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The Gunner

Official e-zine of the St Enda's Wargames Club.

Volume 2, Number 2
July 2002
Past Issues
Contents

  • New Rules - Trouble in the Amatolas
    Play By Email Rules for a Campaign in the Eastern Cape Frontier in the mid-nineteenth century
  • Why we need a Common Basing Standard now!
  • Good Shot! Regular Checkers Column
  • The Art of Coarse Wargaming Chapter Three

New Rules

Trouble in the Amatolas Play By Email Rules for a Campaign in the Eastern Cape Frontier in the mid-Nineteenth Century

Traditional wargames rules struggle to replicate guerilla tactics convincingly. These PBEM rules aattempt to provide a realisticsense for the player of being on campaign in the Amatola Mountain Range, as Xhosa or Brit!

Good Shot!

A Regular Column for the latest games, openings, and shots to improve your game of draughts.

The Tourist Trap

Apparently, many players have fallen for this one.

9-13 (Edinburgh), 23-19, 11-16, 26-23, 10-14, 24-20? Black wins 2 pieces:

14-17, 21-14,

(20-11, 17-26, 31-22, 7-31, BW)

6-10, 20-11, 10-26, 31-22, 7-31,

Black wins

The Art of Coarse Wargaming

In his regular column, the Editor looks at the coarse side of wargaming

Chapter Three

Those who wish to justify the hobby of wargaming as something a cut above train-spotting, are very keen to stress its links with historical research. Wargamers, proper ones at any rate, spend many hours with noses burried in historical tomes, and certainly accumulate a great deal of esoteric knowledge about all sorts of topics. Many go deeply into military history, and emerge as experts in their fields. They could certainly, as Gilbert & Sullivan would have it, tell a javelin from a ravelin. Others, while not experts, are well educated in history, and at the very least could name long-forgotten kingdoms the average man-in-the-street knows nothing about.

The coarse wargamer, on the other hand, derives all his knowledge of military history from Hollywood. He thinks "head 'em off at the pass" is a serious military communique, and believes firmly that David's portrait of Napoleon is a fake because it looks nothing like Rod Steiger. Look, I've got nothing against films. I'm sure many a Samurai army owner was originally inspired by Kurusawa. Many a youngster who watched Spartacus as a lad, now sports a freshly painted Roman army, and Waterloo was a very watchable movie. But the coarse wargamer stops there. If he does do any actual reading about his chosen army, it is more likely to be a romanticised novel a la Walter Scott, than a serious historical work.

It is time to introduce Steven Watkins, not the coarsest wargamer I know, but up there with the best of them. He fields an Early Imperial Roman army, the result of a matinee infatuation with Elisabeth Taylor in Antony and Cleopatra. He watched the film thirty-seven times, and after a particulary apotheotic viewing (number tweny-three, I think), decided his soul was Roman and placed on earth to conquer Egypt. Just outside the cinema in Kings Cross is a little wargames shop, and in an equally apotheotic moment his eye caught a display of legionaries in the window. Half an hour later, armed with a small fortune in figures, a set of rules, dice and the address of a local wargames club, Steven joined the ranks of those who seek to win victory on the tabletop.

Steven's chosen club accepted him warmly, even waived his membership fees for a month or so until his "ship came in" - well he had spent all his money on the figures, hadn't he? They were soon to realise their mistake. You see, in all the movies Steven watched, the Roman army was all-conquering, and victory normally stemmed from the personal invincibility of the general himself. Shortly after learning that Roman Emperors were divine, well ... that sealed it!

At the next club meeting, Steven announced, as his general faced annihilation, that his general was the emperor and consequently immortal. No ammount of referals to the rule book could convince him otherwise. After all, had not Peter Ustinov ... er... that is Nero, declared himself immortal? And didn't that mean you couldn't die?! The rule book might say "unit destroyed", but the book was clearly wrong. No amount of appealing to good sense, to the spirit of the game, and even the offer of a pint over which the whole thing could be discussed reasonably could persuade Watkins to yield.

Several weeks later, the incident more or less forgotten, Watkins was offered another game. On this occasion he argued, based on a TV series, that since he had rolled a six upon his general "cutting open a bird" (his own rule, of course, not one of Phil Barker's less lucid moments) - his army would automatically count +2 on morale. Not even the intervention of a former National Champion could disabuse him of this notion. When challenged to find it in the rule book, Watkins rolled his eyes to the heavens at the monumental stupidity of men, and their failure to see beyond the constraints of rules.

That was the last game Watkins ever played, but he still hangs around the club, spouting off to anyone who will listen about how bad the rules are, how they don't adequately capture historical research, and how real wargamers need to base their games on "solid research" , his words, not mine, and certainly not on the rule books, obviously written by someone who has never studied military history.

And that is how to tell a coarse wargamer from mere mortals, he's the one who trumpets loudest about military history and historical research, and thinks Polybius is a character from Asterix!



Why We Need a Common Basing Standard Now!

by Dorian Love
St Enda's Eagles Wargames Club

Historically, wargames rules have included a section, at the beginning of the rules in which representational scales are discussed, and base sizes are defined. Each rules set has defined its own base sizes, based on the preconceptions of the rules maker, historical research into frontage, or perhaps to conform to those defined in the most popular rules set of the period. Typically, a wargamer who wishes to play more than one set of rules, or who is changing to another set, has to re-base all his figures. A daunting and unpleasant task. For friendly games players may play with different bases, but have to compensate for this, not an ideal situation, you will agree.

As an example, here are some base sizes quoted in various English Civil War sets. I have used the foot pike base for 4 figures in 15mm as an example, but I could have chosen any troop type, as the sample below is representative of the problem as a whole. You will note that even where frontages are the same, base depth often differs.

Rules Frontage Depth
Matchlock 40mm 16mm
Forlorn Hope 40mm 40mm
File Leader 30mm 30mm
WRG 2nd Edition 30mm 20mm

For those who wish to promote wargames as a sport, rather than a hobby, this situation is not only undesirable, but also limiting on the growth of the sport. Imagine setting up a game of soccer in which the shape of the ball changed according to which tournament was being played! Intersetingly enough, in the world of football I have seen such an example - a televised match between the related, but different codes of Australian Rules and Gaelic football. The game was played to Aussie Rules, but using the Gaelic rounded ball!

Potentially this is what happens in wargaming, although realistically each period tends to have a dominant rules set. Those periods where a single rules set has tended to dominate emerge as the chief period for competitive play, while periods where many rules sets vie for popularity, tend to shy away from competition. The dominance of WRG 7th edition and then DBM has made Ancients a very popular competitive period. Whereas Napoleonics, where many rules are used, tends to suffer from the inability of players to agree on which set of rules should be used in competition.

The South African Wargames Union organizes its tournaments on the basis that the entrants nominate which set of rules they would like to play, and a majority decision is reached a month in advance of the competition. Before you rush to SAWU's defence, let me say I agree with them - what else could they do? In practice, since most competitions focus on Ancients, and DBM rules the roost, the rules set is never in dispute. Renaissance is also played, and here again the popular WRG 2nd edition has been replaced by DBR. SAWU's approach is most sensible then in regard to periods such as Napoleonics, where no paramount rules set has emerged. Perhaps WRG's imminent release of Horse, Foot and Gun will change all this, but I doubt it. No-one wants to re-base their army for a competition, and so periods where this is a possibility, I would argue, also tend to emerge as non-competitve periods, where the hobbyist is left undisturbed.

There are two things wrong with this situation. Firstly, every period should be encouraged at competitive level, and secondly new, and possibly better rules sets may be disadvantaged purely because of the schlepp factor. It is too much hassle to change rules, and base sizes. This leads to inertia and stagnation in the sport. Neither are hobbyists served by this. More than the competitor, the hobbyist is prepared to try new rules. Re-basing figures hardly encourages experimentation and innovation.

Many recent rules have deliberately stated that the base size is immaterial, and encouraged players to use their figures regardless. Interstingly enough WRG's Horse, Foot and Guns takes this approach, perhaps indicatinmg that it is less than sanguine in taking over the period. Clearly, however, if opponents have different base sizes, the situation could get hairy. I would therefore like to urge the administrators of wargaming, SAWU, the BHGS, the IWF, and so on to encourage the adoption of a common basing standard for each period. This is not to say that rules makers have to adhere to the standard, but it would encourage them to do so, and would I believe help in promoting those periods where many rules sets abound. It might also encourage figures manufacturers to make figures which fit on uniform bases.

By a Common Basing Standard, I mean an element size, which could be used universally regardless of representational scale. One could say, for example that a base 40mm wide and 20mm deep represents 100 men or a thousand! Different rule sets could still take different approaches by altering the number of troops an element represented, but the base size would remain the same, allowing for players who usually play different rule sets to play against each other, even if the representational scale would normally preclude this.



Editorial Note

The question of race was bound to rear its ugly head sometime or other. Given our history, South African Wargaming was bound to have to face up to it at some stage. The other day, sitting in the convention hall during the SA National Team Trials, I couldn't help but notice the Apartheid in a room divided largely along racial lines. On one side of the hall, where Morabaraba and Draughts held sway, smiling Black faces abounded. On the other half, where figure-gaming was king, smiling White faces were everywhere. The only thing that reminded me I was not back in the bad old days was firstly that black and white were together in the same hall, and that the faces were all smiling!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to blame the administrators, as the minister of Sport has recently done. I'm not one who believes three hundred years of colonial history can be reversed overnight with a little tokenism here, and a touch of affirmative action there. The administrators have tried their best. Under the rules of selection, any black player who qualifies for a National Trial, is automatically selected!

Wargames began as a figure-gaming code, and could have chosen to remain so, retaining a mainly white constituency, but chose to include the populist boardgames codes of draughts and morabaraba specifically to attract a black membership in the hopes of sponsoring cross-fertilization. Colin Webster is to be commended for his vision and the breadth of his non-racialism, rare in sports administrators, even those with black faces!

Nevertheless, we have a problem. Wargames is racially divided, and we need to pull out all the stops to ensure that wargaming becomes a racially-blind sport in the shortest possible period of time, without tokenism, without quotas, and without acrimony. If we do not, we will, black and white, end up with serious problems down the line, and will have to face our makers, trying to defend why we did nothing when placed in our racially divided society with the obvious task of ending division.

This is a tall order, but the solution is very simple. Blacks have to start playing figure-gaming, and whites have to start playing draughts and morabaraba! One might say that is as easy, or as difficult as blacks adopting rugby or cricket, and whites taking to soccer. But in fact that is not the hard part. As a high school teacher I have found it very easy to get black children to play figure-gaming. You simply need to produce the equipment and administrate the rules. At both Phambili High School, and St Enda's, any number of black children have played a game, probably more than the total number of white children who have played figure-gaming within the same time period! And yet the problem is a cultural one. Black and White children play differently.

Draughts and morabaraba are played in a very devil-may-care way. With much talent and flare, but without much study or notation. In the tournaments at my school, most games are decisive, and yet in serious tournament play most games are drawn! White kids, on the other hand, take figure-gaming very seriously. Unlike the games I witness involving black kids, where rules are almost a hinderance to free expression, white kids study and seek to master the rules. I know this is all stereotype - I'm not trying to draw any racial conclusions here, just observing in a sort of common-sense way what I perceive to be going on at the moment. Black kids don't care for wargames and so don't try to learn the rules, or enter tournaments. Very often they play one game and never return, or play many games without ever learning anything. They've had a good time, and that is that. Marvellous, but hardly a recipe for ending the Apartheid at Tournaments.

So, is there a solution? I think there is, but not a quick fix. You see, I believe that culture is the most disposable commodity we have in our identities. What do I mean by that? We tend to assume, and this is where stereotyping becomes dangerous and racist, that cultural traits actually equate to personality, intelligence or worth. Yes, whites are task-oriented, and yes blacks are process-oriented. This is true, as long as we understand that there are many process-oriented whites, and many task-oriented blacks, and that we cannot assume anything, base any judgements on, or take anything based on stereotyping for granted.

And, yes, these traits are as easily cast off as traditional dress has been cast off in the process of colonialization. Later than hide karosses or feathers, naturally, but as Franz Fanon has demonstrated, whiteness has nothing to do with the colour of your skin. There will be black figure-gamers, who, in time, will rival white players in their task-oriented dedication to study and analysis. But, and this is where the administrators do need to take heed, I believe, the greatest move to the adoption of figure-gaming by black players will come when tournaments are staged which appeal to a style of play which black players would be ready to adopt with a minimum of cultural shift. In short, if we truly wish to attract black players to figure-gaming, we need to stage process-oriented tournaments, where participation, fun, and team work count more, or as much as individual actualization.

I believe this is where we should be looking. Will, and here is the racist trump card, standards suffer? Will we cease being competitive at the highest level? Why? There's noithing to stop the individual achiever, black or white, from his solitary pursuit.

Dorian Love


The Gunner is published by the St Enda's Wargames Club. The views expressed in this newsletter do not purport to be those of the Editor, St Enda's wargames Club, St Enda's Secondary School, or any body to which the club is affiliated.