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Well my 6mm skirmishing was meant to be a stop gap until I went for 15mm or 10mm but I’m still too busy playing No End in Sight with 6mm and other projects to have done anything about it yet. So my basing is on plastic card, 1cm square with 1 figure per base and between 15 to 30 something figures in a game. It works for me but I would do a bit more to the bases if/when I do it again as they were only meant to be for a couple of solo games over a year ago!
Mike
Absolutely.
I used the term ‘Mesopotamian’ principally because you did,
and I needed a quick catch-all term. I am under no illusion that the military experience of Ur of 2,700BC was the same as that of Nineveh of 700BC.I avoided ‘Ancient’ gaming for years, principally because I had little real idea of what went on (and, various ‘expert’ speculation notwithstanding, I believed nobody else did either). Thought experiments suggested a lot of ‘Ancient’ battles were basically ‘wind em up and let em go’ and I didn’t see much tabletop ‘gaming’ interest in that. Other types of ‘ancient’ wargaming offered more interest, but I am not sure how much historical veracity they offered either. How much insight does a group of 20th century (as was when I tried this) middle class white western Europeans in a committee format or a role playing scenario, offer into the activities of 1st Century BC Gauls or 3rd Millennium BC Akkadians.
The further back in time you go the less certain we are of the important influences on how and when to give battle and what happened when different groups of armed men met. People have extrapolated back from modern military dicta and some have even used psychological and anthropological profiling to attempt an insight into the universal human condition of men in close combat.* Fascinating though the deliberations have been, I remain to be convinced that they offer much to improve the accurate gaming experience on a tabletop.
Is that a counsel of despair regarding ancient wargaming? Personally I suspect it is. Anything before the Early Medieval/Late Roman Empire period feels pretty much like an absolute straight game of toy soldiers with a paper scissor stone (possibly Lizard, Spock for aficionados) approach to battle. You can stretch the period back for some Roman battles where there is more written evidence but then there is only one side writing the propaganda.
In a period that encompasses Ur to Nineveh in terms of time and geography how do you successfully transpose the fighting qualities of different peoples, states and cultures to another time and place (Macedonian Alexandrian) and compare the two? There is so much in terms of societal expectation and organisation that we can only speculate about which influenced military affairs. How do we compare performance against different enemies?
There is a desire, probably born of the early days of ‘Ancient’ wargaming to allow imaginary battles between non-contemporaneous opponents. Many rules do this but what does that give us? A universal accurate rule set? Or an abstraction to the nth degree that provides a prettier version of chess that tells us nothing of the actual wars of either period?
Of course people may want simply a prettier version of chess. That is okay, but then the rules are not really open to criticism that they diminish Sumerian generals/phalangites. Such rules diminish all cultures by reducing their forces to interchangeable colourless ciphers.
Perhaps all wargames do this, but the longer the period purportedly represented the more likely they are to be guilty of it.
Guy
* Off the top of my head:
Hanson: ‘The Western Way of War’ and Grossman:’On Killing’.
What is wargaming?
It is making and playing games about warfare.
(You can apply the same ideas/rules to diplomatic conflict, business, sports and no doubt many other human interactions but if its a wargame it has to be about some facet of warfare).
That doesn’t necessarily mean the combat end, the sharp end. You can play wargames about logistics (and if you can be bothered it will tell you a lot about the historical wars you are interested in, probably more than games that concentrate of the armour thickness of a tank and the brochure penetration of a particular AP round). You can play games about the politics of warfare (and if you are playing post WWII games at least- probably all periods) without a political input to your activities you will almost certainly be in a fantasy game). You can play games about the design and cost of military millinery and tailoring and the effect on morale. You can play games that enter and explore the socio-economic make up of military castes without ever playing out the battles they were involved in except in the most abstract way and gain great insight and have a great deal of fun along the way.
But most people do think of wargaming as involving toy soldiers. Do these pieces of metal alloy or plastic really have totemic power? Symbolic power of representation of the thing that interests us? Or are they just tokens? They are no doubt all those things and none of those things for different people at different times. Does it matter? To some of them at some times no doubt. In an objective all seeing way? No of course not. They are arbitrary objects assigned a value for a temporary purpose. A lead guardsman is no more a guardsman than I am even should I put on a bearskin and stamp my feet.
Art? Not required. You can play wargames entirely in the mind, as Macunaima intimated with his phantom armies on the beach. I have commanded Divisions on the Western Front from a bunker under the stairs, a desperate air assault (and dramatic extraction) in Vietnam in a classroom in a college, and decided the bombing strategy for 1944 in a Further Education College, all without benefit of toy soldiers, let alone beautifully painted ones. If the painting and uniform becomes the main aim it probably ceases to be a wargame and becomes animated military modelling. Not a criticism, but certainly a distinction.
It becomes merely a game when it ceases to be about warfare (ontological? and you criticise ‘ludic’ as ‘academic’? Really!
) and becomes a vehicle for gameplay of itself devoid of relevance to a particular facet of warfare. When the interaction between the players is all and the relationship to war so tenuous as to be irrelevant. Chess. Wargame or not? Possibly but probably not. It began as being an abstraction of war but the game as a competition became everything. Winning the game as oppose to playing a game about warfare became the end of itself. Sure, we almost always play to ‘win’ a wargame but ‘winning’ may not mean we have to beat the other player. The situation may be such that ‘winning’ a battle is irrelevant to the game or impossible and to win is to do better than the original participants or to understand why the situation made people do what they did even though it means they, and you, lost.So wargaming? Simply a game about warfare. Lots ways of doing it, lots of ways of becoming merely a game.
