Enthusiasms -

I fear I've fallen for temptation yet again. This last weekend was Enfilade!, the largest miniatures convention in the Pacific Northwest. It is organized/run by NHMGS, part of Historical Miniature Gamers Society, and includes people from Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia. A lot of games are put on, and one can get enthused by some game you were in. This year was a good example of that.

As usual, I put on, or helped put on, two games, both of which I wrote the rules for. The first was Little Big Battles, 6mm Napoleonics where two 3-figure stands are a battalion, one 2-figure mounted stand is a pair of squadrons, and a gun with 1-3 figures is a battery. You can run multiple corps with these rules. We use a form of competitive die throw first done in DBA for combat. Things feel right with the way things go.

The other (in the evening) was King's War, pike and shot, 1640-1695. Jeff did this one, I just helped. It's set in 1672 at the start of King Louis' Dutch War. This is always popular, and we drew quite a crowd. The scenario needs work, but people had a good time.

While the King's War game was in progress I found myself going over to watch Bruce McFarlane's Torgau game using the Humberside Extensions of DBA.

The Battle of Torgau was a clash between the Austrians and the Prussians in 1760. It took place just outside of Dresden, and the Prussians narrowly won. Frederick the Great tried to do what the Austrians had been doing to him: converge columns on the Austrians from two directions. He had one clumn, and General von Ziethen had the other. Frederick attacked early, and was very bloodily repulsed. He was trying to reorganize his forces preparatory to a defense, and the Austrians had sent off a dispatch claiming victory, when Ziethen showed up. He put in his attack, and was actually bogging down when one of Frederick's subordinates got his men up for one more assault, catching the Austrians from the flank and rolling them up. It kicked the Austrians out of Saxony (again) for the winter, and was a major step towards making them seek peace. It was also one of the bloodiest battles of the Seven Years War (only Zorndorf was bloodier).

Tony Barr of the Society of Ancients wanted a set of Renaissance rules for DBA. So he added sections to the rules, and they are known as the Humberside Extensions. They take DBA, or a form of it, up to 1900. For 20th Century and later, both Tony and others suggest using HoTTs (Hordes of the Things), a fantasy set of rules. I've played them, and they work quite well (tanks are behemoths, artillery and air power are Gods, staff are wizards, machineguns are shooters, and so on).

One of the complaints about DBA (De Bellis Antiquitatis) is that they didn't account for attrition. Critics would point out that two lines of hoplites would shove each other back and forth until somebody was unlucky. That turned out to be the case with hoplite warfare, but the critics displayed their enormous lack of understanding about the period with their claims. Success in hoplite warfare depended upon flanking the enemy, which became common with the pike-armed phalangites. But DBA was originally meant for a campaign game. The competition gamers grabbed it because all armies are 12 stands, and vary in strength from 20-60 castings, something that even casual gamers can paint. BTW, serious competition gamers play only historical match-ups. I've seen both the serious and the unserious competition gamers, and I know the difference!

Bruce McFarlane decided to fix this, and introduced variable morale. This becomes necessary for musket period games as attrition is a serious consideration (though you win faster and with fewer losses if you can outflank the enemy). He tested it, liked what he was seeing, and went forward. In DBA, if you out-dice your opponent in one of the match-ups, the losing stand recoils. Bruce McFarlane put a limit on the number of recoils a stand could suffer before it was removed. Not all stands are rated the same, so you have better troops and poorer troops, and that gives you something else to ponder.

This is all the genesis of the Torgau game at Enfilade! Using a scale of one stand=one brigade, he prepared an Order of Battle. Following successful games of the Battle of Friedland at the Fall-In Con, he brought this game to the Red Lion in Olympia for Enfilade! Six players volunteered for it; I was involved in King's War, so I couldn't play. But I lurked. And I liked what I saw. In 2.5 hours they had a result that was believable (and historical, i.e. very bloody). And they were talking tactics at the end, not rules.

One of the measures I use for how well a set of rules works at a Con is what the players discuss in the bar afterwards. I saw this at a Dragonflight back in the late 80s or early 90s at Seattle University. I'd put on a game of Warfare in the Age of Reason, one of the best SYW sets of rules around (IMHO - and no, writing the siege module for the rules didn't effect my opinion; I wouldn't have written them if I thought the rules were bad). Afterwards we all retired to a Red Robin just down the street. The players at the next table had been in the game, and they were talking about the tactics they'd used, not how they'd manipulated the rules. I'd followed my principles of a good wargames convention game, and they'd had a lot of fun. I incorporated that into a measure of success as a games master.

The three rules for a convention game:

1. Make the tactical problem relatively simple;
2. Have players throwing dice no later than turn 2;
3. Keep everything moving quickly so no one can possibly get bored.

So with that aside, it was quite refreshing that players were talking about tactical moves they made, not whether the dice had been favorable or unfavorable (I gave a demonstration of bad dice an hour later by losing 16-2 in a game of HoTTs; my Barbarian Queendom Army going down to thundering defeat at the hands of a Dwarven Army - but my tactics were bad also).

So since that game I've been researching everything I can about the Humberside Extensions, and even tried a solo game using my ACW troops. And I'm in a quandry that I hope to solve: what to base for them? My ACW troops, that's a given. But I've more or less made up my mind to base my SYW troops for Volley & Bayonet. But do I have any others? Funny you should ask that.

I have a veritable unpainted horde of figures for the 9 Years War. They look like Marlburians, but with floppy hats, not tricornes. So those'll go on DBA style stands. And still I'm tempted. Expect updates as I finally decide on what I want to rebase.