What can Wargaming Learn from Board Gaming? Part 1

As well as I wargamer, I play a lot of board games. I don't mean the traditional hex and counter type of military themed games that are sometimes called wargames, but the modern style board games that have seen a massive rise in the last decade or so. One of the earliest and probably best known of this new style of game was The Settlers of Catan, a resource management/trading game set on an island with randomised locations. With the huge rise in board gaming as a hobby a massive shift in the actual game mechanics has also occurred with lots of innovative ways of playing and using the various game components as seen in Settlers. As wargamers there is a lot we can learn from these games. 

Since the release of the very popular Pandemic, the world of board gaming has also seen a rise in cooperative games. As the name suggests these type of games involve the players cooperating together to defeat the game itself and in Pandemic the players work as a team of scientists to control the spread of disease across the globe. The game generates the disease cubes and the locations in which they appear. Events, such as outbreaks, are triggered when certain conditions are reached and the players are in a constant state of trying to firefight the rising danger whilst trying to find cures. If you haven't played Pandemic, it is an excellent introduction to modern board games that is fun and frustrating in equal amounts.

For wargaming, we can look at playing cooperatively as way of enjoying games. Rather than fighting one another, players can work together to defeat the unseen enemy. One idea my friend and I discussed a while ago was an air raid game on an enemy held location where the anti-aircraft elements were 'controlled' by the game. Let's make this into a specific example for the purposes of this article, it's late 1944 and RAF Typhoons are setting out to destroy German logistics and rear areas after the Normandy landings. Each player controls a plane equipped with rockets and MGs and the game is won by destroying trains, railways, marshalling depots, road junctions, military convoys etc. Each location destroyed gains the players points, with the final score determining how well they did. The rules you use are entirely up to you, and there's plenty of air wargaming rules to choose from, but they will need to have some form of anti-aircraft fire and ground attack rules. Also, there are plenty of 6mm options out there for modelling the table, Leven Miniatures do some nice and cheap railway accessories and plenty of companies make the other military equipment you'd need. Personally, I would get some 1/144th scale Typhoons to give you that sense of scale when aircraft are attacking the ground. So far, so easy. 

However, the German forces are not happy to allow this to go unmolested and will want to be firing back as the RAF zoom overhead. As the enemy is controlled by the game, we can use dice or cards to randomly place German AA guns or other air defences at predetermined locations on the board. Rolling a dice and consulting a pre-made table for the type of air defence and location is one way of doing this, however, I would prefer to use cards for a couple of reasons. Cards act similarly to the randomised nature of dice rolling/table combination, but they also allow for the players to add or remove elements as they wish. Along with this, one of the interesting mechanics in Pandemic is when the cards are drawn to place the infection cubes on the board they are discarded into their own pile, to be shuffled together separately and placed back on top of the draw pile when an outbreak occurs. This means that the players have a rough idea of where the next infections will appear and can plan for it. Taking this idea for our air attack game, each card will represent a particular AA gun and/or location on the board, when the AA gun is destroyed by the players, its card is discarded into a separate pile. If a particular event occurs, such as when a target building is destroyed, the discard pile is shuffled and placed back on top of the enemy draw pile. Drawing new cards will mean that the already existing defences are increased with another AA gun, or one that has been destroyed being replaced (this could mean new crew take over, recover from the attack or a new weapon is moved into position). What this does is reduce the randomness of placing new defences and has a slightly intuitive sense of placing them in locations that are already deemed to be defensible by the enemy. 

It takes a little pre-game planning in drawing up a rough map of the board, or even splitting it into 'sectors' and marking these on the map. To make it more random, create two decks of cards, one for the actual defence weapons (light AA, Heavy AA, infantry unit, mobile AA, etc) and the other for the location on the board, both to be drawn to determine the weapon and the location. If you split the board into 6" squares, a 6ft by 4 ft board would require a maximum of 96 cards (or whatever fits your board size). This option makes creating a location deck even easier as it can be used no matter what terrain you decide on using for your game. Again, with a card deck, you can remove particular elements from the deck to make a more 'realistic' defence network, for example, if you have a large river on the board you are not likely to have an 88mm gun emplaced there, so simply remove the locations from the deck to ensure that any weird locations are not drawn. 

Typical 6 x 4 foot table gridded into 6" squares

Again, how you play the game and when you draw the defence cards is entirely up to you, but I would probably draw a defence and location card each time a certain situation is triggered, such as the aircraft reaching a certain point on the table, a certain building is destroyed, by rolling a certain score on a dice, or even every other turn. The latter is a good choice as it means that the longer the aircraft remain on the board attacking, the heavier the defence becomes, making it increasingly harder to complete the mission without being shot down. The players have to get in quick, do as much damage as possible and get out again. And whilst they are circling the table, do the players use their limited weapons to whack-a-mole the air defences or go for the juicy railway targets? 

This is one simple idea of making a tabletop wargame cooperative, and the ideas here can easily be transported to any period or location. Replace the Typhoons with a a couple of battalions of British line infantry and/or cavalry and swap the German AA defences for French infantry, artillery and cavalry and you have the makings of a cooperative game set in the Napoleonic Wars. If you really need to keep the competitive nature in the game, let the individual players score their own points for destroying enemy units/targets and see who scores the highest at the end of the mission. Added to this, this game can be played very easily solo as the enemy is controlled by the draw of cards, which as I covered previous posts, and is an important issue at the moment with the UK Lockdown. 

I will return to this topic in future posts, so keep an eye for them!