A futile fight against entropy or 'Every man should have a hobby'? Either way it is a blog on tabletop wargames, board games and megagames
The reason I have been so quiet on here recently is that I have got a dream job in the gaming industry, as a game designer with Warcradle Studios, and moved city.
A few months ago I got my cats, my games, and my books and moved to Nottingham. Trying to establish myself has been challenging at times but so far I’ve really enjoyed it.
Hope everyone is doing well.
Cheers,
Pete.
These last three months I have read nineteen books , painted forty nine 28mm and eighty two 20mm figures, Finished one 1/50th, and six 1/300th kits.
Also, stand by for a big personal news announcement.
Cheers,
Pete.
A quick post about some of the books I’ve recently picked up (and why).
The three yellow books are some of the CHECO reports on Vietnam that I found cheap on ebay. If anyone has any idea if they can be found on the internet as pdfs, please let me know.
The two Osprey Campaign series books were inspired by recent games I’ve been playing of OP14 with the Sheffield crew. The rule set handles 1914 Western and pretty much all the war on the Eastern Front really well. I was thinking, given that, it should be good to work for the Russo-Japanese War too. Also, a land campaign would tie in nicely to my naval collection.
The Partisan Warfare book is to get a quick grasp on the situation there before I dive into a Tim Jones book that I have, he is the leading historian, academic rather than pop history*, on the formation and deployment of the SAS. It was in one of his books that I first learnt that after the end of WW” the SAS went discreetly to Greece to fight in the civil war there rather than fully disbanding before reforming for the Malayan Emergency.
Boots on the Ground is a recent book by Leigh Neville- a great author on modern technology and modern war. I know you can get all the statistics and specifications from the internet, but Leigh has a way of putting it all into context that if find valuable.
The red book is from 1936 and details a (then) fictional German Invasion of Russia. I’ve always enjoyed ‘future war’ fiction, so when I heard about this book, I was pleased to be able to track down a volume at a reasonable price. It could inspire some interesting ‘what if?’ games going forward.
Cheers,
Pete.
* Not having a go at pop history books- I read a lot myself- but it is a different discipline.
Last weekend I made a rare trip down to London, fellow wargaming PhD student (at KCL) Evan D’Alessandro asked me to be part of the control team for his megagame, the game is designed to explore various scenarios relating to a Chinese (People’s Republic of China) invasion of Taiwan (Republic of China). I have helped in the playtesting bits of the systems Evan has developed at past Conference of Wargamers so I had a rough idea of what to expect. As I wasn’t privy to all of the game details, -such is the nature of a megagame- this is less a game analysis but rather some personal observations.
Due to my initial train being delayed and therefore missing a connection my journey down was a bit of a pain. It was good to see Nick a (Bath Spa University) PhD colleague too. A nice Thai meal and some drinks and a good chat was a great way to unwind after the journey down.
Evan’s game is rather comprehensive, and the Taiwanese and China teams were large: ten plus players each. The next biggest team was the USA, also played were Japan, Philippines, the UK, Australia, France and Canada. Each team had three components, a political team, a diplomatic team and then a military team. In the smaller teams each component could be just one player. This resulted in at least seventy-five players, I’m unsure of the exact number. In each turn there was time for the team to plan and strategize between themselves, then a negotiation phase in which the player could move around the game hall, with some restrictions, to negotiate with the other teams. This allowed the players to try and garner support, make deals, work out the details of treaties and try to coordinate action. After this was the action phase: the military players went to the operations room where three maps (ground action on Taiwan, air map, and a naval map) to give orders to the military control team to execute, the diplomatic players went to a separate room to negotiate in a UN council. Meanwhile, the political players stayed in the main room to make speeches and media statements on the main stage. Additionally, each team had intelligence, cyber, and information domain activities that they could leverage. Each team had a visible tracker that indicated the morale, expressed as will- to- fight, of different demographic sections of their nation. This provided some limitations to the actions that they could take. Given that each turn only ran for half an hour the pace was pretty frantic all day.
Evan’s PhD work looks at immersion in gaming and this run through of his game was to look at how the briefing materials and setting affect this. As an example of his attention to detail there were flags hung around each nation team’s table to give a sense of place. Each team was provided with official headed notepaper on which to issue official communiques, and each player’s briefing came in a smart card folder. A nice touch was a website that could be accessed through a QR code in the player’s handbook that acted as a newsfeed for the game that players could upload to. It proved handy to me to keep me up to date with other bits of the game. The game started in medias res with Chinese occupation of some of the outlying Taiwanese island and a blockade of the Taiwanese mainland euphemistically there for customs inspection. This set up gave all the players an initial problem to deal with.
As team control for Taiwan. I had the biggest sub- group that I ever had to control for. Was a bit of a challenge at the start to keep track of them all but they gelled together incredibly quickly. There was a diverse set of players in attendance for the game, alongside a much better gender balance that I am used to from previous games; the variety of backgrounds, and experiences of players was very evident. This was reflected in all of the teams.* Accordingly, the intra- team exchanges that I overheard quickly proved the social science studies that show that diversity of participants brings a diversity of thought which results in better outcomes. The team worked incredibly well together, presenting a united front against the Chinese threat.
The Taiwanese team quickly went on the offensive with the media trying to get their position across at the same time as building international support. Their attitude toward China was bellicose from the start. I did notice that a few of the press statements that they put out were effectively de facto independence statements and, I was surprised that the Chinese team didn’t pick up on this. After some delay and initial naval skirmishing that I do not know the full details of (given the size of the game it is hard to know exactly what is going on everywhere) the Chinese team launched an invasion of the main Taiwanese island. Pregame, Evan had said that there was a separate command bunker that the political leadership could retreat into in the event of a Chinese invasion. This would isolate them from the game to a degree but prevent any decapitation strikes against the government by the Chinese, either with SOF or missiles. Initially the political leadership stayed public and slightly vulnerable to show the population that everything is under control. Ultimately the fighting got so bad that game control made the decision to move them into the bunker. At this point I had to lead them into a windowless room a floor below the main hall where they had to conduct the rest of the game from. It certainly added an atmospheric degree of stress and isolation being in there.
It was at this point intra- team communications broke down to some extent. As the invasion continued the ground military players were consistently optimistic in their reports to the political leadership team of how the fighting was going. I was hearing from other control umpires how things were actually going and I was aware of the inaccurate messaging. Given that communication is one of the key features of the megagame experience it wasn’t my place to correct the situation as it is incumbent on the players to do that themselves. Evan as game control gave realistic inputs to the Taiwanese players but these were met with suspicion. So much so that they felt that game control was feeding them disinformation as they trusted their military players more. I have seen communications break down in previous megagames that I have played, but not to this extent. By this point the air force and navy had fought to the last and Chinese had air superiority over the island. One of the pol players at this point was taken aside by me and instructed to negotiate with other teams for somewhere that would host a government in exile. Furthermore, the other nations were trying to create a peace treaty with China over the heads of the Taiwanese and presented a treaty port deal as a fait accompli the political leadership rejected this.
The post game debrief made it clear that China out- played the rest of the teams. By never having to fight a coalition of all the other nations at once they were able to defeat them in detail. By the time a large force was bearing down on their forces in support of Taiwan, they had already got a secure lodgement on the island. Ultimately the difficulties with logistics, treaties, and legalities prevented a complete early united front of practical support against China. As Evan pointed out, wargames are indicative rather than predictive so no hard lesson should be drawn from this game. However, in terms of producing problems for the players to overcome, as well as tying it together in a plausible narrative, the game worked incredibly well.
All of the rules for the game are online on Evan’s site. I intend when I have some time to download them and have a play about with the air combat rules to see how to model the emerging new stealthy aircraft from China. I know that details on them are sketchy at the moment but it will be possible to make some educated guesses and project things forward.
I also have a personal/ academic interest in a follow- up insurgency game taking the end of this game as a starting point; I’m thinking here of something similar to GMT’s Next War Taiwan + Supplement 2. It gives me plenty to consider.
This run through of the game might have been the last time the game will be run. If that is the case I am glad I made the effort to go down. Sadly I couldn’t stay to chat after the game as I had to catch a train back north.
Cheers,
Pete.
*I’d be interested to know how Evan went about doing the casting for such a big game, were questionnaires sent out in advance?
These last few months I have read nineteen books (getting better there), painted fifty six 28mm and thirty one 20mm figures, Finished one 1/50th, one 1/72nd, and four 1/300th kits.
Cheers,
Pete.
One thing I’ve long been interested in is public engagement, academia can too often be stuck in the mythical ivory towers separate from pop culture arguing over minutia rather than furthering general public knowledge of their specialism. When it comes to gaming and bringing on the next generation of either gaming professionals or gaming- inclined academics engagement with the media that they engage with is important (despite any misgivings this cynical gen X-er may have). One of the most common routes into gaming is through Games Workshop’s monolithic empire. Indeed, some of my earliest games were with Rogue Trader back in 1989…. What lessons can be drawn by the players of these games, consciously or subconsciously, has always been of interest to me much in the same way that historical representation in TV and cinema is. Accordingly, when my friend Grant asked me to feature on his Warhammer themed You Tube channel to talk about real world parallels in Warhammer of course I was going to say yes. The video has gone live this evening- go over and have a watch of it: https://youtu.be/Nu56QyY5aME
This is a less formal approach I took when I spoke in the inaugural Warhammer Conference, which has also been archived on You Tube.
Cheers,
Pete.
Last night Chris and I created a drone team and ran through the first rotatsyia for our team using the Game of Drone book that I recently reviewed.
First up was generating the team which was achieved with a quick set of dice rolls. The key member of the team: the drone pilot themselves was a dreamer with 1 pilotage, 4 sixth sense and 2 Moxie- these can be spent at a rate of once per day to improve the chances in dice throws. The Navigator was fairly decent with a skill level of 5, Both the Sapper and Driver had the same skill level of 4 each. Not the best team that the random table could have thrown up but not the worst either. We then determined that we would be at the ‘Rolls- Royce’ bunker and generated an extra 10 support points to purchase equipment with.
For equipment we went for a Toyota Stout truck- the basic model- a drone detector, a drone jammer, an upgraded antenna and some high-quality food. For drones we purchased two Mav recce drones, a Matrixe, a bigger recce, drone and a Classic small bomber drone which has the ability to drop two bomblets per mission. This was then rounded off with nineteen FPV drones that are used in one way suicide attacks. This brought us in just under budget and well under the weight restriction for carrying things in in one go.
The rotatsyia starts with the vehicle infiltration- given our drone detector and drone jammer we got a decent bonus for this so arrived at the vehicle hide without incident. The advantage of being at the ‘Rolls Royce’ bunker is it is very close to the vehicle hide so we only had one risky roll to make for the foot infiltration stage. Again, this was concluded safely. Each game day starts with determining the weather- can affect rolls as visibility changes, getting the daily taskings- these are points of interest and potential targets that need to be recced that day, and finally what priority target we are given in the handover from the night time drone team. We had to recce 4 sites looking for mechanised targets, there was also an infantry team at one of them that needed to be taken out. The weather was clear, so it didn’t hinder us. We decided to start by using our Classic bomber to fly to the target and take out the infantry team. We passed the defensive Russian Electronic Warfare test, we were able to drop our bomblets, sadly both missed. The drone then safely made it back to base. We then sent out a Mav to recce the gully as part of our daily taskings. This was lost due to Russian EW. Our second Mav was then sent out and recced the gully finding no targets. It then flew to the soccer field to recce there but was lost to Russian EW. Feeling a bit unlucky we sent the Matrixe to recce the last areas, it found no targets at the settlement but was lost at the gully to the Russian EW. Now we had lost all of our recce drones in the first morning. We sent the Classic out and that successfully recced the soccer field finding no targets. Upon its return to base, we decided to launch a FPV suicide drone attack and the infantry target we had to take out. Although the navigator flying the Classic successfully got in position to guide in the FPV drone, the latter was lost to EW, as was the second one wee tried. At that point we decided to bring the Classic back to base and load it up as a bomber again to try a third time at the infantry group. This was successful and the infantry was taken out earning us 20 SPs. This took us to the end of day one of our rotatsyia, although we had to roll for changes in weather and random events throughout the day we suffered no ill effects.
Day two started with hi8gh winds that meant we couldn’t fly any drones in the first early morning period. We were spared any daily recce taskings as we had no recce drones left. We did get another group of infantry that was to be taken out. This was easily accomplished the with bomblets from the Classic; this earned us another 20 SPs and ended the day. Day three saw yet another infantry group appear- again bomblets from the Classic put paid to them. Similarly to day one, days two and three saw no negative effects from the random events.
Say four saw clear weather and an MTLB APC at the soccer field that needed to be taken out. A FPV suicide attack gave us the best chance of success so that is whet we launched. However, the Russian EW was too strong, and the Classic was lost before it could guide in the attack. This left us with no effective means of offensive action, so it was fortunate that the rotatsyia was ended on the evening of the fourth day. After a successful foot exfil and vehicle exfil, we arrived back at base with 60 SPs earned, these could be banked for victory point or spent. We desperately needed to build our stocks back up. We decided to upgrade the antenna again, get some high-quality food, then buy two Classic bombers, one Martixe recce drone and three Mav small recce drones. The drone team got five days rest and recreation during which we received a bit of media attention, and our driver was interviewed on TV. The next rotatsyia will start of June 10th. Chris and I will return to this campaign as soon as we get a chance.
As can clearly be seen the Game of Drones book really does produce an excellent narrative that seems plausible and thematic from what is essentially a solo RPG set of mechanics. Our drone team was lucky that we didn’t attract any negative attention from the Russians during our time in the bunker, out investments in drone detectors and jammers, as well as the antenna helped here. However, we were unlucky to lose so many drones to Russian EW, a cursory scan of defence news websites shows that this is also realistic. (There did not seem to be anything in the rules however on what did do if you lack offensive capability: does the rotatsyia end early?) The EW roll is an opposed 2D6 roll, the distance from the bunker is the biggest factor that helps the Russians, the further that the target is behind the front line in the Russian rear the stronger the EW is, also the inherent protection of the site factors into this too. As chance is lumpy, we were consistently unlucky here – losing four drones to EW, but we were lucky elsewhere suffering no negative attention. We never found anything during our recces either which would have generated extra targets for our team.
Game of Drones, now that I have had the chance to play it is very much recommended. As an game experience it feels very authentic, as a game to understand how tactical drone warfare is being prosecuted in Ukraine at the moment it is invaluable. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to take the drone team out on their next rotatsyia soon.
Cheers,
Pete.
I hardly posted in 2024, and barely looked at anyone else’s work too, the latter I feel worse about. The long story short is health related… without oversharing my health nosedived, mostly physical which had a knock-on effect on my mental health. This meant I wasn’t able to work on my PhD as much as I wanted and then guilty spending my time on anything else with the end result that nothing much of anything got done. Hardly an ideal situation. Struggling with my 3d printer also took up more of my mental effort than I wanted. Still now I’m on a fistful more of meds that seems trop be working things are looking up.
I’ve been painting as much as ever- it is always a pleasant escape, but I want to move away from just posting what ever I paint (unless it is noteworthy in some way) as that feels too easy. I want to blog more game related content instead. That will be my idea for the coming year.
I will detail my return to GM’ing Cyberpunk after a break of some 30 years fairly soon as a starting point. Also, I want to show off the games I’ve been writing as part of my uni work – hopefully there will be some interest there. They have been tested at various academic conferences and have seemed to be well received.
I also spoke at the first academic conference looking at Warhammer. The talks are all on you tube; see my academic page for details. That also led me to collecting a new 40k army- genestealer cults.
See you in the blogosphere soon.
Cheers,
Pete.
In Oct/Nov/Dec I painted 55 28mm, 50 20mm, 18 15mm, and 16 6mm figures; I completed 15 1/72nd kits as well as 45 1/300th ones; I also read 29 books.
For the year of 2024 in total I have painted 15528mm figures, 176 20mm, 18 15mm, figures, and 61 6mm figures. I have finished 2 1/56th scale kits, 20 1/72nd scale kits, 1 1/200th scale kit, and 134 1/300th ones. I have also read 78 books. Not a bad year again but still nothing compared to pre- covid levels, I painted consistently during the year and managed to rally my reading right at the end of the year.
Cheers,
Pete.
Game of Drones by Joe “BigMac” McDonald and Thomas Van Hare 2024. Initial thoughts after first read through. Pete Sizer. 2024.
In Game of Drones the player takes the role the commander of a four person Ukrainian drone team and has to lead them through a series of rotatsiyta (rotations) making up a tour of duty. In essence the game uses solo roleplay style mechanics to play against the game, as expressed by a succession of tables, to try and complete daily tactical missions with your drone team. Whilst the game mechanics are similar to the roll-and-write genre of games use is made of various maps and counters to handle the tactical elements of the game: movement and combat. The game designers strongly encourage the player to keep a narrative diary of the events that the game generates, it is clear that the mechanisms would make this very easy and would add a lot of verisimilitude.
One of the game designers is currently an active drone operator in the Ukrainian Marine Corps, this personal experience, combined with the unclassified data that has gone into the game give it a very authoritative feel. The concentration of information in the book is very dense, collating information that I was aware of but hadn’t seen in one place before. Whilst some design notes with explicit references would be nice it is fully understandable, given that it is a game covering an ongoing conflict, why they haven’t been included.
The game book starts with the rules going through them step by step. As a personal note I prefer to see the tables that the rules refer to being included on the same page that they are introduced rather that in a separate section. Admittedly this would push the page count higher due to duplication and concomitantly the price. In a manner familiar to all RPG gamers the individual characteristics of the team are generated by dice rolls and extra points calculated that can be used during game play to provide bonuses, rerolls, etc. I think an alternative way of creating a team by allocating skills to each team member by spending points from a central pool would be a good addition here. It would give the player more agency in creating their team and possibly even favouring a distinct playstyle. At the time of writing, it is not clear which method would be more indicative of actual practice. After the team is created, points are spent buying equipment for the first deployment. A vehicle is a necessity as are a selection of drones, the difficult decision comes on what additional equipment to purchase, on the first playthrough the relative value of each is harder to ascertain. The additional equipment provides bonuses to different parts of the game mechanics, visual camo, electronic warfare (EW) kit, better food etc. A key component of the game is the team’s morale, this can go up and down over the course of the game, it also acts as a hard limit mechanically to certain attributes in the game.
The game starts with the team being allocated to a section of the front. After parking the vehicle the team must make the journey to the frontline bunker where they will spend the next 4-7 game days. During the different steps of this journey, hazards must be diced for using the Mistakes were made table (this table being the one used for most hazard checks). After reaching the bunker targets and missions are generated and must be attempted. The drones can be used to conduct a series of different missions: reconnaissance, bombing, FPV strikes and calling in artillery. Ensuring you have the right mix of drones purchased prior to the game is essential as different generated targets, from tanks and afvs to logistics and command nodes will need to be attacked in different ways with different drones. The drone missions are conducted by flying the drone to the targets, avoiding Russian EW (an opposed dice roll) and then carrying out the mission. Whilst a D20 roll on a table is used to determine the success of a strike it is the careful use of available assets, both equipment and character bonuses that will decide whether its is successful or not, especially against high value protected targets such as tanks and enemy HQs. Successful persecution of targets gains the player support points, these may be spent between rotatsyia, however the total numbers of unspent point s that the player has accrued is used to determine victory. A number of missions may be executed during a game day. If things go wrong, such as team member injuries, a rotatsyia may come to a premature end, otherwise the team stays out for a variable number of days. After some downtime, where certain ability pools and the teams morale are reset, the player’s team will return to the frontline for another rotation, this game play repeats until the end of a two month tour of duty, at which point the level of victory is ascertained. The game takes place in June and July 2024 around the area of Krasnhorivka.
The rulebook concludes with an informative essay detailing drone operations, contrasting their initial active combat use in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to their current usage in the positional/ attrition stage of the current conflict in Ukraine covering both tactical employment and the lived experience of the drone teams. Compared to the drone pilots of the GWOT era who were geographically remote to their drones and area of operations the Ukrainian operators are right on the frontline of the war.
Game of Drones reads well. As much as one can recommend a game without playing it this game is definitely recommended. A playable version will be constructed as soon as practical. Whilst not a true game in the sense of the player fighting against an active opponent it looks like it will provide a very educational, vicarious experience of running a drone team in the Ukrainian War. Even without playing the game I feel that my knowledge of drone operations is much improved, provide the behind the scenes context to the drone attack videos that have proliferated on social media.
For my regular readerds: I’ve put the above here for uni related reasons. I’ll do a post after Christams itself on the future of this long neglected blog.
I’d like to take this oppertunity to wish everyonme a Merry Christmas.
Cheers,
Pete.
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