Friday 26 April 2019

Wargaming one-sided wars

There was a recent discussion on TMP about why the Franco-Prussian War isn't more popular among wargamers. Various reasons were mooted. Lack of information, lack of rulesets, lack of  figure manufacturers? While FPW is less well served than other periods in these respects, there's still enough choice that they can't really be the main obstacle. Lack of attention from popular media - not enough FPW movies or novels to stimulate interest? Not enough British or American participation to appeal to Anglophone gamers? The large armies required are too daunting? Cavalry isn't as powerful and glamorous as in other periods?

"But I couldn't have won anyway!"
(Caravaggio: David with the head of Goliath)

I suppose each of these reasons plays its part, and the crucial ones will vary from gamer to gamer according to taste. My own theory is that what puts off a lot of potential players is simply the perception that it was a one-sided walkover: a short war in which the French got crushed and won hardly any significant battles.

This set me to pondering: how much (or little) appeal is there in wargaming one-sided wars?

The most popular wargaming periods by a mile are WWII and the Napoleonic Wars. Of course these encompass a large number of individual conflicts, but still, you could make the argument that part of the interest is that they were titanic struggles that could have gone the other way, in terms of both the overall result and many of their important battles and campaigns. Hence when we wargame these, we can feel that we could have changed history. In the survey I'm citing, from Wargames Illustrated, the one discrete conflict to register is the American Civil War, and the same argument could work there too. (Though that argument doesn't seem enough to make WWI nearly as popular.)

In the case of the Franco-Prussian War, arithmetic plus hindsight makes it much harder to believe that France could have avoided defeat. Thus all we can hope to achieve as the French player is to do less badly and lose less quickly and disastrously. There are plenty of players, myself included, for whom that is fine and we are happy to play on those terms; but there are also plenty from whom the cry will go up, "But I couldn't have won anyway!"

That cry is an actual verbatim quote (RIP, Phil), not from an FPW game, but from a game set in another one-sided conflict: the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Yet my impression - not founded on any survey statistics, only on casual observation of show games, manufacturers' output etc - is that gamers are keener to play 1939 Poles than 1870 Frenchmen, even though they were surely even more certainly doomed to defeat. Is it that a gallant Polish army giving Germans a bloody nose in a David-and-Goliath fight is more glamorous than the fumbling ineptitude of Napoleon III's Second Empire?

There must be many other examples of one-sided wars: the Russo-Finnish Winter War,  the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 (both of which have given me some very good games), various colonial conflicts such as the Anglo-Zanzibar War, and no doubt lots more that I'm unfamiliar with because they pre-date my preferred C19 and C20 periods. I'd be interested to know which one-sided wars readers of this blog either love for their glorious underdogs, or avoid for their futile inevitability.


12 comments:

  1. I have an undiminished love for the Austro Prussian War, even though the Austrians are inevitably doomed tactically, operationally and strategically. 1859 is similar.

    I find both more interesting than the FPW, possibly because the battles are just more asymmetrical.

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    1. Hi Martin,

      Yes, asymmetry definitely makes for more interesting games, regardless of period. Personally I think FPW has plenty of asymmetry, in terms of weaponry, doctrine, command competence (in the republican phase) troop quality, so I'm surprised it doesn't do it for you. I'm with you on 1866 and 1859 though. 1866 deserves more attention from me: I've fought Koniggratz and Langensalza a number of times but somewhat neglected the rest. As for 1859: Montebello is a battle I initially dismissed as too small, but which has become one of my favourites and the one I always recommend to new players. It seems to encapsulate the asymmetry of that war perfectly.

      Chris

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  2. Funnily enough Dave Fielder and I were talking about this a few days ago. With your BBB ruleset, you are gaming as the underdog, but within a historical framework that, if played as linked games, could possibly affect the outcome of the conflict. Often gamers might just want to play one battle, which stand alone isn't much fun, but linked together it is a different matter. Also I found that reading the history and then playing the battle/s, you get a much deeper appreciation of what happened and why.

    As you say, Poland '39, France '40, Russia '41 or even Germany '45 can be so one sided as to be rather dull. But link the games together, which I often do with BKC, and then it is a very different kettle of fish!

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    1. Good point, Steve. Yes, that doomed rearguard action acquires another dimension if you get to enjoy the benefit of it in the next game in a campaign. I've recently finished the last draft scenarios for my Hungary 1848-1849 set, just three left to playtest, then the plan is to fight through the whole of that campaign before publishing the book. That's a very even fight until the Tsar joins in, at which point the end becomes inevitable. But it falls in the category of gallant underdog so it's still fun to play.

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  3. Not that I've ever got as far as putting figures on the table, but the Winter War is a one-sided conflict that holds a fascination. The plucky underdog par excellence (it helps too that they were democrats versus a totalitarian state).

    Probably difficult to engineer a game which was balanced though as on paper if you had the usual disparity in numbers and equipment it should be a walkover for the Soviets.

    It's popularity is probably hampered by a releative lack of figures (at least for the Winter War as opposed to the later Continnuation War where you don't need figures in winter gear), by the specialist terrain/snow, and maybe the relative lack of English language reading matter.

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  4. I was fortunate that the Winter War was a particular interest of Nick Murray's (now Professor Murray, US Naval War College). He ran one memorable game of the battle of Raate Road: a huge column of Soviets grinding along a road through the snow, fighting their way through a succession of roadblocks and minefields, harried on the flanks by Finnish ski troops. We used the Tac:WWII rules which while a bit slow and fiddly by today's standards did at least do a good job of representing the Soviets' command and control failings and making it an even game.

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    1. Sounds good. Was it a game with figures or a 'board' style game with counters?

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    2. No, it was figures: 1/300 (6mm). The Russians were my Heroics & Ros tanks in their usual green livery and Irregular Miniatures infantry, some in greatcoats but others in summer uniforms. I forget what we used for the Finns - probably Germans, though I think there may have been some actual Finnish ski troops on the table too. Apart from the latter, none of the figures were in winter camo, but on a white sheet it looked suitably wintry and the traffic jam on the road was impressive.

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  5. That's David holding the head of Caravaggio, who was wanted for murder at the time.

    The Fencibles had a fine year playing most of the Franco-Prussian War battles with BBB. One of these days we'll get around to 1866.

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    1. Thanks for the note of cultural information!

      I commend 1866 to you. Langensalza as an appetizer; Koniggratz as the piece de resistance.

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  6. "The most popular wargaming periods by a mile are WWII and the Napoleonic Wars. "

    That depends on your scale - according to Andy at H&R if you play 1/300th then the two biggies are cold war and WW2

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    1. Fair comment, Bob, though I was citing data from a Wargames Illustrated survey - which I suppose may have some survey bias (perhaps the glossy mags attract more 28mm-lovers than fans of 6mm?).

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Comments welcome!