On the virtues of IGO-UGO

I got a ton of gaming in in January - not spread out as a game a week as usual, but packed into a four-day long weekend. At the foot of this post is just a brief report for the record. As well as providing good gaming, the weekend also prompted me to pontificate on the virtues of traditional 'IGO-UGO' rulesets.


By 'IGO-UGO' I mean games where basically all units on one side take their actions for a given phase, then all the units on the other side do so. A typical IGO-UGO sequence of play could be:

French units move
British units fire
French units check morale
French units resolve charges

British units move
French units fire
British units check morale
British units resolve charges

There are plenty of criticisms that can be made of this 'traditional' sequence. Real battles aren't like that; it's too predictable; it's not exciting enough; it doesn't capture the ebb and flow, the tempo, the shifts in initiative, etc. Consequently many rulesets now use more fluid, less mechanical turn sequences. These may be card-driven, or use clever bidding systems to see which units get to move first, or have variable points to allocate and ways to interrupt the enemy's actions.

Such non-traditional systems have many virtues. By forcing players to concentrate their efforts and attention where they matter most, they may produce more realistic battles with complete lulls on a less important sector. They can produce cinematic excitement as everyone follows the action. Unpredictability may keep players on their toes and encourage realistic behaviour - maintaining reserves, setting up units on overwatch. Bidding systems can generate a battle of wits and bluff that can be entertaining in its own right.

Unfortunately, on occasion all these virtues are outweighed by one major vice: in multi-player games, I don't get to spend enough time actually playing.

Life is short. I get much of my wargaming pleasure from making plans and implementing them through my tactical decisions on the tabletop. Watching other people implement theirs is also interesting, but I never go to the club just to watch. But that's what some of these systems make me do.

Look at it this way. Say there are six of us in a Napoleonics game; for the sake of argument, make it three French and three British. With an IGO-UGO ruleset that lets all three of us Brits move at once, I am getting to play 50% of the time; knock it down a bit to 40% because one of my fellow players will usually take a bit longer to do his moves. Then there's 50% of the time when all the French are moving, including my opponent on my particular sector of the table; knock that down to 40% as well, since he will usually finish before one of his comrades. Let's give an arbitrary half-value to time spent watching my direct opponent, and quarter-value to time spent sitting around watching less relevant action. I calculate that gives me my own 40%, +20% for my oppo's actions, plus just 5% for what everyone else is doing = 65% of the time I am engaged in the game.

Now let's translate that to some non-IGO-UGO system where just one player activates one unit at any one time. (I remember one grim evening of Saga - in itself a brilliantly innovative system and great for one-to-one games - but absolutely dire for a six-player game of Stamford Bridge.) With a sixth of the units, I get a sixth of the action: 17%. My oppo gets his sixth, which at half-value is worth 8% to me. The other two thirds of the time, at quarter value, is worth 17%. Total 17+8+17 = 42%.

We could argue about whether watching other players is more or less than quarter or half as interesting as pushing my own troops across the pitch. The exact numbers don't matter so much as the general point that when multiple players get to act simultaneously, I find it significantly more engaging, and feel I get better gaming value, than when we all have to watch the one person whose card just came up. I don't think I'm alone - during some of the games in our gamefest, there were guys spending more time on their phones than actually gaming.

I'll throw in another point in favour of the multiple simultaneous actions allowed by mass IGO-UGO: it can actually generate more realistic command dislocation. By that I mean, with a 'follow-the-action' game, where everyone is looking at everything that happens (provided they're not checking emails or playing Candy Crush), developing and maintaining a coherent and consistent centrally-directed plan is relatively easy. If everyone gets to act simultaneously, and people are more engaged and absorbed in the action on their own sectors, you can get more realistic results in the sense that real commanders likewise often focused on what was in front of them, to the detriment of the bigger picture.

Hence my personal preference for rulesets that allow simultaneous action. I know others feel differently. I have enjoyed many good games with 'cinematic' rulesets. However, I feel that four players is the limit for such games, and beyond that I don't get enough share of the action.


January gamefest

Because of cancellations and overruns we had to drop a couple of games from the schedule, unfortunately (Finnish Winter War air battles, and a Pacific War strategy game). Still we got these six in, plus movies (T34, and Panfilov's 28), plus much camaraderie and banter:

Cole's Charge, Carentan 1944 (Battlegroup WWII rules)
Another Carentan 1944 game - road to Baupte? (BG)
Battle of the Bulge 1944 (BG)
Spotsylvania ACW 1864 (BBB)
Jumonville Glen FIW 1754 (Muskets & Tomahawks)
Hannut 1940 (Breakthrough)

That's enough WWII skirmish gaming to last me all year! But I enjoyed the tactical challenges, especially the Bulge game trying to hold off overwhelming numbers of Yanks with a few Panzergrenadiers and Panthers handicapped by fog and lack of fuel. Always a pleasure to run the ACW BBB games, though sadly this time it was a daytime game rather than evening so there was less atmosphere of bourbon-fuelled revelry than normal. As George Washington, I let Jumonville off the hook somewhat as he himself got away, but most of his command didn't. Hannut was a really interesting fight that I'd never really studied. Good to see all that 1940 armour trundling around on the table, and I managed to give the Panzers a bloody nose. Hope to fight that one again some time.

Operation Bluecoat: The Wilderness in the bocage?

Had the privilege of spending the 75th anniversary D-Day week in Normandy, witnessing commemorations, celebrations, reenactments, and events of all kinds. A wonderfully memorable week.

[Sorry, no photo right now for technical reasons! I should add one in a week or so.]

Naturally we had to mark it with some suitably themed wargames. One highlight was joining the Guerriers du Marais for their exposition in the municipal gallery in Carentan. They had two display games: one a 28mm Bolt Action section of Omaha Beach (fine scratchbuilt bunkers by Pierre); the other a 10mm representation of the whole of the battle for Carentan, using a WWII adaptation of BBB.

The buildings for the latter were real works of art, having been handcrafted by Colin based on actual Carentan buildings, using photos from 1944. The game was good value too. The poor German players really felt pummelled by the US artillery, airpower and naval gunfire support. At the end their paras were still hanging on grimly, but 17th SS had taken a battering and the Ostbataillons had lost interest long ago. The game felt right, and of course it was great to fight for Carentan in Carentan.

We fought a couple of other battles as well. But my favourite game of the week was the tail-end of Operation Bluecoat. Bluecoat seems to be a somewhat neglected operation in Normandy histories, perhaps because it is a kind of bridesmaid as it covers the US flank after the more glamorous and well-known US Operation Cobra. But whereas much of the Normandy fighting is simple frontal assault slog with limited options for the defender, the last part of Bluecoat offers scope for games of much more complex and interesting maneuver.

The focus of our game was the period in early August 1944 when two British divisions - 11th Armoured and Guards Armoured - push south from St.-Martin-des-Besaces toward Vire and the critical east-west highway through it that the Germans are using as an axis for their drive on Mortain. The result is that they collide at right angles with 9th SS Panzer Division 'Hohenstaufen' and some other fragments and remnants. Hence the attacking British forces are not much larger than the defending/counterattacking Germans; both sides have substantial mobile and armoured formations; and both sides need and want to maneuver.

To me the situation is strikingly similar to the ACW Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. (See here and here.) Invert the map east-west, and you have the British playing the part of the Union - with Guards Armoured showing some of the diffidence and caution of the passive and confused Union army - while 9SS is Bobby Lee's mobile, smaller but highly motivated and aggressively led army, striking at ninety degrees. Vire isn't quite Richmond, but near enough in providing an objective at the southern end of the pitch that the CSA/9SS have to stop the US/Brits from reaching; and to do so they have several options of blocking, smashing, or cutting rear lines of communication.

We fought this twice in Normandy, having fought it once already in UK. In game 1 (UK), the British easily raced south and cut the road at Vaudry and Viessoix but then couldn't make much progress along it to the east, and ended up winning by turning west and taking Vire (unhistorically, since in the actual campaign this could shifted from the British to the US sector during the operation). Game 2 was another British win as the Germans opted for a straight punch to the west from Estry, came within an ace of cutting British supply lines completely, but left the road to Vire and the highway too open. Game 3, benefiting from previous experience, the German players followed a more historical plan. KG Weiss's Tigers successfully dominated the main road toward Vire for the whole game, and 9SS managed to string out along the key Estry ridge and hold that against all efforts. There was an alarm late in the game when Guard Armoured briefly opened a gap on the eastern flank and looked like getting through behind 9SS; but reserves plugged the gap. By then all the British formations had run out of steam, so a German win evened up the score somewhat.

The game was fought with a playtest version of Frank Chadwick's forthcoming Breakthrough! rules.

Studying classic battles

I realised that in the space of a couple of weeks I have looked at four different classic historical battles in four different ways:
- visited Normandy
- wargamed Gettysburg
- watched the movie Waterloo
- read Clausewitz.

It made me reflect on how these four different ways of approaching history give us different insights and understanding of the events.

Bruce's gorgeous Israeli Centurions for 1973. Can you believe they are 3mm scale?

Not much to do with this blogpost but prettier than my usual illos.

Visiting a battlefield is surely the best way to truly appreciate the nature of the terrain: the close country created by the Normandy bocage, or conversely the open enfiladed killing ground that was Omaha beach. You can see why Panzer Lehr's counterattack north of St Lo came to grief in ambushes on narrow lanes, or why the rolling country southeast of Caen dictated that Operation Goodwood be a massed tank attack. (Visit Normandy in January and you have a good chance of finding the River Aure flooded, giving you a good picture of how the inundations looked in June 1944.) I've been to many battlefields and they are always educational. The battle for Normandy in 1944 crammed so much important action into such a small area, however many times I visit there will always be more to see and more to learn.

Then we wargamed Gettysburg (again). That's one of those classic battles that everyone has to fight at least once in their wargaming career. Of course, a battle fought over three days on a 5- or 6-mile front and involving over 150,000 men is too big for a lot of wargamers to ever get to fight more than a small part of it, because of their choice of rules and scale. With five players, we were able to do the whole of it on 6'x4' in under 3.5 hours using BBB. (Our Union side lost ... I think the scenario is skewed and neeeds tweaking! But the Rebs played better than we did anyway and deserved their victory, and it was still a good fun ebb-and-flow game where we felt in with a chance to the end.) An analogy that I freely acknowledge may be wasted on readers from non-cricketing nations is that to play a small segment of the battlefield is like just watching one day of a Test match, whereas to fight all the action of all three days is to enjoy the whole Test series, with its contests within contests, changing situations, shifting fortunes, and players having to think of consequences beyond the next ball or the next throw of the dice. (Perhaps to translate into baseball terms: one innings as against a whole World Series best-of-seven playoff?) So what lessons does such a game give? As I've said before, it is learning by doing, and gives a better sense of the shape of the battle and the reasons it took that shape than simply reading a book ever can. A historical scenario is usually more complex and subtle and interesting and challenging than anything I could invent; but as if that weren't sufficient reason for playing historical refights, the understanding gained by doing so surely is.

What of the movie, then? I was slightly disappointed by its perfunctory treatment of Quatre Bras, Ligny and Wavre, and would have liked a better exposition of the relationship among the four actions. But of course that's something that's better done by a book, whereas this was a movie and ultimately all about spectacle. And boy does it deliver on that front! We could quibble about some of the tactical detail: lines of infantry right in front of their guns, for instance, and I'm not sure I'd have wanted to be in the front rank of the multiple ranks of guardsmen rising out of the corn and firing over each other's heads. But the sheer number of extras (courtesy of the Soviet army, I think?) enabled De Laurentiis to give us a really good view of what mass formations look like, and of how quickly some of them could move, or indeed - when floundering through mud - how slowly. The charge of the Scots Greys was tremendous. Did watching the movie give me some special additional understanding of the battle of Waterloo? Hard to say, but I'm sure that next time I'm pushing some 2mm lumps of lead across a Napoleonic wargame table, I'll have some of De Laurentiis's images in mind. (And an aside, while on the subject of movies: earlier this year I watched all six hours of Abel Gance's 1927 classic, "Napoleon". This covers some of the same ground as my Clausewitz book, so it was great to see those scenes on screen, especially Napoleon's famous address to his army at the start of the campaign.)

And so finally to Clausewitz. The work of his that I've been reading most recently is about the 1799-1800 campaigns in Switzerland and Italy, including the battles of Zurich and the Trebbia. Maybe these don't quite qualify as must-game classics, though they are ever so interesting. However, Rivoli surely does, and he covered that in his history of the 1796 campaign which (as I hope regular readers of this blog will forgive me for mentioning again) will appear for the first time ever in English next month. I just love his incisive analysis of every misstep by the French and Austrian generals. The way he leads us through to strategic insights is exquisite, and the final chapter of the book is a kind of punchline that elevates our understanding of the whole business. Please buy it - I need to fund my lead addiction!

To summarise the point of this post, there are different ways of learning about the great battles of history, and each way can teach us different things. The obvious conclusion is that if we want the fullest possible understanding of these battles, we should use the full range of approaches.

But for the combination of insight, entertainment and camaraderie, of course, wargaming them on the tabletop is hard to beat. Roll on the next club night!