Most wargamers are at least casual consumers of military history. An interest in some or another item along the rich, lengthy timeline of mankind’s most rigorously embraced and universal pasttime (i.e. finding clever ways, and even cleverer excuses, for blasting each other to bloody flinders) is typically what initially draws us in to our little corner of the gaming universe.

Whoa. Wait a second. I’m not trying to get philosophical here. What I’m heading toward is this: We’re all generally familiar with the ‘received imagery’ that characterizes past conflicts. But with the exception of a few of our most recent wars — fought since the introduction of film photography and serious, clinical methods of record-keeping — many of us (myself included) have a limited understanding of how elements found in many of our wargames ‘really’ worked in battle.

Napoleonic skirmishers, for example. Wargames that try to portray them nearly always screw something up. I’m not exactly sure how a skirmish line worked on the battlefield. I’m not that sure which armies used them (and when), how their usage changed from the 1790s through 1815, how many played a role in any given battle nor even (just being honest) what they REALLY did. But I’m pretty sure that the treatment they get in many wargames doesn’t quite square with history.

A British 60-pounder in action during the Great War.

Another iconic element that wargames (and wargamers) seem to struggle with is indirect artillery fire. I guess in this case I’m looking primarily at tactical and grand tactical wargames. It’s a vexing subject.

Given that a lot of gamers (and some game designers) have first-hand familiarity with the processes and effects of modern-day “off-board artillery” I think it’s interesting that so few games come even remotely close to getting it right.

Sometimes I think that designers trip themselves up when they convince themselves that their game is incomplete without some sort of detailed treatement of artillery. Games set at the ‘man level’ — like SPI’s old Sniper and Patrol games — should have skipped it entirely. In Patrol, at 5 meters per hex, the blast radius of a super-heavy artillery round covered nearly an entire geomorphic map sheet (usually about one-sixth of the map). It’s nuts to even attempt to ‘game’ something like that — you’re not calling 8-inch artillery onto the bad guys when you’re close enough to throw rocks at them.

In cases like that (and there are others) a designer just needs to admit his game is set after Arty has done its work and move on from there.

The time scale of the call-for-fire process screws up a lot of game designs. Even well-regarded ‘technical’ games like ASL and ATS struggle with it, principally because of issues with turn scale, time compression and predictability. A more chaotic process gives artillery a better ‘feel’ in the Combat Commander series of game. Still,  in all three games we’re really dealing with artillery being commonly used well inside the “danger close” engagement zones that battery commanders rarely approved.

Platoon-level games usually get closer to the mark. Their longer time scales and larger hex scales are much easier to square with a real-world call-for-fire process. First-generation games like PanzerBlitz and its various offspring struggled with implementing artillery terminal effects on different target types (armored vs unarmored), but elements like call cycle timing and engagement ranges always seemed more appropriate.

Keeping all of that in mind, it’s time for me to steer back onto my original theme: Gaming elements of warfare that seem familiar because of our passing acquaintance with history, but about which we have limited first-hand technical knowledge.

Just a camporee with cannons...

The popular history of World War One is clogged with the imagery of slaughter on an industrial scale. Machineguns mowing down rows of advancing infantry, massive artillery barrages burying entire trenches packed with grunts, gas rolling across the battlefield like a silent wave of horror. Particulary because of the general stalemate in the West from 1915-1917, the Great War has received scant attention as a topic for tactical gaming.

Tactical reality for the grunts of World War One, however, was far from a static, wait-to-die affair. Although the battlefield was indeed dominated by then-modern methods of technological slaughter there was still plenty for an infantryman to do.

A couple of fairly recent games add substantially to the Great War’s tactical wargaming library. In The Trenches is a series from Grenier Games — the third volume is shipping now — set at the platoon level with a hex scale of 100 meters and 5 minute turns. Infantry Attacks is a PanzerGrenadier spin-off from Avalanche Press that tackles things at the company level, with 200-meter hexes and 15-minute turns.

The games take distinctly different approaches to the topic of indirect artillery fire. Artillery was undeniably one of the dominating factors on the World War One battlefield, which means in both cases the artillery mechanisms are crucial components of the game designs.

In my next blog post (or two, maybe), I’ll be taking a more detailed,  side-by-side look at these two games. Tune in next time for my take on where these games work, where they don’t and how they address some of the foggier aspects  of history surrounding the world’s first truly industrial war.

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