camera, holding two hills and the road to Ferrara. During the game, the hills, incidentally, were named ‘Sinister’ and ‘Dexter’. The Papal infantry holds the hills, the cavalry the gap, with the heavily outnumbered light horse to the fore. The plan was to hold the hills and use the cavalry advantage of one base to ride down the Venetian heavies.

The Venetian plan was more or less the opposite. The aim was to brush away the Papal light cavalry with their own and then disrupt the Papal heavies before sending in the gendarmes. The Papal left wing was to be masked by the crossbowmen while the right was assaulted by arquebusiers and sword and buckler men.

You might consider that the terrain is a bit sparse. This is due to the vagaries of the generation system. I rolled low on the first pass, such that the battlefield would have been a featureless plain. Fortunately, I had gone for a dense terrain, which allowed for a second roll, and got the above. The low rolling was a sign of things to come, at least for the Venetians.

On consideration of the armies, I permitted each side a sub-general. These make no contribution to the tempo rolling, but have a point of their own to reorganise their forces or get them moving. As it happened, this was crucial in the game.

Mostly, the game went to the plans of both sides. The Papal mounted crossbowmen fought like, um, demons (Really? Angels, surely?) and in a swirling cavalry skirmish held off the Venetian light cavalry. You can sort of see what was going on in the next picture, taken during the coffee break.

The scone, incidentally, was locally produced and cheese. The Papal light horse were surviving and even prospering through careful management and good dice rolling. The Venetians had, in some exasperation, permitted some stradoits to stray within charge distance of the Papal gendarmes. These had gone in. This was a calculated risk, of course, as it would have left the Papal army outnumbered in cavalry if they had rushed off the table or gone too far out of position. As it happened, they declined to charge on after disposing of the immediate threat, withdrew, and rallied before the Venetian cavalry got into range.

The next shot shows the Venetian left-wing assault on Dexter Hill going in. The clouds of smoke are from these new-fangled arquebus devices, which were present in some numbers on both sides. In the distance, you can see the Venetian centre and right shuffling across to line up with their own objectives. What the picture does not show is that the Venetian left has lost its sub-general, who had been key in getting the wing moving at all, and whose loss would be heavily felt as the assault proceeded. The Papal sub-general is just visible bottom left, moving up some sword and buckler man.

The Papal right stood firm against the assault, just about. The main crunch came in the centre a few moves later, where the heavy cavalry clashed. The result is in the next photograph.

The Venetian general did everything right, honestly. He skirmished up to the right range and got his gendarmes lined up and ready to roll. It was just that they refused to charge. Not his fault, just bad dice rolling. The Papal cavalry had no such problem and immediately counter-charged, with the results shown above. Most of the Venetian gendarmes are fleeing; the still intact ones are heavily disrupted and the rest of the Papal gendarmes are going to pursue.

Even the loss, next move, of the remaining gendarmes did not break the Venetian army, but the pursuing Papal gendarmes crashed into Venetian light horse and, after a bit of a struggle (the gendarmes being disordered) put them to flight, which did break the Venetian army. The Venetian general, whom you can see in the midst of the fray above, had a charmed life and survived about three risk rolls. However, he now has to face the wrath of the Doge.

This was a good action, brought on by the campaign, and a lot of fun. Both sides got their skirmishers organised and active, which was nice, and the final cavalry clash was pretty close – it really came down to which line would charge first. Without the sub-general on their left the Venetian assault on the hill stalled rather, while the Papal army could bring its units back into line.

In the wider context, Venetian army A3 has been removed, while the Papal army is now free to besiege Ferrara. As with creating rules for sub-generals, necessity is the mother of invention, and I have decreed that, upon losing a battle, the same frontier cannot be crossed again in the same year, so unless the Venetian army in Mantua chances its arm the Papal States should be safe until 1501, at least.

The Battle of Pavia (No, Not That One)

As reported last week, the first move of Avalon Hill’s Machiavelli 1499 campaign started with a bang as the French invaded Pavia from Milan, and the autonomous garrison decided to fight it out, outside the walls. This was a bit of a surprise to everyone (the rules say that autonomous garrisons just stand siege and die, but my argument would be ‘not always’). Still, a wargame beckoned, and that is the point, after all.

A bit of dice rolling created a battlefield, which, with its well watered plain, might even look a bit like Northern Italy. The Pavia garrison is closest to the camera, the French on the far side.

The Pavia garrison has four bases of gendarmes, three crossbows, two crossbow skirmishers, two mounted crossbow light horse bases and two sword and buckler. A sort of normal Italian army, at least for a wealthy state that could afford gendarmes. The French are, in my experience, a bit of an odd, unbalanced but very powerful (at times) army, with four bases of gendarmes, four of Swiss pike, a mounted crossbow and two skirmisher bases. In vague memory the French seem hopeless until they get to close quarters, at which point the sheer violence of the assault from either cavalry or pikes tends to blow opponents away.

The French aim was, as you might possibly be able to discern from the photograph, to cover the advancing columns of pike and cavalry with skirmishers, get in close and go ‘Boom!’. The Pavian’s plan was to hold the French off with the skirmishers, entice them into the field of fire of the crossbows and hit any remaining, hopefully disrupted, formations with the gendarmes.

A few moves in and the plans are evolving somewhat.

The Pavian mounted crssbows have managed to push back their French counterparts, and one base just about managed to avoid being destroyed by advancing French gendarmes. It has been rallied and is now again attempting to fill the French with bolts. The Italians are moving their crossbows a bit to the left to give their own gendarmes in the centre a better chance of charging in due course. On their left the other gendarmes are advancing, just about into charge range of the detached French gendarmes. The next move they charge home, the French rout, the Italians decide not to career on into the rest of the French cavalry (which deployed) and rally back. The French general just about survived the debacle, and carried on moving the gendarmes forward and trying to get the Swiss into the action. On the Italian right, incidentally, you can see a brisk skirmish underway, honours going mostly to the French.

The next photograph shows the crunch point. The Italian gendarmes which charged and then rallied are some way back behind the Italian left rear. They got the fall back order fine, but the general did not have enough tempo to stop them retreating and start them rallying until they were almost off the table. Lots of other things were happening, after all, and the Pavians suffered from bad tempo dice rolling all day. Tragically, the Pavian general was shot down by a French mounted crossbowman just before the critical point, which meant that Italian command and control evaporated.

On the Italian right you can see that the skirmish has been resolved in favour of the French. There was nothing much clever here, just some decent dice rolling which eventually wore down the Italian skirmishers. The French gendarmes have now charged home and hit their Italian counterparts very hard indeed. The rightmost gendarme base is on the verge of breaking, the left has been forced back. Lack of command means, of course, that the other half of the Italian cavalry is away to the left rear of the army and not intending to do much at this point.

To follow up the cavalry charge you can see in the French rear the Swiss pike bearing down on the crossbow line. Italian armies of the early Italian Wars, do not really have much of an answer to the Swiss pike and gendarmes combination of the French. It did take Cordoba and a ditch and bank to beat them originally, of course.

As it happened here, the pikes were not necessary. Another move or two and the Italian gendarmes were routing, along with the skirmishers and the rightmost mounted crossbowmen. That gave rather a large negative push to the Pavians, especially as they had lost their general as well, and they routed. Pavia was French.

As an opening battle for a campaign this was rather a nice one. As I mentioned, I was a bit worried about bias against the French, and that was even more so once the lead French gendarme base had been taken out by a careful Italian charge. The French general was attached, and was lucky to survive. Indeed, he had a charmed life, surviving the disruption of the mounted crossbow base as well. If he had gone on one of these events the French would have had a very hard time, I think. On the other hand, the Italians were unlucky to lose their general. If he had stayed intact, they might have brought in the other gendarmes and stitched together a defence to the French charge. But I do not think three crossbow bases and two sword and bucklers would really stand much chance against a Swiss pike strike.

As it happened, not too much was at stake in this battle, except irrelevant detail such as Pavian freedom and Italian unity. I did spend a few minutes wondering whether, in campaign terms, the French should have simply retreated to secure Milan as it was possible that the Austrians could have come in behind them and seized it in the subsequent turns. As it happens that did not happen; the rest of the year was fairly quiet in the north of Italy. Most of the interest moved to the Duchy of Ferrara, between the Papal States and Venice.

What Would Gonsalvo Do?

A long time ago I bought the board game Machiavelli. This turned out to be the first Avalon Hill edition. The second, which a friend of mine bought, had a slightly different map layout. We, as a group of friends, played it quite a lot both face to face and via mail (this was before the days of email, which shows how old I am), and a good deal of fun it was too.

Recently I have, for reasons I will not go into just now, been rather overwhelmed by onrushing deadlines and stuff to do. While the deadlines are a fair distance off, I have been slogging away at a computer screen not achieving very much. The Estimable Mrs. P, whose husband managerial skills are legendary, noticed this and demanded a change, that is doing some wargaming rather than just thinking about it or painting.

Having recently excavated Machiavelli from its storage box, and having been thinking a bit about campaigns and strategy, as the recent blog posts will aver, the pressure to indulge in some wargaming, a campaign and a bit of strategy all came together, and so an Italian Wars campaign was born.

After the inevitable humm-ing and aaah-ing, I decided on the 1499 scenario, with some changes, both because the scenario really needed some, because I have a few logistical issues, and partly to make the game suitable for solo use.

As for the modifications to the scenario, the province labeled Swiss is neutral in my game. The Swiss, of course, were integral in the French armies, but Switzerland was not really part of France. Additionally, so far as I know, the French and ‘Austrians’ (really the Holy Roman Empire) never invaded each other through Switzerland. Another change was to split the Austrians and Neapolitan Spanish in the scenario. This was because, well, they did operate separately at the time with different troop types, and the aim here was to fight out the battles, not use the game’s combat resolution system.

I also turned the Turks into neutrals. This was mainly because I do not have all that many Ottoman troops. Probably just enough, in fact, but I was not confident. At the time, anyway, the Ottoman interests were elsewhere, after all.

As just mentioned, the idea was to wargame the combats. I have had the idea for years of using my Italian Wars armies to do this. Originally these were 100 AP DBR forces; they have only morphed a little in the meantime. I also have, you might recall, suitable galleys for the naval forces. A fleet was arbitrarily defined as consisting of 12 galleys. The armies ranged between 11 and 15 bases.

In Machiavelli, a force in a neighbouring area can support another force advancing into it or being attacked. I have for a long time had the means of dealing with this. Each force consists of a 100 AP army, as mentioned. The first support contributes another 50 AP (or, in the cash values of this game, half an army), the second support 25 AP, and so on. I used this method in 1618-Something years ago, and it seemed to work nicely, although in this game I did not include train and siege extras, which in 1618-Something could double or more the size of an army.

I also decided to use only the basic game. The number of units is determined by the number of cities held – the black squares and circles on the map above. In a solo game, I have not figured out how to manage finances as well, at least, not yet, so I decided to test the diplomacy mechanics I had invented rather than include ducats as well.

There are also autonomous garrisons in the game. These hold cities that are not (or are trying not to be) committed to one of the sides. In Machiavelli, they have to be besieged or bribed (in the advanced game) out. In my game, I adjusted this to a 2D6 roll if a force enters the province. At a low roll, the city surrenders, at a high roll the garrison comes out and fights, and in the middle, the most likely roll, after all, the garrison stands siege as per the rules.

The diplomacy was handled via a system I saw years ago in Lone Warrior, the reference for which I have lost. Basically, you have a table of the countries and each cell gives the relationship between countries A and B, from 1, at war, to 6 friendly and possibly allied. I have adapted this to include the internal relations of the countries, as often they were factionalised and coups, rebellions, and civil wars were not unknown, and also the relationship the other way, as it were, between country B and A. This is because sometimes a country or ruler could be desperate not to upset another which might be about to invade them, for example.

Diplomatic relations are adjusted after the three campaign seasons that make up a year. For this I roll matched average dice, so the swings are not too wild, although having read a bit about the Italian Wars matched d10 might be more appropriate. Side-switching was really a hobby of some of the states.

I also introduced an activation system. Each turn (season) each power would turn a card, and could only move on a heart. Bitter experience has demonstrated that there can be simply too many battles in a turn to wargame in a sensible time frame unless some such system is involved. If that happens often the campaign grinds to a halt in frustration, so hopefully the activation system will slow things down to an acceptable rate. Things in Renaissance Europe did not happen that quickly, I think.

The picture above shows the Spring 1499 turn partially completed. The French have been activated and moved their fleets into the Gulf of Lyons (I think it should be Lions; Lyons is a fair bit inland), armies into Turin and Savoy, and are about to move into Pavia as well. I debated this internally for a bit because it leaves Milan open to the Imperialists, so it is taking a risk and after JWH’s post on possible solo wargamer’s bias I don’t want to be seen to be pushing the French too hard.

The Venetians have moved into Mantua and also into the Upper Adriatic, while the Spanish Neapolitans have also put to sea. On the autonomous garrison rolls, Manuta surrendered, Turin and Savoy stood siege and the garrison of Pavia came out to fight. So that will be the next post, together with some poor photographs.

The Seventeenth Century

I have seen in more than one place, so it must be true, historians grumbling that there is not very much published in paperback about the Seventeenth Century, at least by comparison with the Sixteenth. I suspect they mean about England, or the British Isles, and are excluding academic historiography from that. ‘Paperback’ seems to indicate a certain popularity. I have seen it said that yet another book about Mary, Queen of Scots, can be predicted and sold, while one about Anne of Denmark is likely to get a ‘who is that, then’ sort of response.

This may well be true. There is something much more exciting and romantic about the Tudors than the Stuarts. After all, the Tudors have a usurper, a sickly boy, a tragic queen (or two), a woman who sacrifices love (of an aristocratic sort, of course) for the duty of queenship (unlike her cousin) and whatever you want to make of Henry VIII. As for the Stuarts, we have a Scot, of, perhaps, questionable sexuality, one who got his head cut off, a military dictatorship, a Merrie Monarch, one who didn’t last and a Dutchman as kings. Perhaps the appeal of the Sixteenth Century is a bit clearer.

As I said, this rather excludes academic debate over the Seventeenth (or Sixteenth) Century. The academy, unfortunately, usually talks to itself, even in these days of Research Impact Assessments. These latter, by the way, is why you often get rather half-baked research appearing on the end of the news. The university and research funders have forced the academic to go public before they are ready. Those of you with long memories may recall the cold fusion fiasco of the late 1980s.

But I digress; or at least, before I digress to far afield, the situation seems to me to be a bit different in wargaming. In Tudor England there was not a huge quantity of fighting, so not much of the period is wargame-able. There were, of course, a few rebellions against Henry VIII, and a couple against Elizabeth, but these really stood little chance against the might of even the Tudor state. There are also various rebellions in Ireland, but these can have political resonances even today and often get overlooked.

The big event in late Tudor England was, of course, the Armada, and that is high on some wargamer’s list. I have, of course, run a narrative campaign of my own set in the period. Actually, for a monarch who really was averse to warfare, because of the cost in both financial terms and human life, Elizabeth I spent much of the reign with her realm at war. To her credit they were mostly defensive wars and, probably to the wargamer’s dismay, did not result in too many field battles in which English forces were involved.

A reason for the relative lack of interest in Elizabeth’s wars might be due to Oman, of course, who did not think that too much interesting occurred militarily during her reigns, and Cruickshank’s Elizabeth’s Army which rather implied that it was corrupt, ineffective and inefficient. Well, maybe, but you do not see many late Tudor armies running around.

The opposite is true for the Seventeenth Century, of course. The English Civil War dominates the wargaming scene after a quiet forty years or so. Following on from that there are the Anglo-Dutch Wars, war against Spain, and then the whole complex of events starting in 1685 and culminating in the War of Spanish Succession. I see an increasing amount of this around, which is an interesting trend which I am not going to try to analyse.

On the whole, then, wargaming, focussed on England and the home nations is in opposition to the historiographical trend. There is, in my estimation, a fair bit more of it than Sixteenth Century wargaming. When we come to continental warfare, of course, the Sixteenth Century tends to strike back, particularly with the Italian Wars and, perhaps, occasionally the French Wars of Religion. The Thirty Years War and allied conflicts of the Seventeenth Century get less of a look in, as do the eastern wars of the Ottomans, Venetians, Muscovites, Poles and Austrians, even though the Austrians made spectacular gains in the period, and the 1685 siege of Vienna was a stunning victory.

Even further afield, the Seventeenth Century was that in which it could be argued, colonialism got going, with extensive contact between musket armed Europeans and natives of every range of sophistication from Africa to India, Japan and China. This early colonial adventuring gets, it seems to me, little attention, except if pirates are added in, in which case more light-hearted games, or role-playing scenarios, come to the fore.

Going back to the paperback thing, I suspect I might have hit a limiting factor on wargaming the Seventeenth Century. There is not a huge amount published on the period in affordable, more popular history. While Wedgwood's books are excellent, they are getting on a bit now and some of her narrative assumptions might be looking a bit threadbare. There are a few other works which count, but really, as historians generally, and in particular military historians have not until recently been particularly interested in battles and campaigns (often dismissed as ‘drums and trumpets’) and more popular writers cannot gain access particularly easily to academic work and so tend to rely on older writings, there is a bit of a deadlock.

This is a bit of a shame. I am sure there is interesting work going on at the moment in academic history, particularly with respect to the Protectorate and its military adventures, but it is rather hard, or takes a generation or so, to emerge into the public, or wargaming, consciousness. There are signs of hope, such as the Helion ‘Century of the Soldier’ series, but the danger is there that the wargamer is simply overwhelmed with information and books (and, if you get them all, they are not cheap).

Still, an interesting paradox. I suspect that there may be other historical periods to which the above apply, and which might remain under-investigated by wargamers. But I don’t know what they might be.

Up and Down the Scales

In the unlikely event that this blog is known in the wider wargaming world at all, I suppose it would be known as a ‘6 mm’ blog, that is, a blog that features 1:300 scale figures in its wargames. Many wargamers, I suspect, might read some of the text, and even appreciate some of the wilder ideas about wargaming, but, on the whole, are not too impressed with the eye candy (can you have eye poison?) on show.

It probably only goes to show that taking photographs of 6 mm figures is a lot harder than with larger scale figures, and also that neither my painting skills nor my ability with a camera are up to snuff. I shall, therefore, keep wargaming with the small stuff and taking bad photographs. All I can say in my defence is that both my painting and photography have improved over the years, from the dreadful to the merely awful.

Anyway, as the astute reader of the blog might have noticed, occasionally larger-scale figures make an appearance. I have, in one of my boxes of shame, a stash of old (over 20 years) English Civil War dismounted cavalry and infantry figures, along with a few French King’s Musketeers types. These were purchased, I imagine (you really don’t think I can remember that far back, do you?) for my forays into role-playing games.

I started role-playing games as a teenager, of course. One of the difficulties was the fantasy setting, and the other was the lack of figures. The former meant that many hours were spent poring over books of rules and cults, trying to figure out how it all cohered. It was only many years later that I worked out that the setting did not need to be more than immediately coherent.

The other issue that I never solved for Runequest (for indeed, that was the RPG of choice) was the lack of figures. Naturally, I could (and did) get some ancient figures. My own was a Spartan Hoplite which, my friends complained, was not actually carrying a weapon, as he had lost his spear somewhere along the way. Anyway, we cobbled together some figures, some appropriate and some not. But unless one of us had a vast sum of money, which as ‘A’-level students was distinctly unlikely, we were never going to get giants, dragon snails or trolls.

Later on, I discovered the delights of FGU’s Flashing Blades game. Remarkably, this is still in print, along with all the scenario books. I have discovered over recent weeks that I use it a lot for Seventeenth Century background and ideas. Refreshingly, as I may have remarked before, it is set not in the France that was, but in the France that should have been. While the sword combat system is a bit complex (I don’t think I have ever played it correctly) a lot of the other stuff is a rollicking good adventure RPG.

Those of you who have read so far will have divined the next step. The large ECW figures are for Flashing Blades and similar systems. I also have in my pile of books the GURPS Pirates modules, and a few renaissance era skirmish type sets of rules – Peter Berry’s Once Upon a Time in the West Country and Once Upon a Time in the West Indies, and someone’s Have Pike Will Travel, which in the best traditions of my wargame stash, is in the ‘it's around here somewhere’ category.

So far as I recall they were all quite fun, in different ways. Flashing Blades was a real role-playing game, with adventurers with attributes like charisma, which could get the young ladies swooning, or at least intrigue the barmaid sufficiently to show the party the back way out of the pub. The others are slightly higher (or lower) level games. There is a lot less characterisation and the scenarios are more wargames, such as escort the wagon across the table, rather than intrigue and scandal. Still, with secret missions and occasional random events, they could be jolly fun games.

Meandering towards the point here, I suspect that often these sorts of games have been compartmentalised, perhaps almost totally, away from serious or proper wargames. In the latter, we conceptualise a few figures as being a battalion or a brigade, or perhaps a company or platoon. There is not much individualisation, there are few fun chance cards, and, hearkening back to a post a while ago, the chance of comedy narrative arcs is fairly small.

It has always seemed to me that there is a good opportunity being missed here. Why not mix the levels of wargaming up? After all, a lot of historical novels count on some individual action in saving the day: retrieving the Queen’s jewels which she has inadvertently given to a rather sweet English ambassador, for example. A more political plot could be ensuring the ambassador and a signed treaty get through hostile land to the destination. The really astute reader may recognise the Corbie battles and skirmishes here.

Without wishing to belabour the point, has anyone any ideas about this? Have you done it, mixed the levels of wargaming, so that the outcome of a skirmish game determines the circumstances of the next full-scale wargame? Does it work?

My own thoughts on the matter, having tried it out a bit, as just noted, is that it can work, but it can be a little difficult to decide on when to switch back to the other scales. I think particularly, given the options for identification with individual figures there are in the RPG and skirmish level, it is hard to get back from that to the army level operations.

On the other hand, Tolkien managed it in The Lord of the Rings, of course. The battles are only really sidelines to the progress of the fellowship of the Ring, or latterly Sam and Frodo to the Crack of Doom. But I have not seen many wargame campaigns that take this line. Have you?