Sono lieto di annunciare che, su richiesta dei giocatori italiani, abbiamo creato una versione italiana dello Schema Riassuntiva per la regola "Bloody Big BATTLES!" (BBB).
Bloody Big BATTLES Blog
Mainly devoted to the "Bloody Big BATTLES!" wargames rules (BBB): scenarios being developed or playtested; games played; figures and terrain; and also to any of my other (non-BBB) wargaming activities. BBB is published by SkirmishCampaigns, and is available from dealers such as: Brigade Games; On Military Matters; Caliver Books; North Star Figures; Tumbling Dice. For loads of good stuff related to BBB, check out the BBB group on groups.io: https://groups.io/g/bloodybigbattles
Thursday 26 September 2024
Disponibile la versione italiana dello Schema Riassuntiva BBB
Monday 16 September 2024
Colours 2024 - Borodino
The Colours wargames show in Newbury is probably my favourite show these days. For a start, it's one of the closest and easiest to get to and therefore the one I get to most regularly. But also it's a nice venue - Newbury Racecourse - with loads of parking, decent refreshments available, and enough space for games and traders and everyone who wants to see them.
We (Oxford Wargames Society) always lay on a participation game. Last year we did Isandlwana, which proved very popular. Everyone knows about it and wants to say "Zulus, sir - fahsands of 'em", and Bruce's gorgeous 28mm figures and terrain drew plenty of people to the table. This year we went to the opposite extreme, from a battle of a few thousand men represented in 28mm, to a titanic contest with a quarter of a million men on the field in God's own scale (6mm): Borodino. This is one of the scenarios from the newly published scenario book, "Napoleon's Bloody Big BATTLES!".
Borodino is just as famous as Isandlwana, of course, so again there was a lot of interest. Numerous people joined in to command a corps or three for an hour or two. Best result of the day was a Warhammer 40K player looking to get into historical gaming, who we tempted into playing on the Russian side mid-morning and who then fought through to the finish (well done, Bart!).
Interestingly, there were two Borodino games at Colours - at the other end of the hall, Dave Brown was running a General d'Armee game focused solely on action around the Raevski redoubt. Hopefully a few gamers appreciated seeing these complementary games offering different approaches to the same battle, one "zoomed-in" and the other "zoomed-out".
I was on my feet for seven hours, talking virtually non-stop to all the folks who stopped by our table. Thank you to everyone who came by to get their ears bent. It was great as always to catch up with a number of old friends (let's give a special namecheck to Steve Johnson, since he's already done his own report from Colours 2024). I was so busy chatting that I wasn't able to pay much attention to the actual game (let alone do much more than a swift lap of everyone else's beautiful tables). Apologies, therefore, to Alan Millicheap, who'd asked me to take lots and lots of photos of the battle's progress. I did manage a dozen snaps of it, which I offer below with commentary for those interested.
In summary: a great day at a great show, highly recommended, many thanks to the organisers, and see you all in Newbury same time next year!
Thursday 15 August 2024
Why play a whole big battle at all?
Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts ... this reflection was prompted by Jared Fishman interviewing me on his "20 Sided Gamified" podcast, which is up to an impressive 69 episodes already, including many extremely eminent guests from different areas of our hobby. After episode 68, Jared was running out of people to invite, so he kindly asked me along 😉, together with longtime BBB player and scenario designer Vincent Tsao, to enthuse about the "Bloody Big BATTLES!" ruleset. (This was my third time on air, following outings on Scott van Roekel's "Shot & Shield" and Sean Clark's "God's Own Scale".)
I told Jared and his listeners the reason we created BBB - namely, so that a few of us could fight entire 19th-century battles on a normal 6'x4' tabletop on a regular Monday evening club night at Oxford Wargames Society.
I subsequently realised there is a meta-question that merits answering. It's one I hinted at during the podcast but that really deserves fuller discussion. It's also a question implied a few months ago by a podcast I haven't been on but have often enjoyed listening to: Ken Reilly's "Yarkshire Gamer's Reet Big Wargames Podcast". In one of his "Brews in the Binyard" episodes, Ken was chatting with Sean and another gamer and the topic of my GOS interview with Sean came up. (Incestuous business, podcasts ...) Ken said something like, "As soon as Chris Pringle said it was all about fighting a whole battle on 6'x4' in an evening, he lost me!"
The meta-question in question is this: why should we want to fight such battles in their entirety in this way at all? Hence I am elevating it to full "Reflections on Wargaming" status with this post.
Let's start by asking ourselves what the aim behind any game might be. In a previous Reflections essay I discussed three dimensions wargames try to satisfy in varying degrees:
- exploring military history;
- providing entertaining game mechanics;
- and generating a competitive contest.
I submit that BBB does relatively well on all three counts. Long before BBB, the biggest game I ever played in was when the whole club deployed all our Napoleonic collections for a single battle. It was literally played on a basketball court. There were probably 20 players, with CinCs sending written orders by courier, and it took all weekend. What did I get out of it? As an easily-pleased teenage wargamer, I was happy to push around my little brigade and engage in inconsequential skirmishing for hours. But:
- I had no idea what the bigger picture was, the point of the battle, what crucial decisions were taken when or by who and how they worked out. Hence, it failed as an exploration of military history (at least, I didn't learn any from it);
- the game mechanics were fine, but I might as well have played a simple brigade-sized battle and had just as much fun in a fraction of the time. I'd call that inefficient;
- I had no idea who won and I'm not sure we actually finished it, so perhaps it wasn't great as a dramatic contest either.
Of course, not every 'big game' will be like that. With clear briefings, tight management, pauses to take a step back and appreciate the wider situation, and post-battle summings-up, players can get more of a sense of the big picture and how their small part contributes to it. Still, I maintain that the BBB format of playing a whole big battle in an evening has significant advantages, including:
- You get a 'big picture' appreciation of a historical battle that is impossible to obtain by fighting it in fractions or where each player is only involved with one small corner of a huge multi-player game;
- You get to make major, substantial game decisions such as shifting whole corps from one sector to another, rather than pushing around individual battalions and doing tiny tactical stuff. It has the right granularity for the size of the battle and lets you see the wood, not just the trees. (See my Reflection on getting the right granularity in games.)
- You get to finish the game! Even with a whole day, too many monster games finish up with "in the end, we ran out of time, so we called it ..." (see my Reflection on that phenomenon here.)
- Not only does the game finish, a BBB battle most often ends with an exciting climactic turn in which two or three objectives are in play, all three results are still possible (win-draw-lose) and it comes down to the last few rolls of the dice.
- As you only need a 6'x4' table, three or four other players at most (indeed, one would do), and three or four hours, it is far easier to organise and fit in than a grand weekend event. I'd rather have a BBB game every week than six mega-games a year.
- If you do have a whole weekend for gaming, you can fight several BBB battles in the time it takes for one mega-game and get to make a lot more significant decisions in the same time. (We once fought a whole 9-battle Franco-Prussian War campaign in a three-day weekend.)
- Huge games need huge armies. BBB forces are modest enough that it relatively easy to buy, build, transport and store multiple armies for multiple wars, which is good for varying the gaming diet.
I'm going to finish by reporting some recent comments by Jim Owczarski of the Armchair Dragoons that support what I've said above. Jim regularly runs online wargames through Tabletop Simulator, using many different rulesets for many different wars. For instance, last year I believe his group did a comparison exercise, fighting Quatre Bras eight times with different rules. The publication of "Napoleon's Bloody Big Battles!" has really enthused Jim and his merry grognards. He says that after a couple of games "the consensus of the Dragoons is that they want to play ALL the BBB Napoleonic scenarios". In particular, before playing Bautzen, he said "The battle of Bautzen was a strange, sprawling affair. Curious to see how BBB makes sense of it. Not too many miniatures rules have." After the game, his verdict: "it's the best treatment of Bautzen I've played on the tabletop". That seems a good point to rest my case.
===
Update 25 August 2024
Well, that was a popular post! It generated a lot of feedback on TMP, LAF and TWW. These 70+ replies caused me to reflect on my reflection. Let me add the result of that reflection here:
A big thank you to everyone who responded. I appreciate all your comments (including the critical and dismissive ones – I care about your opinions too). Judging by the quantity and quality of replies, it was evidently a worthwhile question.
As far as the charge of shameless self-promotion/advertising is concerned: guilty as charged, sorry – can I make a plea in mitigation? It genuinely wasn't my original prime intention, but I struggled a bit to structure the essay, was under time pressure, then saw Jim Owczarski's remarks, got over-excited and lapsed into stream-of-consciousness anecdotes and enthusing. There is a better essay to be written on this question that actually answers it properly, perhaps enumerating types of battle and game, listing what features each provides to players, addressing limitations and practicalities …
Nevertheless, I feel my decision to just publish and be damned is partially vindicated by the wealth of ideas in all your great comments. I hoped and expected that the resulting discussion would be better than what I'd bashed out in haste, and you didn't let me down. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't reply in great detail to the multitude of points in 50+ posts. I have just a few remarks to make now:
First: I should have made a clear distinction between big battle and big game – these are not necessarily the same thing! Small games of big battles are possible, as are big games of small battles, etc.
Second: I'll readily acknowledge BBB's limitations (e.g., the lack of fog of war, albeit the activation mechanism introduces enough uncertainty to compensate for that to some degree). Other ways of fighting big battles are possible and other rules are available. All have their merits and which is the right tool for the job depends on the job and the craftsman.
Third and finally: absolutely no disparagement of anybody else's fun was intended. Tournament games, skirmishes, monster marathons on basketball courts – it's all good and all part of our rich hobby. I ain't telling anyone else how to play toy soldiers. Have fun your way! Happy gaming!
Monday 24 June 2024
Turning flanks at Fraustadt (GNW, 1706)
I have had my second taste of the Great Northern War (regular readers will remember the first was at Kliszów) and a very characterful and indeed illuminating game it was: Fraustadt (1706).
The background is that Russia has joined the war on the Saxon-Polish side. The allies are trying to concentrate their forces. A Swedish force under General Rehnskiöld intercepts Schulenburg's allied force near Fraustadt (now Wschowa in western Poland) before it can unite with other allied armies. Despite being outnumbered two to one and facing a line of chevaux de frise, the Swedes attack. Historically, Rehnskiöld's superior cavalry enabled him to accomplish a double envelopment and then crush the allied line from three directions.
Our Swedish opponents, Matt and Crispin, were less ambitious. They went for a mirror image of the 'Swedish Leuthen' plan that worked so well in our Kliszów game. The eight annotated pics below tell the story, followed by some reflections.
Reflections:
The attack is king! (See my earlier post on why defence is not king.) In this period of linear warfare, being able to choose the point of attack is a valuable advantage, as it is so difficult for the defender to respond by maneuver, and weapon ranges are short. Even though the Swedish plan was obvious from the start, it took forever for Dave's troops to get across from our right wing to help our left.
Options, options ... Halfway through the game I commented that I didn't see what else we allies could have done: we had to defend both villages to have a chance of victory; we had a central reserve and it wasn't enough. However, on reflection, we could have made the garrisons smaller and the central reserve stronger. Perhaps our right wing cavalry could have raced directly across behind our lines, rather than trying to fight its way through the enemy's pinning force. Our guns could have deployed differently too. We can always do better!
Victory conditions - more objectives needed? There were four objectives (two villages plus the LOC roads behind them). Both sides needed two for a draw or three to win. I think making the big pond in the middle a fifth objective and upping the Swedish victory target could be good. That would represent breaching the allied centre.
Linear warfare can be fun. I routinely mount my hobby horse with a freshly ground axe to condemn pre-Napoleonic warfare as limited and dull in terms of its gaming potential. I might cynically say that last pic looked just like every ancients or renaissance tournament game ever played at OWS: the battleline wheels clockwise or it wheels anti-clockwise and that's about it ... but actually it was thoroughly absorbing and there were enough interesting decisions to make. When and where to counterattack? How to reform our line after each Swedish assault? How to insure against Swedish breakthroughs? OK, I admit it - I had fun.
Tuesday 18 June 2024
NBBB is published!
What better day than the anniversary of Waterloo to announce the publication of the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated "Napoleon's Bloody Big Battles!" scenario book to accompany the "Bloody Big BATTLES!" ruleset!
"Napoleon's Bloody Big Battles!" is written by Dr Mark Smith (who also wrote the "Bloody Big Battles in INDIA!" scenario book). The 16 scenarios in NBBB cover the biggest battles where Napoleon commanded in person after becoming Emperor:
Austerlitz
Jena/Auerstedt
Eylau
Friedland
The War of the Fifth Coalition (1809) – 3-scenario mini-campaign
Eckmühl
Aspern-Essling
Wagram
Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (1812) – 2-scenario mini-campaign
Borodino
Berezina
The War of the Sixth Coalition (1813) – 5-scenario mini-campaign
Lützen
Bautzen
Dresden
Leipzig
Hanau
The Final Battles (1814 & 1815) – 2 stand-alone scenarios
La Rothière
Waterloo
NBBB is printed and shipments are en route to BBB's usual loyal retailers right now. I should like to take this opportunity to thank them for their support - between them all, they have bought out the whole first printrun already! I'm sure their confidence will be rewarded.
Tuesday 4 June 2024
Defence is not king! Lule Burgas (1912)
A friend of mine writes school textbooks. A few years ago he did one in war and society for the UK history curriculum. I reviewed the chapter on 1750-1914 for him. I thought I was doing him a favour but in fact I caused him a problem. I found two bones of contention in it.
One was the claim that war did not change significantly between 1750 and 1850. Napoleon and Clausewitz might disagree with that.
The other debatable claim was this (I paraphrase): 'the foolish WW1 generals had not learned the lesson of the previous 50 years that, because modern weapons had become so lethal, the defence was king'. I pointed out that (a) the attacker gets to shoot too and (b) the lesson from virtually every war of the previous 50 years was that the attacker wins. The Crimea; Italy in 1859; Denmark in 1864; the ACW; the Austro-Prussian War; the Franco-Prussian War; the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan Wars, with the latter two being proto-WW1 warfare with WW1 weapons: the attacker wins, the attacker wins, the attacker wins. The difficulty for Paul was that the debatable claim was not his, but he was required to make it because it was actually in the curriculum ...
Which brings us to this week's wargame: Lule Burgas (1912), the fourth in our ongoing campaign from the "Bloody Big Balkan Battles!" scenario book. This was the largest European battle between 1870 and 1914. The attacker won.
The historical situation was that, just four days earlier, the Bulgarians had defeated the Ottomans at Kirkkilise. The battered Ottoman army established a new defensive line at Lule Burgas, but its right flank was open. Ottoman reserves were rushed up to fill the gap and clashed with the Bulgarian 3rd Army, while the Bulgarian 1st Army took Lule Burgas. After a three-day battle, the Ottoman defense caved in and retreated to the fortified lines at Chataldja.
The scenario revolves around four objectives: Lule Burgas itself on the Turkish left; Karagac in the centre; Bunarhisar on the right; and Congara in the rear. Both sides need to hold two of these to draw or three to win. The five annotated photos that follow reveal how the game went.
Reflections:
Blenheim in the Balkans. The battle had a nice shape to it: initial fencing along the front, a turning movement on the Turkish left, then essentially a big fight on each flank that made the Turks thin out their centre and make it vulnerable to the victory blow. Kudos to Will for having the vision four turns earlier to get his Balkanska brigade into march column and race it across the battlefield to where it was needed.
Other plans are possible. As is usually the way, I can see other options for both sides. The Turks could deploy differently with more attention to their left flank and to fields of fire. The Bulgarians could try what seemed an obvious approach at first glance: weight their attack heavily to the left, avoiding most of the dug-in Turks and going for the three village objectives rather than the tougher town. Certainly worth replaying to see how it goes with different plans and different players.
Limiting LOS. I noted in the Kirkkilise report how that similarly large-scale scenario might benefit from some line of sight limit. The scenario special rule here did the job.
Quality tells! All the Bulgarians were rated Aggressive. Most of the Turks were Fragile. On Day 1, while they were mowing down advancing Bulgars, the Turks had the best of it. Once the Bulgarians developed their own firing lines and set up their artillery and started dishing some out, Turkish units evaporated rapidly. And, of course, the quality difference swung it in the final assault.
Nice terrain. Rob Owens's rivers had their second serious outing (their first having been at Kirkkilise). Definitely an improvement on the usual blue felt. Now to attend to the roads, and then the woods ...
What a good game! I embarked on this one with some trepidation. Assaulting against an entrenched enemy with equal numbers of troops and modern weapons? It didn't look too promising. But the space for manoeuvre on both flanks actually enabled a mobile game, and it was a bold dash in the centre that decided it at the end. The shift in fortunes and the epic climax meant the game really told a story.
Thank you to Nick, Will, Dave and John for being engaged and enthusiastic and tackling the challenge in good spirits, and to Konstantinos for a fine scenario.
Thursday 23 May 2024
An Unabashed Success! BBB Bash Day V
On 19 May 2024, some 25+ likeminded souls gathered in Daventry UK to share the love for big nineteenth-century battles. Yes! It was the fifth "Bloody Big Battles!" convention, "Bash Day V".
The first three were held at the home of the Oxford Wargames Society, Wolvercote village hall. Last year, Bash Day headed north for the first time to Leeds. (Report here.) This time, we found an accessible Midlands location in the excellent Battlefield Hobbies wargames store.
Because it is entirely about participation, Bash Day takes quite a lot of administrative effort to ensure we have the right number of games for the number of players expected, and then to assign players to the games they want to play. Mark J did a tremendous job of organising all this, liaising with the venue, keeping gamemasters and players informed at every stage, and adapting when (inevitably) one GM and a couple of players dropped out. In the end, it worked out virtually perfectly: all the games had a suitable number of players and everyone got their two games in (one in the morning, one in the afternoon).
The games were all 19th-century actions from a variety of conflicts:
Hanau (1813), from the forthcoming "Napoleon's Bloody Big BATTLES!" scenario book;
Mudki (1845), from the "Bloody Big Battles in INDIA!" scenario book;
The Alma and Balaclava (1854) (beautiful Crimean War games by Matt Bradley of "Pushing Tin" blog fame);
Brandy Station (1863), largest cavalry battle of the ACW;
Mars-la-Tour (1870), one of the biggest battles of the "imperial phase" of the Franco-Prussian War, a scenario from the BBB rulebook;
Champigny/Villiers (1870), when >50,000 men sortied from Paris during the "republican phase" of the Franco-Prussian War, complete with forts, railway guns and a river gunboat;
Isandlwana (1879), the Zulu War game in 28mm that was so popular at the Colours show so popular at the Colours show last year.
These games nicely illustrate how BBB can cope equally well with small actions of a few thousand, like Isandlwana, and with massive battles with 100,000+ men on the field, and can still resolve them in an afternoon. The scales on display varied as well, with 6mm, 10mm and 28mm forces in action. Lots of fine craftsmanship was on show: beautiful armies, gorgeous terrain, not to mention cleverly designed scenarios to create nail-biting finishes.
The players were a varied and high-calibre lot as well. I have sat across the wargame table from a few numpties in my time, but there were none such here. The clientele that BBB attracts seem universally to be nice smart folks who approach the game in a spirit of historical inquiry and good fellowship. Consequently we had a great crowd. Some were veterans of previous Bash Days; others were experienced BBB players attending for the first time; and then there were the totally new recruits who'd never even played BBB before. Some I had met before in person, others I knew 'virtually' from chatting on wargames forums. We doubled our previous record for female gamers attending (nice to see you, Sarah H and Sarah J!) and the teenage generation was present as well (well played, Will!). Special honourable mention goes to our US participant, Jeff, who arranged his UK holiday so that he could join us in Daventry. It was great to meet so many good people and kindred spirits. Half of us went for a post-battle curry - a precious tradition, as it is always nice to have a social as well as the dice-rolling.
Huge thanks to everyone who made this fantastic day possible: to Battlefield Hobbies for hosting; to the gamemasters for laying on such great games; to all the players, some of whom travelled a long way, for making the trek and for participating in such excellent spirit; and especially to Mark J for all his hard work to make it happen and running it so smoothly.
Before we'd even finished our curry, the guys were already talking about planning the next Bash Day. Date, venue and format to be confirmed, but rest assured it will happen. Bash On!