West Nattai Walls

Gaming

Over the years I have played many board games and war games, although very few computer-based games (I don't like the poor resolution, heat, and noise of a computer, plus I fear their addictive powers). This page contains some rules I have written, and partial designs I have worked on.

Family commitments prevent me from playing "serious" wargames or role-playing games these days, but I do play a lot of Euro-style board games with the family. A particular favourite of ours is Silverton, a self-published and largely ignored gem.

La Bataille

In the early 1990's I played a lot of the La Bataille series of Napoleonic war games published by Clash of Arms. We found the tactical complexity to be fascinating, but were frustrated by the ambiguity of the third edition rules. We were particularly confused by the cavalry charge rules, so one Saturday I decided to sit down and write up our house rules as a coherent body. Unfortunately it was not possible to describe cavalry charge without reference to fire, or formation, or units, so the small project grew into a complete rewrite of the rules. We were also playing the Civil War Brigade Series from The Gamers at the time, and I became convinced that a game (i.e. a model of reality) that portrayed French superiority in terms of being able to shoot straighter and march faster was not very accurate. Napoleon's victories were usually achieved by being able to order his armies faster, i.e. to turn within their decision cycle. Austerlitz is a classic example. So we (myself and Ed Bryan) grafted a derivative of the CWB orders rules onto my rewrite. Eventually it was published in Operations. I offered my rule set to Clash of Arms for free, but they did not take me up on the offer. They produced their fourth edition rules soon after which I believe includes its own command rules. However, Clash of Arms did grant me permission to publish these rules.

The colours in the command charts refer to see-through coloured dots that I fixed to the counters to make it easier to recognise formations.

The rules are provided as pdfs, paginated to A4.

The rules are written using Adobe Framemaker, which I find to be vastly superior to Microsoft Word because Framemaker can reliably number paragraphs. Word is seemingly unable to do in a document of any complexity.

I have not played the game in years, so I won't be able to reliably answer any questions :-(

Fleet Series from Victory Games

We also played a lot of the Fleet series games. We used the variant rules for "simultaneous" movement published in The General. There was one little thing which still bothered us, which was that air unit losses were expressed in absolute terms (ie one plane, or half a plane), irrespective of how many air units were involved in a combat. If two planes fought one, then the result was one shot down, the same result if twenty planes fought ten. So I wrote up some house rules for air combat that expressed the combat in terms of ratios. Here are those rules. This is not a very original idea, and it only matters when large groups of aircraft are involved (i.e. rarely).

Gallipoli

I have been working on a grand tactical game of Gallipoli for many years now. It would be nice to publish it, but I would have to quit paid work for many months to see that happen. Nowadays I view it is an enjoyable process, not as a goal.

I originally hoped that it would just be a slight modification on the Tactical Combat Series from The Gamers, but I quickly realised that the scale, time and unit granularity, and command system were completely different. So now all that the two systems have in common is that they are grand tactical.

Units are companies, because at that stage of the First World War neither side manoeuvred independently as platoons. Artillery was all direct fire, so we do not need indirect fire rules. Nor did mortars or tanks exist, so the fire rules can be much simpler than for a World War 2 tactical game. Therefore I am able to put much more complexity into the command rules. The difficulty of executing an order can be influenced by many factors, and I also have rules for getting lost (particularly at night) and therefore failing your orders, plus special rules for the covering force a The Landing.

I produced one map based on the 1920 British Army contour maps held by the Australian War Memorial. I have rules and counters, and am at the point of play testing the basic rules of fire and movement. I have draft rules for command, but they have not been tested at all. I took a version of the map to CanCon in 2005 and just laid it out for people to see, and also play tested an earlier version at the Paddington Bears.

And yes, I am aware that the June 2007 issue of Against The Odds will continue a Gallipoli game. That is a pity for me, but I only have myself to blame for my tardiness.

If you want to see it published then sign up for my P1 plan - I only need one pre-order, but the purchase price must cover paying off my mortgage :-).

Text and Images Copyright Geoffrey Phipps 2007-2009. Unauthorised copying or reuse prohibited.