Life and Lessons of a Wargamer, Part 2

Having discovered Avalon Hill’s wargames and identified sources for them, my friends and I spent several years happily buying and playing their expanding list of titles even as the company underwent its own changes.  During this time, I also discovered wargaming with miniatures, which would eventually become my principal hobby gaming interest.  I was in Junior High School (aka Middle School) when a schoolmate displayed a number of his painted miniature figures in our local library and then at our school (major nerd points back in the 1960s).  These were painted plastic figures from Airfix and included some that had been converted to appear as something else.  I had seen these HO scale figures in the local hobby shop where I was buying model kits of airplanes, tanks, and ships but hadn’t realized until these displays that there were people using these for wargaming in my area.  Certainly, I had owned toy soldiers (including a Rin Tin Tin western fort and a World War II set) but I had never subjected them to wargames in any serious form. 

This fact was shared with me by a classmate as we were both examining the figures on display at school.  Chuck was apparently looking for fresh m…I mean…new opponents and soon my circle of board wargamers were pushing miniature figures across his terrain table.  We then went beyond just the figures adding plastic model tanks from the Austrian maker Roco to fight alongside our Airfix soldiers and started refighting World War Two as well.  (Chuck, by the way, was one of those gamers who flooded the table with Tiger tanks, representing on one battlefield the majority of those manufactured!)  The Roco Minitanks line is now reportedly made and distributed by the German firm Herpa.

One member of my local circle of gamers introduced me to the then emerging war game convention scene which brought me to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in 1975.  There we joined the latest in an ongoing series of war games between a Canadian and an American group focused on the Napoleonic Wars and using the Frappe and Napoleonique rules sets.  Mike Scholl was able to persuade Ray Johnson and the others to let us command a scratched together French Allied Corps consisting of the Irish Legion and other non-French odds and ends placed on the French right.  Opposing us was another walk-on player who conveniently had brought along his own Russian miniatures army – of which he was rightfully proud verging into boastfulness as he regaled friends with tales of what he was about to do to us on the tabletop.  Mike proposed, and I quickly agreed, that we would begin the game as a ‘refused flank’ by holding all of our units off the table and only bringing them on as our first turn movement.  Then we would continue to advance our entire Corps toward the Russians lined up on the ridge at mid-table, with every unit we had moving and attacking any Russian unit they encountered.  Our initial attacks on the ridge were successful and the supporting Russian units were inundated by a wave of fleeing Russians mixed in with our units attacking at every opportunity.  The Russians collapsed and fled the field.  Shaking hands in victory, Mike and I turned to our left to make sure the others had seen our victory – and it was only then that we discovered that the rest of the French Army had itself been driven from the battlefield in defeat!

The largest part of my miniatures wargaming over the past 50 years has been at conventions, especially those organized by The Historical Miniature Gaming Society, aka HMGS – these days usually meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Picking scenarios and rules sets from the convention program that sound interesting, walking up to the table and reading the terrain, meeting the other players, and choosing a side to play, and then deciding what to do with the troops the game master gave me.  It is an exercise in the ad hoc nature of war in miniature across historical periods and reflecting every part of the globe.  Almost every player I have met at a convention is someone I would be happy to play opposite or alongside again.

I was going to attempt a quick explanation of the scales possibly available for use but Wikipedia has a rather comprehensive take on this already at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scale_model_sizes.  This even includes the GI Joe/Action Man figures that I have seen used in some war games.  Players will sometimes mix figures and vehicles from different but similar scales when they cannot find everything they want to put into a game at the exact same scale.  Naval games and games that focus especially on tanks and vehicles often use models that are not in the precise scale set out in the rules, but these still work with only limited adjustment.

The miniatures conceal the real secret behind wargaming – it’s all math.  In a miniatures wargame, the individual figure or vehicle can be just that, one soldier or one vehicle, or a single figure can represent any number of actual soldiers.  In this way, a number of figures grouped together on a single stand or base can be a platoon, company, battalion, or more depending upon the rules and the game scale.  Multiple figures on a stand are often used as an accounting device via the use of caps or rings moved from figure to figure to reflect casualties inflicted during combat with the stand being removed after a certain portion of the figures have been marked as casualties.  The figures removed as casualties represent those wounded or missing as well as those killed.

Whatever scale figures you use, there are two approaches to the wargame.  H.G. Wells outlined one in his “Little Wars” book which emphasizes the game element with no attempt to link his game world to the real world with any real-world based time, movement, and distance scale.  His combat includes the actual firing of toy cannons at the other player’s soldiers.  Hand to hand combat is won automatically by the side that brought the most figures to the fight.

The rules we preferred to use state specifically how much real-world time is represented by a single game turn.  This defines how far various miniatures (vehicle or personnel) can move across the terrain in a single turn and the ranges at which different units can fire their weapons.  Such rule sets introduce additional decisions to be made.  Players may have to consider the morale of their units and ensure that they are close enough to their ‘commanders’ to receive and act on orders.  Units can run out of ammunition and have to withdraw to be resupplied.  Some rules allow units to be hidden from the opposing player’s view until they are “spotted” by that player’s units.  Such rules encourage the study of the armies of history, their uniforms, their organization, their weapons, their tactics, and their generals.  You can also give units more or less combat power on the wargame table based upon whether they are green recruits, militia, veterans, or highly trained elite soldiers.   Maneuvering your troops against an opposing player is part mathematics but is also a matter of deciding whether or not, or when, and under what circumstances, one might match his Old Guard with your line troops or even militia.  This I find much more satisfying than board wargames in which cardboard counters are too often known by their numerical value in combat and not by their unit identity.  Get the math right and you can war game anything and I have wargamed everything from the American Civil War and American Revolution to the Anglo-Zulu wars.