Orcs in the Webbe

I’ve always wanted to be a rock star. This despite neither being able to sing or play any recognised musical instrument.

I have had a fleeting pass at musical fame (on the Show of Hands single “Crazy Boy”), although not in a performing capacity. Still, I now find myself in a position comparable to that of a rock legend. 

I don’t mean the rock n’ roll, or the drugs, or even the rapt attention of teenage lovelies. I mean the returning to and reissuing of games from my past, my wargaming  discography if you will.  Those mighty artisans of song, when getting on a bit, review past works and issue a “digitally remastered” rendering of the same or, if they can still sing and play an instrument, do an “unplugged” acoustic version.  Under the watchful gaze of Wessex Games own Svengali, Steve Blease, many of my early works are coming back into print, or at least “digitally remastered” in colour and with better pictures as PDF’s available from Wargame’s Vault. My “Tusk” mammoth (and dinosaur) hunting set is already there, and variously other sets including Elan (a divisional-level WW1 game) are heading that way soon.

I am of course delighted that material I wrote almost two decades ago still has value, however I have somewhat mixed feelings about this process. Partly, I guess, this comes from an innate loathing as a player of “nth editionitus” amongst wargames rules. You know the story, you just get happy with a set of rules, have your armies built up and based to the arcane specifications of the author, and then the blighter issues another edition, making half your army useless and the other half “illegal”. Also I can’t escape the feeling that a quickly released next edition just covers up for the fact that the first edition hadn’t been playtested properly and the author was trying to make me pay twice for a product that should have worked first time.  Fortunately, neither situation is the case with my reissues, my games have been long out of print (very long in some cases) and nothing core has changed.  Where new material has been added it is in the form of more or different scenarios or minor optional rules chrome. Still as I look over these venerable offerings I nostalgically wonder why I wrote a particular rule the way I did, and would I solve the problem the same way now.

I’m not the only one engaging in the old rule set business. Phil Barker’s WRG Ancients 6th edition rules have just been reissued as part of John Curry’s “History of Wargaming Project” along with many other ancient sets (in both senses). There are some absolute gems here, and not just for so-called “old school” wargames. Remember all those sets that were ahead of their time? Well, now their time has come.

As I hinted at in my last Tale, I have been busy at work on new projects. The core of this new work centres on try to solve the problem of asymmetric (counter-insurgency) warfare on the table top. There are lots of issues to tackle, including hidden movement (never yet done well in a game); difference in force strength and/or technology; and different aims and objectives of the parties involved. My aim is to produce a toolkit set with all the basic core rules which I can then adapt out with period specific rules chrome, a bit like the Aeronef system and its adaptations to create Land Ironclads, Aquanef, and Astronef. Current applications for the counter-insurgency tool kit include an Afghanistan 1979-2010 set, Aliens (and Predators) vs colonial marines and colonists, and Apache wars (with a VSF twist).

I’m currently experimenting with using playing cards to set objectives. Dominoes also feature (a great under-exploited resource, the domino).  One big idea is the use of area movement (as featured in the Geheimkrieg rules). I’ve found that liberating the players from the tyranny of the measuring stick vastly speeds up the game and allows players more time to concentrate on the action and spectacle on the table rather than the minutiae of measuring. I’ve also come up with a novel approach to forces – players can bring along as much as they like – a platoon or a brigade, or anything in between. However the victory conditions automatically adjust to reflect the ratio of forces between the players. If you vastly outnumber the opposition you are going to have to wipe him out to win, if you are vastly outnumbered, giving the enemy a bloody nose will be enough. All these rules are being playtested right now and I will report on progress in the next Tankard Tales.

Matthew Hartley
July 2010