Kriegspiel by phone

[Last Hussar]

Following our Platoon by Video game, I tried something a bit further up the food chain

2nd game was a Battalion Attack as part of Epsom – Capture that small town.

The table was scaled at 1cm/5m, with platoons on paper cut to the correct footprint. Brits had a generic OOB – 3 Companies of HQ, 3 Rifle Platoons, Heavy Weapon Platoon, with a 4th company in 3 squadrons of 4 carriers to act as recce. I laid some German paper out as individual sections/squads "MG", "Rifle", "AT".

Rather than terrain, I just put out felt and cardboard squares for the woods and town, a rise of 10-20 m was represented as terrain hills, and another by a folded cloth. I chalked on some field boundaries as cover, these did not appear on Sunjester's gridded map.

Rather than video, we did it by voice only, so my phone acting as the radio set. I set it up on a 'phone tripod' on the side board, and called out to it – any miscommunication could be blamed on 1944 radio tech!

I moved the platoons around based on orders given to Company Commanders, putting 'x's on as I felt hits were being taken (even if not casualties, I suppose, just general exhaustion)
I've never been in a military op HQ, but I have worked incident control rooms, and wargamers forget is things take time. Its very much 'Hurry up and wait' – Silver issues his commands and instructions, then you all sit wait for the results to be reported back, using the time to check you've got things right on the stuff you are responsible for. People wander off,("Where's John?" – "Making a brew" – "He never asked me" – "You were busy talking to Gold"), day to day tasks need to be reassigned ("Have we done the 1300 check?" – "No." – "Why not?" – "Because its Dave's job today, and he's here, and nobody realised it hasn't been done").

Even during the most passive IGOUGO, players are still involved, still looking at units – nothing has moved without them moving it, they know what is happening. In contrast, my majors (especially A company) had to resist the urge to say "I'm in the same effing place I was 5 minutes ago, when you last asked, and I told you we were under fire and were trying to stop them doing that."

There were a number of lieutenants saying "Tell the old man he can order all the advances he likes, my men are in no fit state to rush machine guns again."

On top of that things happen unexpectedly – If you are moving troops on the left of the table, the tin soldiers on the right are not going to be triggering ambushes- a couple of times he was trying to get the attention of one company, when another that I was moving suddenly passed up a contact report. I wish to apologise to the A coy CO, as I shot him just to see what Sunjester would do.

Thankfully as an experiment it worked, and fun was had by all (I hope).

Thinking of the next one being H&M – Set the camera up on the CiC point, and let him try and play a commercial set of rules under 19th C conditions!

[paulr]

 

Sounds frustrating and fascinating

[Steve J]

I agree with Paul's comment .

[sunjester]

It's been a lot of fun to play, if sometimes frustrating. I'm now working on payback a game to challenge LH.