Throughout the past year of pandemic isolation and political turmoil, I have watched what friends are doing to occupy their time. While some are throwing themselves into their careers or avocations (making movies, writing books, setting up emergency communication networks, crocheting king-sized blankets from thread-weight yarn, working for social justice, or just plain working), I have been wargaming.
Most people will view this as merely one step up from devouring an industrial-sized bag of Funyuns while binge-watching entire seasons of Californication days on end, which was my other option. Given my choice was between that, going full-frontal prepper by breaking ground on an improvised fallout shelter on the porch (fully stocked with Funyuns as emergency rations and trade goods), and curling up into a fetal fugue state, I think I made the right choice. Writing was largely off the table for me. As I’ve said before, I need to feel marginally safe to write fiction. I was lucky to post the pieces I did last year.
Normally, reading would be my go-to form of escapism. Except for a two-month dead zone over the summer, I leaned heavily on that. I lost count of the number of books I read last year. Somewhere south of forty, I think. Fewer than my wife, which is unusual. The problem with reading during stressful times for me is that when a book is difficult or slow, as several of the ones I picked were, my mind drifts back to the three-card monte game above.
Some people will ask why wargames, not video games, boardgames or roleplaying games. Well, roleplaying games generally require more than two people to create a satisfying experience. They also consume a great deal of my bandwidth to setup. While I have run successful campaigns during stressful times, including while working mandatory overtime, in general the issue with this kind of creativity is similar to writing: it requires a minimum psychological standard for being marked as safe.
Similarly, the sweet-spot for players in most boardgames I find interesting is between three and five. Neither boardgames nor roleplaying games are conducive to being run over Zoom or Facetime, not that I detected much interest in the Kitten*Con crowd anyway. And boardgame runs are generally short, a couple hours to a day at best. I was looking for something more immersive.
Video games can fall closer to what I’m looking for but come with a host of other limitations. Most of the games I’ve enjoyed run on hardware and/or operating system that are several generations old. In publication terms, they would be considered out-of-print. The current generation of games has shifted in a direction I don’t find as appealing. The kind I do enjoy aren’t being developed for the platforms I’m on. While I have had fun with a couple straight-up video games last year, many center around physical reflex challenges that have never been my forte. For me, those are likely to induce more frustration than they relieve. In competitive games, the native AI often suffers in single player mode. Playing online against strangers would likely drive me back to the bunker option above. Plus, even in the best of times there is still the problem of scheduling, which is a constant challenge with anything involving two or more adults. And there is nothing like playing against a live opponent as they constantly surprise you.
All of which led me back to wargames.
First, let me clear up a few misconceptions about wargaming. The largest being that it is an exclusively testosterone-laden hobby geared to drooling, sloped foreheaded killers and JROTC military wannabes. Well, let’s take that one piece at a time.
While it is true that wargaming as we know it was born out of the Prussian military in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars through a game called Kriegspiel (literally wargame), over its two-century evolution, the hobby has attracted many non-military people into its ranks. Perhaps the best known is H. G. Wells, a devout and lifelong pacifist, who developed a set of miniatures wargame rules called Little Wars (“a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books”). As well, during the run-up to WWII, a series of sponsored naval wargames was run on the ballroom floor of an elite Manhattan hotel which was the place to be seen for many socialites who would never see the inside of a uniform, including many women. By the 1960s, the hobby had evolved into a favorite of college students, many of whom had no real desire to find themselves putting its principles into practice in the jungles of Vietnam.
Circling back to Wells’ perhaps somewhat problematic description of his own game above, let’s address the gender issue in the common perception of wargaming. Much like roleplaying games or the genre of science fiction, wargaming has never been an exclusively male avocation. Reviewing the subscription lists to wargaming magazines, as well as letters to the editors, reveals an approximately 10% female demographic of players and readers going back decades. The current evidence points to perhaps as high as 20%. That can go to nearly 50% if you examine the class composition of one of the very few Master’s levels wargame simulations design courses offered in a university (for the likes of people wanting to work for the RAND corporation).
Male wargamers often complain about the dearth of female players, but at the same time, they do not always create a welcoming environment for either female or minority opponents (again, much like roleplaying, science fiction or even STEM). The reality is there are female wargamers and female wargame designers. Hell, there are even award-winning transgender designers. Perhaps the best how-to-play video I’ve ever watched was created by a female former-servicemember for a C3i magazine game called Case Blue. Of course, I can no longer find that video on YouTube. Perhaps she grew weary of the marriage proposals sprinkled heavily through the comments. Which is a better alternative than the Gamergate harassment she could have suffered, a very real, and sometimes existential threat to women in the gaming community. The level of even casual sexism in male instructional and review videos is supremely depressing.
But the reality is that the wargaming community, like all hobby communities, is a continuum of many different types of people, from physical characteristics to socioeconomic backgrounds. Fitting all players into a single mold is like pounding off the corners of square pegs just to fit in someone’s desired round holes. It’s more than unproductive. Women wargame. Minorities wargame. LBGTQ people wargame. Pacifists and liberals wargame. Get used to it, or get out.
The only thing that matters much to me right now as far as a wargaming partner goes is that my wife is also interested in playing. She enjoys learning the history. She enjoys touring battlefields. She has a surprising competitive streak. She comes at the problems from a different angle. And having a gaming partner in the same household has made life easier (except maybe when she tells me, “I know where you sleep”). It’s something we enjoyed doing together even before the pandemic isolation. So, we continued.
The first quasi-wargame I played was Stellar Conquest (aka Stellar Confusion), a four-player, 4X strategy game which friends in high school introduced me to during my sophomore year. It incorporated economics, a multi-tiered technology track, hidden resources and movement, along with a simple combat system and an unofficial negotiation, all tracked by hand on a map with counters and concealed paper player sheets.
The first true two-player wargame I played was Panzer Blitz, which a different friend picked up when I was senior in high school. It is a classic hex and counter game set on the Eastern Front of Europe in WWII. My friend wanted to play the Germans, so I got to experience the Soviets. Which meant I got mauled pretty badly early on. The first scenarios do not favor Big Red.
My next foray was in college with another Avalon Hill game called Machiavelli, a multiplayer game of conquest set in Renaissance Italy (complete with tables for plague and famine) that focuses heavily on negotiation, similar to Diplomacy. This one featured hidden unit orders (ultimately executed simultaneously) again tracked with pencil and paper. This is a game we’ve planned entire weekends and cross-country vacations around so we could experience the full eight-player scenario, which is pretty wild.
When Karen and I moved to Maryland, where initially we didn’t know many people who shared our tastes in roleplaying, we set out to learn Squad Leader. A friend in college had a copy which we played a couple times before I picked it up. At the moment I bought it, it was one of the most complex games on the market. Like many modern video games, the rulebook walked you through a series of twelve scenarios, each one of which introduced a new section of rules so you could get a handle on them without being completely overwhelmed. So, one scenario might tackle morale and rallying, another tanks, another offboard artillery and spotting, another radios and flamethrowers, etc. I think we made it through seven or eight scenarios.
Then for a long time, we set the hobby down. Roleplaying was our first love in gaming, so we spent what time we had organizing groups that ran in multiyear campaigns of AD&D, Traveller and Aftermath.
Fast forward to somewhere around 2018. For my 50th birthday, a friend had given me a $100 bill, something I had never held in my hand before. For whatever reason, I didn’t spend it right away. Because the gift was special to me, I wanted to buy something special with it. By then, our roleplaying group had floundered as most of our friends adulting schedules made coordinating impossible. Somewhere along the line, I had rekindled my interest in wargaming. I was at a point in my life where I needed to refocus on things that gave me joy. Poking around, I ran across C3i, a wargaming magazine that primarily supports GMT wargames. Each issue includes a fully developed minigame, often with a subset of rules from a larger, more complex game. That struck me as an interesting way to try out a more expensive game before buying it.
So, I used that gift money to pick up three back issues on Amazon. Included were games called Plan Orange (a speculative US-Japan naval war in the 1930s based on Empire of the Sun), South Pacific (also based on Empire of the Sun, centered around the campaign at Guadalcanal), and the Battle of Wakefield (a War of the Roses battle based on the Men of Iron series). Soon after, I picked up Case Blue (the WWII Stalingrad offensive based on the rules of Unconditional Surrender: Europe). The following year, I picked up The Battle of Issy (the last battle of the Napoleonic Wars using the Jours de Gloire system).
Each game only took about a weekend to learn and play with rulesets of 10-12 pages, which by modern wargame standards are relatively short. Because the minigames were less intimidating, my wife once again joined me in playthroughs. We found them all interesting enough, and fun enough, that I ended up buying each of the larger games.
Emboldened by our success and having something enjoyable to occupy our weekends, I delved back into my small stash of wargames in the back closet. Among them I rediscovered one called Onward Christian Soldiers, a 2-7 player wargame with three scenarios and two rulesets that focus on the First through Third Crusades. Back when we were regularly traveling to the other coast each year to visit the parental units, I would stop at a game store in Orlando that I’d been frequenting since high school as a reward for surviving the excursion. On one of those trips, I’d spotted and indulged myself with this game. I had glanced it over once or twice but life got in the way of my fully diving into it.
For Christmas break that year, we decided we would learn and play the first scenario. Little did we know that this game had a well-earned reputation for not having the cleanest ruleset. It can be a frustrating experience trying to understand someone’s less than perfectly written or implemented set of rules, especially with a wargame. This game has two 32-page rulebooks (one for the First Crusade, a different one for the Second and Third) plus a 16-page Quick Start Guide and Playbook. They were generally poorly organized with multiple typos and contradictions due to inadequate editing and printing errors. In fact, there are pages and pages of errata and FAQs on Board Game Geek and Con Sim World (a wargaming support site). For years the developer threatened to incorporate the clarifications and corrections into a new edition of the rules but could never get the game designer onboard. I have a composition notebook for Onward filled with handwritten questions and eventual answers citing references (designer, developer, house rule, website, etc.).
Back in college, I heard the most complex wargame printed (at the time) was called Third Reich. As you might guess, it simulated WWII in Europe. The same friend owned it as owned Squad Leader but could never get anyone to play. At some point, I made a copy of the rules and eventually plowed my way through them. By the time I finished, my friend and I no longer lived in the same city never mind the same state but we did have a few opportunities to get together and discuss how the rules might work. Even though we never got to play, trying to understand the rules was a kind of challenge, as much to see whether the game had potential (it did) as to play it.
That experience served me well with Onward Christian Soldiers.
Because in the end, despite all its creakiness, Onward is an oddly fascinating and fantastic game to play. By the end of our Christmas break, both my wife and I found ourselves huddled over the game table, plotting our next moves, throwing down cards and rolling dice to determine how our encounters played out, screaming “God wills it!” when fortune turned our way. Or whimpering that same phrase when fate and the dice abandoned us. We had a blast. For all its issues, this is still one of our go-to wargames.
Fast forward again to the pandemic. By now, we had more rulesets under our belt. We’d played through Arquebus which was the latest installment of Men of Iron. We’d played through over half a dozen battles of the Napoleonic Wars in Jours de Gloire, including Waterloo. We’d played through Battle Hymn: Gettysburg and Pea Ridge. We’d played through Putin Strikes (the gods only know why) and heavily modified it with house rules to make it enjoyable. We’d played through At Any Cost: Metz 1870 (another go-to game). We’d even given a go to MBT (Main Battle Tank), a Cold War US-USSR simulation with a 75-page rulebook and slightly shorter Playbook.
During the initial lockdown, we opted to play the four main battles of Napoleon’s Last 100 Days (Quatre Bras, Ligny, Wavre and Waterloo), complete with an introductory review video and updates posted on a Facebook page we created. After a long break over the summer for reasons discussed in other essays and an abortive attempt at playing Little Bighorn (too grindy but maybe deserves a second chance), we held a two-person Kitten*Con: Covid Edition which featured a couple minigames that eased us back into playing again. That ended with us taking up Case Blue as a warmup for Unconditional Surrender: Europe with its 56-page Rulebook and equally long Playbook, and surprisingly little errata.
Unconditional Surrender has hundreds of counters on two map sheets that take up our entire gaming table, and requires two auxiliary TV trays for the three faction mobilization cards plus the top of a game cabinet for counter storage and a pair of compact dice rolling towers. Even that barely contains this monster of a game into the space we have. At the peak of the January wave of Covid, we walked through several training scenarios then embarked on the full war, which we finished about a month later, playing nearly every day. We even spent our January stimulus checks on new gaming chairs. Wargaming was back on the menu, boyos.
All of which left me wondering, how was it that I could focus on reading, integrating and digesting dozens of pages of rules when I couldn’t really sit down to write? What was it about this hobby that was so captivating where other forms of escapism had failed?
I mean, I have never been in the military. I don’t like air shows. I don’t like cars shows or boat shows. I don’t really like fireworks. I’m not into guns or gadgetry, any of which you might expect. I view tools as tools, not as lists of specifications to be drooled at or debated over beers. I guess I am not a typical guy in that regard.
But I am still an engineer at heart. I am the guy who looked forward to the logic problems in crossword puzzle books as a kid. I am the guy who enjoyed word problems in school. I am the guy who liked diagramming sentences in English. I am still the guy who does his own taxes every year, so poorly written instructions leave me undaunted. I am the guy who took boundary value problems in college as an elective. So, complex problems are not particularly intimidating, at least when there are rules and instructions to help me forge my way through. And I also am the guy who can quote 6-sided (and even 10-sided) dice probabilities in my sleep. I was born under the sign of a bell curve.
What I am not good at is people. Ok, that’s not strictly true. I do pretty well at judging people’s motivations and intents, and intuitively gauging how certain social scenarios might play out. But it’s something I don’t particularly enjoy. I picked it up as a survival skill from growing up in an unstable environment, then honed it in a Machiavellian workplace. Decades of roleplaying helped. As did spinning out oddly interlinked and little understood scenarios for a post-apocalypse roleplaying game called Aftermath sometimes based on classified information gleaned from public sources.
So, when I was faced with a real-life scenario that both experience and intuition screamed at me was perhaps an existential threat in the twin avatars of a pandemic and social/political unrest, my first priority was to contingency plan. The problem I faced was Rumsfeldian. It wasn’t the known knowns or the unknown knowns or even the known unknowns that bothered me. Those I mostly knew how to deal with. It was the unknown unknowns. The black swans if you will, at least one of which had already occurred in the pandemic itself.
This series of knowns and unknowns wove a complex web of problems. Some were straightforward. By a year ago, we knew there would be lockdowns, either structured or self-organized, but we didn’t know how long they would last. We knew we should wear masks but didn’t know how effective they would be. We knew people were working on a vaccine, but didn’t know if or when one might be available or how effective it would be. We knew there would be shortages be we didn’t know of what or for how long.
Because people are people, we knew there would be hoarding. While some items made sense pretty quickly (masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning products), others took some digging to figure out (toilet paper, meat), a few only made sense in hindsight (freezers, exercise equipment), while some never made much sense at all except as self-fulfilling prophecy (ammunition, emergency rations). But at least people were taking the pandemic seriously if somewhat haphazardly.
We also knew there would be economic impacts, but didn’t know the depth or breadth of the downturn and how it would impact us. Not an ideal situation with my wife having retired less than a year before. A nightmare scenario for order of returns (a key component of the American retirement system), never mind for the friends and relatives suddenly thrown out of work.
We also knew it was an election year, but we didn’t know exactly how that would play into the crisis. We knew we had erratic leadership, but didn’t appreciate exactly how erratic (enough that it cost a sitting President an election). We knew there was a ton of misinformation out there, but didn’t know the extent to which it was organized and orchestrated for political gain.
Because of all that we knew people would get sick, that people would die, and that this country was not prepared or equipped to prevent the bulk of that from happening. From 1918, we knew those infections and deaths would likely come in waves.
What we didn’t know was whether the healthcare system would fully collapse (as it almost did in NYC). We didn’t know that over the summer the country would see some of the largest spontaneous civil rights demonstrations and unrest since the 1960s. We didn’t know that armed and organized right-wing groups would attempt to kidnap a sitting governor with the intent of publicly executing her to further their “liberate” agenda.
In short, we didn’t know exactly how far social cohesion might break down.
Although I suspected and predicted that the combination of social stresses, societal trends, and sociopathic leadership would lead to violence, I did not know exactly what form that might take (spoiler alert: it wasn’t the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man). Like, say, whether Q-Anon, the 3-Percenters, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys would forge an unholy alliance and attempt a full-on insurrection at the Capitol with encouragement from a lame-duck President who had yet to concede defeat (spoiler alert: they did).
That just scratches the surface of the constellation of problems that occupied my mind, the list of which grew throughout the year. The country was at a confluence of events, some of which had been decades in the making, some of which had sprung up overnight. Most of which, either known or unknown, were out of my hands to solve or resolve. There were actions I could take to protect us on a small scale but precious little I could do to influence the larger outcome. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Which is what I focused on until my personal life went off the rails in June. But even then, I continued garnering information and monitoring the situation.
But my capacity to initiate change was quickly overwhelmed. I spent a lot of time waiting to see how the scenario unfolded, incorporating models into a lot of multi-branched decision trees, with a lot of contingency plans depending which path they took. Suddenly, I found my personal Venn diagram between reality and wargaming significantly overlapped.
At their core, all wargames are simulations. They are instructional tools for orderly quantifying and understanding complex problems set in chaotic environment. At both the professional and the amateur/hobby level, they teach a particular set of skills. Organization. Objectives. Supply. Situational Awareness. Surveying the terrain for strengths and weaknesses. Evaluating a position, yours or someone else’s. Spotting a vulnerability. Recognizing an opportunity. Planning, and because no plan survives first contact, contingency planning.
If engineering fundamentally teaches you how to solve a problem and how to read a book, and science teaches you how to evaluate data and how to confirm a pattern, and art teaches you how to see and how to control your hands, then wargaming teaches you how to organize and how to adapt. Or perhaps a little of all those things. But only with practice, practice, practice. Like any skill, it needs to be sharpened so that it operates smoothly under stress.
So, while I couldn’t develop a vaccine, or heal hundreds of years of racial inequity overnight, or dyke the spring tide of conspiracy theories, I knew how to spur Murat into a charge and collapse an Austrian flank at Montebello. I knew how to patiently hold the key villages around Mars-La-Tour even with only degraded French forces until the relentless Prussian assault ground down. I knew how to get Italian formations moving across the river at Fornovo to engage and scatter the idle French. I knew control of the fortress at Antioch was the key to success or failure in the First Crusade. I knew that if the Japanese could seize and hold Port Moresby, the entire American Guadalcanal offensive might collapse.
And what I didn’t know, I could learn. I could distract my mind from fixating ineffectually on the problems of the present by unleashing upon it the problems of the past. So instead of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about some possible event I couldn’t change, I could set my mind to how to launch an effective surprise attack to disrupt and delay a Soviet summer offensive in 1943, and prevent the collapse of the entire Eastern Front. I could review force dispositions in my mind, moving them this way or that based on what I remembered. I could consider what units might be transferred from other theaters to improve the outcome, and whether that would strip those defenses too far back when the Western allies invaded. If need be, I could get up, turn on a light, study the map, consult the rules, calculate the odds, determine how to improve the probabilities, and devise a plan that might or might not pass muster come daylight. And with that problem solved, at least until the next morning, I could get back to sleep.
Once my plan was put to the test, I could immerse myself in a language of tables and modifiers, of dice rolls and simple mathematics, of the probabilities of success and failure, of adaptation to the truth on the ground as the encounters unfolded. Of the satisfaction of well executed plan that accomplishes its objectives. Or the sudden anxiety of attempting to salvage an untenable position on the fly when it doesn’t.
As I played, time and reality slipped away. The noise of daily life faded to the background. Just one push might make the difference in an offensive. The risk of one more airstrike by the Luftwaffe, of one more panzer army committed to the attack, of creating and exploiting one more breech even if it thinned out my defenses. Of one more sketchy Italian ally plugging a hole in a suddenly tenuous line where only it can hold back an inexhaustible red tide of infantry if only for another month, another turn, another night. Until I could reset and recompose a new midnight gospel master plan for that cardboard ballet of uncertainty which continued to uncoil accompanied by both Heisenberg and Schrodinger singing impromptu arias. You can predict either the position or the momentum of your offensive but not both with the same precision until your turn fully plays out. That critical panzer army at the point of your attack is both alive and dead until the dice settle into their final position, revealing its fate.
And if none of the planning worked? If Fortuna did not smile in my favor? If I misread the transition between aggression pays and conservatively consolidating a position that inexplicably collapsed? If I risked a bridge too far in a moment of no guts, no glory emotion? Well, it was simple enough to reset the board and try again. And again. And again, if necessary. Until the contours of the problem of that scenario were fully understood. Until I got it right.
If nothing else, this past year has reinforced the opportunity to apply those lessons to my everyday life.
Things like understanding that long-term strategy and accumulated odds of success are directly applicable to retirement planning. That sticking to the plan to see how it plays out is important but so is adapting it when the unexpected happens. That spotting and seizing a no-guts-no-glory investment opportunity, however fleeting, is often the key to financial success.
Or applying Machiavelli negotiating skills, with the right blend of gathered intelligence, perceived mutual interests and veiled threats (or if necessary, flashing a metaphorical assassin’s dagger), is critical when dealing with the recalcitrance of the city or the county, a middling to major corporation, or rival organizations and teams at work. That building alliances, sometimes with unreliable allies, is often the only way to achieve your overall objectives.
Or learning enough about logistics to build a running, rotating stock of essential supplies during a pandemic, including from nontraditional sources that deliver on Easter Sunday. That a vaccine being 95% effective translates to a 1 in 20 chance that it won’t be, that mask’s effectiveness of 83% translates to a 1 in 6 chance that it isn’t. And exactly how those odds play out in real-world rolls, and how to evaluate the risk/reward implications should one of those rolls fail.
Or even gleaning information on the availability of guns and ammunition from key websites to calculate the likelihood of violence. Or if necessary, being able to set up a defensible position behind the rock in front of the house with firing lanes that cover the main approaches should it happen that some of the armed and dangerous, batshit crazy Proud Boys instigating the Capitol insurrection had infiltrated and occupied my own neighborhood (spoiler alert: one was captured by the FBI a few blocks away).
Like a purported Chinese curse, we live in interesting times.
Which is why until time and chance return us to some semblance of normality, you will find me at the gaming table, working through problems I can solve. Because the day-to-day surreality of this life grows increasingly beyond my ken.
© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III
