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Where we're going, we don't need miniatures!
I recently concluded one of the more unusual, least sensible and most time consuming things I've done in this hobby: I and ten friends refought the Waterloo campaign via a play-by-email kriegsspiel game. It took over a year, and if you take one thing away from this series of posts, it's not to do what I did.
This idea didn't spring out of nowhere though, so let's back up again and put the above in context.
This is post one in a series of seven; the others are:
Context
Kriegsspiel
Kriegsspiel can refer to 'the' Kriegsspiel developed in the 19th century by the Reisswitzes for the Prussian officer corps, but generally it just means any free-form wargame where the players don't explicitly play the game, but instead give orders which are resolved by one or more umpires.
What that gives you is both almost complete flexibility in your orders, and a good system for introducing true fog of war. The downside is that now the 'rules' largely exist in the brain of your umpire, so you had best hope they know what they're talking about.
Oh god, the pandemic
I played my first kriegsspiel during the first lockdown in 2020 - like everyone else, my club was put on hold for a couple of months until one of our members announced that he was planning to do Operation Sealion by email.
I jumped on it, and spent the next couple of months fighting a delaying action while the panzers landed at Felixstowe and advanced on Norwich (no, I didn't understand either - apparently mustard is vital war materiel).
Not long after the Home Fleet arrived from Scapa Flow and the Germans surrendered, lockdown was lifted and we all got back to playing with miniatures like god intended.
Enter lockdown 2 (Electric Boogaloo).
Thoughts turned to doing another kriegsspiel, and this time I volunteered to run one - I'd been thinking about running a Napoleonic game for a while, and we quickly settled on the Waterloo campaign of 1815.
Why Waterloo?
The first reason is pretty obvious; Waterloo is the Napoleonic battle and, to quote Nosey himself, was "the nearest run thing you ever saw". It also has three roughly equal armies starting in close proximity to each other, so you get plenty of opportunity for plenty of players to have interesting roles.
The Waterloo campaign (I'll keep calling it that to differentiate between the action in Belgium and the wider Hundred Days) also has another very important property for recreating: it was very short.
The big problem with recreating Napoleonic campaigning is that generals operated at both the strategic and tactical level, often in quick succession. For our Sealion game, we all gave orders for the day ahead, and then each 'evening' received reports about the day's fighting. Clearly this wouldn't work for 1815; virtually all the battles would take place entirely in between players
To put it another way, any system has to support Wellington manoeuvring his reserves towards the battlefield at the Corps level over multiple days, and allow him to order the Guards forward at the critical moment ("Now Maitland, now's your time!").
The inevitable conclusion of this is that players need to be able to make decisions in the moment, and so the in-game time between 'turns' needs to be small, or better still flexible in length.
The brevity of this campaign helps here because even with several turns a day, you can still get through it all in a reasonable time. I estimated we'd manage about one day per month, which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic.
Emphases
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the game system, it's important to know exactly what I was wanting to get out of this game.
The big opportunity of an online game is that it frees you from the tyranny of the typical 6'x4' board that everyone can see, and the typical three hour club night game.
I wanted to really lean in on this, and present the players with an immersive game where they had to focus on the same problems that their real life counterparts faced - making decisions with limited information and large lags in communication about large, unwieldy formations.
The real campaign was hugely influenced by things like d'Erlon spending the day of Quatre Bras marching back and forth due to conflicting orders - something that is very unlikely to happen on the table top. Any system needed to make this sort of blunder a real possibility.
Format
As with most play by email games, this was primarily text based. I would tell the players what was going on ("14:00. The assault columns reach Wagnee. The initial attack, by the men of 3 Brigade, isn't pressed home by the unenthusiastic men of the Berg regiment and Westphalian Landwehr and is repulsed with heavy casualties"), and then they would reply ("OK, send in 4 Brigade and follow up with 3 Brigade's reserve regiment").
The descriptions were backed up by maps, to make up for the fact that the players couldn't see what was going on.
In addition to the 'voice of god' style narration, I also interacted with the players in character as their various aides-de-camp, providing advice and answering questions. This allowed them to think over their decisions and ask questions without breaking the fourth wall.
It also let me head off some of the stupider suggestions, but in general I tried to err on the side of letting the players make mistakes.
Victory Conditions
This was a tightly balanced campaign historically. The French can beat either of the Anglo-Dutch or Prussian armies individually, but not if they manage to join together. The French also have the looming threat of the Austrian and Russian armies, so need to knock Britain and Prussia out of the war quickly in order to give themselves a fighting chance.
Historically this is precisely what they attempted, and of course failed. The French players can feel good about their achievements if they do better than the real Napoleon did. The Allies will be aiming to win again.
Timing
What I settled on was a flexible system; players would make decisions and then I would 'wind the clock on' until the next time at which they needed to make a decision. To make this easier, I tracked time only to the nearest half hour, fudging times in between.
For example, Gen. Thielmann decides at 14:00 to march to Quatre Bras. It takes about three hours to get there, so when 17:00 rolls around I tell him that he's arrived, the lay of the land and so on. He then gives further orders, and we repeat the process.
The major problem with this was the sheer number of players. If Wellington is half an hour away from Blucher, then I can't let him get more than half an hour ahead (or behind), otherwise one of them might decide to send the other a message which would turn up in the past. If Napoleon is facing Blucher across the battlefield, then really they need to be on exactly the same time.
When you've got ten players, all with jobs and things to do, what you get is a campaign that moves at the pace of the slowest player. Unfortunately there's no real way of getting around this without running into the problems described above.
Conflict Resolution
The other key element of this sort of system is some mechanism. Classically this is left entirely to the umpire's judgement, but I wanted to introduce some randomness.
I settled on using 2d6 with modifiers to resolve everything - any time something was at all in doubt, from the quality of scouting to clashes between formations - I would roll those dice and add or subtract values as I deemed appropriate, then check them against this table:
A typical example of this, taken from my notes for fighting near Fleurus on the third day of the campaign, goes like this:
Vandamme's two infantry divisions (total 7619 men) attack 2. Brigade (5543 men ). The Prussians are defending Gosselies, but haven't had time to properly dig in.
The French roll at +1. They roll a 6, so a total of 7
Result: Stalemate. Hard fighting continues; both sides take losses.
The 2d6 system gives a nice bell curve to the results, and is easily applied to a whole range of different situations without getting bogged down in pointless minutiae that the players will never notice.
Infrastructure
Despite referring to this as a play by email campaign, I actually used a series of Whatsapp groups (26 in total, including private chats between myself and single players) to communicate. Whatsapp works well for this because it's easily searchable and allows for the sort of instant messaging you need when having an actual conversation.
When players met up in-campaign, I added them to a group together so they could talk freely, then went back to messaging them individually if they split up.
For players who wanted to communicate over distance, I took messages from them via Whatsapp and worked out how long they would take to arrive via courier. When the time came, I handed on the message to the recipient. I kept track all of this in a spreadsheet, which also let me track messages that had got lost or intercepted.
Speaking of spreadsheets, I used another to keep track of all the formations involved at the division (for infantry) or brigade (for cavalry) level.
Part of the British page of the spreadsheet
Another page in the spreadsheet listed the players, their current time, location and other useful bits of information.
I used a large scale map of the area for strategic movement, and the 1777 Ferraris map for tactical manoeuvring - there's a scrollable version available here.
For battles, I pasted sections of this into an image file using GIMP, which I then used to overlay troop positions, annotations etc.
I used Google Maps for measuring distances between places (as did some of my players, to quote one of them, "My wife wants to know why the satnav keeps suggesting obscure Belgian villages"), and yet another spreadsheet to convert these distances into marching times based on speed of march, length of column and, as always, a 2d6 modifier.
To record everything, I used a series of documents (Google Drive, to keep it all accessible from multiple machines) with a running commentary of dice rolls, movements etc.
Things that players needed notifying of in future got tagged with '[todo 17:30]' or similar, which made it easy to check when winding the clock on.
If you're interested in these tools, I've made the folder on my Google Drive accessible to anyone with this link.
Now we've gone over how the campaign worked, the next post will detail the campaign setup and turn zero - the calm before the storm, if you will.