ConnectionsUK 2022

 

Spent a great day in Bristol yesterday attending ConnectionsUK 2022. This year, I expect due to COVID planning constraints, it was run as a one-day event alongside the DSET Defence Training and Simulation Conference, rather than the 2 day event at Kings back in 2019 (the last physical one). Also it was purely a games fair, there was no plenary game, lectures or workshops - but great fun all the same. Attendance was complete military, professional and academic wargames as far as I could make out.

There were around 20 games set up to play at various times. The bigger games were more talk throughs than play throughs, but some games were short enough that you could play to completion. There was no structure and you were just free to dip in and out of games as you chose.

So here are the games I played, and the ones I just looked at/talked to designers about.

Games Played

RCAT - Falklands

I've been wanting to play RCAT for a while - hoped we might get it as GFX on a project but failed. It seems to be the Armies "go to" operational level manual wargame. Bn level manoeuvre units, Bde-Div force. Although its using a detailed map the map is divided into zones, reflecting ~ a days movement. The combat system uses attack/defence type factors which are then summed, plus modifiers, and then ratios compared to the a force risk table (simplified copy in Successful Professional Wargames by Graham Longley-Brown - who happened to be running the game) with a CRT then giving for each ratio a spread of results based on a D10 roll. The CRT is sufficiently hidden that it doesn't become too much a game of min/maxing the counter ratios, and it was interesting that very few of the games on show used a ratio style CRT (good news as far as the hobby me is concerned). The game only used D10 and D100 on the basis it's a lot easier to present risks/outcomes as simple percentage chance to military people (agree again), even if they may not find the D10s as familiar as D6s.

We only played the initial air attack on San Carlos Water (only lost the Fearless), and then the attack on Goose Green (lost the whole para bn!), but enough to get a sense of the game. I must admit it was a lot better than I feared and I can see why its been so widely used. The system has been well validated in the Army, and the Falklands scenario has even been played by the commanders of the real battle.

I'd hope I can get my "operational" level rules to a similar level of playability and validity as the PhD evolves.

The Long Village

This was an "influence" game by Stone Paper Scissors, set in an English village not a million miles from Ambridge, which is a flashpoint between left and right wing extremists in some Uncivil War type Britain. Players play the different factions, each with their own aims, and with the UN trying to keep the piece. Each round an "issue" card is drawn and players work out whether to back or counter the issue, whilst also trying to meet their own goals. So its mostly discussion between the players with some basic voting and other actions. As factions become stronger their allowed actions increase, rising up through demos to sabotage, terrorism and insurrection. Nice system, very generic and you can see how you could use the engine for a whole host of different (and more serious) games. Some lovely 6mm UN models too!

Decisions and Disruptions

A very nice "Lego" game by Dr Ben Shreeve set around the issues of protecting a company from cyber attack. Each turn you have a budget to spend on kit, training and software, and then each turn you get told what happened and how much money it cost the company. The game plays over 4 rounds - I think we suffered about £120k of loss, about average I think. The game is very simple, but enough to get the basic idea across. The responses are fixed, so play the game twice with the same  choices and you get the same outcome. Version 2 is under development with far more options and far more interlinkages and random, so should be more "realistic" but probably not quite as accessible. The use of Lego just to show the network layout, and then the stuff you deploy, is insprired.

Shooting Daedelus 

Shooting Daedelus was an MA project from Kings by Ares Compagnoni and Evan d'Alessandro. It was a very different take on a CQB game as it represented BOTH the vertical and horizontal layout in one grid of cards. It was a bit like being in Inception at first but you soon got the hang of it. There were some nice touches in the combat model (damage meant losing cards, so restricting options, and then save rolls based on cards left once under 6). Really nice game. Interesting to compare it to Tango Down which has a slightly more developed combat system, but no vertical dimension. I wouldn't want to over complicate Shooting Daedelus (and I know Evan had to throw loads of ideas away), but a couple of steals from Tango Down (eg range and DM for shooting through doors etc) might round the game out nicely. Interesting both games seem to come down to a grenade slug-fest. Once you're up close you realise that grenades are the best way to go, but if you don't kill the other person they just throw some back, and so on. Something tells me real-world CQB isn't like that. I'm guessing grenade lethality in both games needs to be wound right up - but then it comes down to who's quickest on the draw. Will hopefully get another game in soon on our Discord group.

Games Seen

USMC Operational Wargaming System

A HUGE map of the Ukraine with about a 15km grid and Bn manoeuvre units. This is the USMC's new general purpose manual wargame and was used by them to examine the Russian invasion before it happened - see https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/the-wargame-before-the-war-russia-attacks-ukraine/.

The counters are VERY dense with information:

Units are rated D4-D10 (as in Ambush Alley games etc) and again its a Dice+modifiers game rather than ratio CRTs. Looks way complex though with "a day" to train a player, "days" to train umpires.

Would be fun to actually play it some time, but I think that RCAT is closer to what I'm after.

Air Strike

Maj Tom Moaut (aka all sorts of things) ran Air Strike. One team decided on aircraft and load outs, whilst another decided on air defence systems. The air players then had a quick visual recce to decide which target to go for, the defender could then move mobile systems and arrange the detail of their defense layout. Then the airplanes came in, tried to suppress air defence, beat off  the CAPs and finally release some ordnance and get it on target. Looked fun.

Strike! - Kestrel's Hover

A company force with Section/Squad manoeuvre units of a British assault on a remote airfield somewhere in Africa. Looked pretty conventional, no sign of a ratio CRT again and extensive use of decoy blinds (about 3 decoys per real blind!). Surprised that snipers weren't model as "not at that level" since my reading is that snipers have an effect out of all proportion to their numbers, and even if abstracted ought to be included at this scale in some way.

Space Control

A game based about space situation awareness and offensive action presented by Jim Wallman of Stone Paper Scissors. Two teams, red and blue, with charts representing the layers of ground HQs, ground segment, LEO, MEO/HEO and GEO. You spend your budget to launch stuff and to buy offensive/defensive/ISR kit, and then see what you can do to the other side and what they can do with you. Pity I just missed the start of a session as in principle (if not topic) was not dissimilar to a game I've been working on.

Integrity

A game developed by Outreach Group, 77 Bde as a training aid for anti-corruption and stability operations. You assign staff to G1-G9 desks and then draw incident cards to be dealt with. "Time" and "Resources" are your resources, and you can choose cautious and risky approaches to deal with them, and have to balance resource use with availability and progressing your various stabilisation projects. Again something that could easily be re-skinned.

Don't Fear The Reaper Drone

A really thoughtful game by Edward McEvoy from Kings. One player is Carrie Mathison a CIA analyst and the other a remote Drone pilot. The CIA player has targets to meet and kill and hang the consequences. The pilot has a family and morals. Who's going to crack first! An almost black game touch is that when a strike ends up hitting civilians the pilot has to draw a card from a thispersondoesnotexist.com deck to see who they just killed. Very thought provoking and in considering how to represent and play the civilian population and moral choices in urban conflict some useful food for thought.

Conclusion

A great day with a wonderful breadth of games considering that they were all serious military games. Great to meet up with my supervisor, one of my fellow PhD students and various professional  wargaming friends and colleagues. Hopefully by 2023 Bath Spa will hav as many games running at Connections 2023 as Kings students did this year!

Postccript: Official photos and report up at https://www.professionalwargaming.co.uk/2022.html

Virtual Reality Wargaming

Isn't it great when day job and hobby come together. I knew I was at the right place when one of the first slides someone put up (actually Steven Bowns from Wargames Research Group) was of the three editions of WRG's Modern Warfare rules, the same rules I cut my modern wargaming teeth on back in the 70s/80s, and the three of which still sit proudly on my bookshelf!

The event was the Defence Science and Technology Lab's show-and-tell on Defence Wargaming. We (my company Daden) were luck enough to get a demo and talking slot.

For the occasion I updated the Virtual Wargames Room (our 3D Virtual Tabletop - 3D VTT) we built in Trainingscapes a year or so ago. The new version was optimised for the Oculus Quest (which meant the hex board and model soldiers had to go).

SPI BAOR at grand scale

A 6x4 type hex table

Within the space we had:

• Three big floor maps for wargames, BAOR 1984 (an old SP game), Waterloo and the Modern War's Crisis in the Baltic. These have a real sense of scale, the BAOR map in particular looks like it's filling a whole sports hall and you just want to walk all over it!
• Example counters (done as cubes for ease of handling) for each game
• A more conventional "wargames table", in this case with a hex grid and some example troop blocks and terrain features, and even an example simple 3D sculpt tank and figure (think Airfix 1/32nd!)
• A dice for random number generation
• Some static information panels (one on Soviet tactics, the other a ruleset aide-memoire)
• A couple of dynamic information panels/web browsers to bring in rule or period related data or even live Google Docs so you can log (or read) activity and someone on the web can read/update it.

About a "28mm" figure - looks great when you kneel down in VR!

One of the whole aims was to keep it very simple. Nothing is automated, it works just the same way as though you got a physical wargame out on a real table (and we even had people knocking things off the table as in real life, and picking them up to keep the place tidy afterwards).

A visitor moving virtual pieces on a virtual wargames table!

That simplicity really worked and we got some great feedback about the whole concept. We also got some great feedback to our lightening talk, linked both to current projects we have with MOD and some of the peripheral (e.g. the BattlefieldAR system we are working up with Battlefields Trust) and hobby projects I am are working on.

The whole day gave a good insight into some of the companies working in the professional wargaming space (or with aspirations to work there), running the whole gamut from machine-learning AI based systems to good old paper and card wargames and PIP dice for unit activation. There was also a good presentation on the current MOD needs in this area, so hopefully we'll get the chance to progress some of the ideas we presented a bit further.

This is the second "professional wargaming" event I've been two in the last 2 months, and I'm missing a third at the end of the month. It's fascinating how there is a huge resurgence in wargaming in the military community (it was a dirty word when I was in), and I can't wait to see how the recreational and professional sides (continue to) interact.

I'm hoping to actually get the 3D VTT to a state when it can be used for a real game over the next few months. If you've got access to an Oculus Quest or Rift and might like to take part then let me know. We might also do a simple 3D session as well where anyone with a decent PC can play - again let me know if you're interested. I might even take it out to COW, or possibly one of the local shows.

ConnectionsUK 2019

Finally got to go to ConnectionsUK, the annual conference for professional wargamers (i.e. those supporting MOD, Government and other organisations). Over 20 countries were represented so a very international crowd. It was a very participative conference with very few sit-and-listen sessions, instead almost the whole time was spent playing various types of wargames (committee games and matrix games very common, but also SPI style).

I got to play a whole day megagame with ~ 15 a side on a "russian" attack on somewhere looking remarkably like Vilnius. This was played double-blind, so running my special force cell all I knew was what my troops on the ground (via umpires) and other HQs told me. Our opening heliborne operation against the main road bridge was a great success and we held it until relieved by ground forces. The weirdest moment though was as the Spetznatz commander briefing the real UK Secretary of State for Defence when he visited.

There was a session on game design where my group had 45 minutes to create the outline of a game on Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD), one of the real naval warfare buzzwords at the moment. Luckily we had some experts in the group and ended up with a good sounding card based game.

Having to miss Thursday my Wednesday afternoon was spent playing the opening scenario from GMT's Next War: Poland. We managed to get through all 3 moves, but it has a horrendous turn structure and the CRT seems overly complex with column shifts, ratio changes and die-modifiers - see next post!

So a great conference, very much along the lines of COW I expect, and can't way to get to it next year (although capacity wise they may have to go back to limiting attendance).

A couple of other games that caught my eye:

Waterloo! There was also an Ancients game, so not all Modern

Battle of Mosul

Cyberwargaming with minifigs!

Some good photos of the events and games on Twitter at https://twitter.com/hashtag/ConnectionsUK?src=hashtag_click