"Old School Army-Level Wargame" Topic

Snappy Nappy uses a two-stand unit to represent a brigade, with each player being a corp commander. This was published by OMM in June in part because there are not that many current rule sets that use a big scale like this -- most are tactical where the basic maneuver unit is the battalion -- and it is a quick system to learn and play.

SN is a much faster game -- at Historicon an 8-player (8 corp) game was played in under 2 hours. A two-player 6-corp game here at the shop was done in about 2 hours.

That said, there's obviously a lot of abstraction incorporated into units. No skirmishers, for example. Infantry is pretty much infantry, defined by its type (from Militia to Guard). No figure removal -- SN uses a roster "for fog of war", although I've read about a number of less foggy marker ideas used by gamers.

There is a Yahoo group supporting SN that was started by one of the early fans of the system. The designer (Russ Lockwood) is there pretty much every day. You can also find more information about SN on the OMM site: click on "On Military Matters Rules-Reviews, Notes and Feedback"

When you step up in scale to a unit = a division, you're talking more about a boardgame than a miniatures game.

Dennis from OMM
onmilitarymatters.com

I know it's somewhere in the signal of this thread, but the noise…probably in my own head…fears that it's lost.

Paddy's Army Game in "Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun" is REAL close to what you're looking for -- in concept.

As I said on another thread hereabouts on the subject, though, I wonder how they'd work in practice and I haven't the time at the moment to try. I would observe that there's a lot of what Paddy envisioned in what I hear about Sam Mustafa's "Blucher". The basic concept is that you shrink the ground scale and thus the battalion frontage until the entire battle gets manageable. Then, in Paddy's case, you write the rules in such a way that burns off all the "business" that bogs down lower-scale games.

Paddy's rules are, after all, all of about four pages (IIRC) with a two-page reference chart in the back.

Yet another project that awaits retirement.

Best,

Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)

"Arthur, do these ideas approach what you were thinking about?"

I think you might have something there … Don't know whether it's Old School enough for Arthur though …

"When you step up in scale to a unit = a division, you're talking more about a boardgame than a miniatures game."

No, you're not. See my definition above. If it uses miniatures, it's still a miniatures game.

"Paddy's Army Game in "Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun" is REAL close to what you're looking for -- in concept."

I'm not sure that it is. I know that Arthur is quite familiar with Griffith's book. If it was, I think Arthur would have said so.