"Most disappointing battle to wargame?" Topic

There are certain epic actions of military history that we gamers dream of re-fighting.
As a younger fellow, my brother and I spent weeks researching and preparing to fight the Battle of Omdurman – only for the result to be a huge disappointment.
He – playing the Dervishes – refused to attack my positions, reasoning (with justification) that he only way he could win was in open battle. I, with equal justification, had no intention of leaving my zariba or gun boats etc.
We got into a bit of an argument, with him saying that if he just charged the positions, then it was pointless and we'd just roll dice and take his men off the table in large chunks. I pointed out that, well, that's what happened. So he said it was a pointless game to battle. And, in hindsight, he was probably right.
Neither of us felt that we have much in the way of input or tactical involvement (and I know we could have tried different rules etc etc, but you get the idea) and the whole turned me away from 'traditional' Colonial battles and towards the Boer War.
Have any other gamers found that their 'dream' battle (not sure if that's the best way to put that) turned out to be a total lemon? And why?

Sorry if this topic has been done before but I have no intention of searching through all the pages to double-check just so as to appease the pedants out there.

Bladensburg…either history repeats itself, or the Brits get hung up on a fenceline and the Americans shoot better than historically, and the Brits break and run. Not much in between.

Your problem was that ou both wanted to "do" Omdurman. So much so that you both knocked yourself out with research and painting. I bet you knew the button pattern of the Southwest Norfolk Fusiliers.
Since you both knew the battle inside out, and wanted to win, you were both determined to NOT make the same mistakes.

The problem is that in the real battle, NO ONE knew what was going on. Hector MacDonald? He would never have become one of the heroes if the high command knew what was going on.

Set it up again, but with unknowns on both sides. Make the British have to get from here to there. Shake it up a little.

Also bear in mind that being your favorite battle does not necessarily make it a good game.
God forbid if your favorite battle is … Casino!

Another thing to consider is that if you have enough troops to do Omdurman, you have enough to do the entire campaign, with the buildup and all the side actions also.
You might also want to get Howard Whitehouse's "Science versus Pluck", which has you role playing the various stiffer up lip types, and lets the Bad Guys run by either random rolls or an evil GM.

We played Marengo in Napoleon's Battles years ago. A friend built a custom board for it, collected the figures to an accurate OOB. The Austrian player had a horrific run of die rolls, and couldn't get off his start line. Instead of the historical "back and forth," the Austrians waddled around while the increasing French reinforcements made the game more and more pointless.

Agincourt.

We have played the Wyoming Massacre several times. (HINT: If the battle has "massacre" in the title, it might not be a good idea to game it. )
However, it has great local interest. The battle took place 3 miles from my house. Streets and golf courses are named for the survivors, and many a political career was born there.
As a straight-up battle, it is a farce. The Patriots were vastly outnumbered. They were flanked by Indians, and faced semi-regulars. They were mostly militia. Do the math.
However, if you play the game as one of your own personal survival, it suddenly becomes a GAME.
For one thing, these were CONNECTICUT SQUATTERS who got massacred, not true Pennsylvanians.
Play all these up.

Even Camerone can be a fun game, if done right.
Even, and especially, the Alamo makes a great game, again if done right.
Played "straight", the Mexicans in both cases always win. No fun? Introduce Hollywood, award bonus points for heroic conduct, and so on.

I tend to tinker with the history – not to even things up, but to impose strict victory conditions on the Europeans.

As an example -
If they wait too long to confront the Mahdis army at Omdurman, the prisoners in the dungeons get slaughtered – some rich, titled landholders son & heir dies a horrible death – the press at home are up in arms at the tragedy – Prime minister is forced to sack the general in charge ruining his career – he goes into a darkend room, shoot himself in shame……

This would be considered a loss (in that particular history). :-)

Waterloo. I was in a Waterloo game once and I was the French attacking La Haie Sainte and was doing very well, and as I was attacking the British player all of a sudden pulled all of his troops from the farm. I figured that I had overwhelmed him. The following move my troops moved in and then the British player announces that the whole farm is being blown up! I asked, "What?" He stated that the night before the battle he had engineers taking the timber from the farm, built a mine, and was now detonating it. I explained to him that there were no engineers in the farm, and even if there were, it had been raining quite heavily before the battle. I asked to see his troop list because I knew for a fact what troops he had in his command because it was a game I designed, but by that time it was too late, two of the other players walked out.
I was left trying to explain how unlikely it would have been. I have not played Napoleonics since, and the two guys who walked out have never played with this guy again……My advice is this, Old school homegrown rules are fine, until some barracks lawyer gets to rolling and decides to change history. If I was on the losing side because of bad dice rolls, I can deal with that, but this was just too much.

It seems to me the entire issue might have been resolved by enforcing victory conditions which require an attack.

As I said :-)

All good points, but any serious tinkering with the battle – making the British march from here to there, imposing ahistorical time limits or enforcing victory conditions etc – mean you are no longer fighting THE battle. Probably better to fight such one-sided actions with an Umpire controlling the 'masses' – as per the suggestion of SvP.

Like Rorkes Drift, for example – there was no time limit on the British and no reason whatsover to leave the fortifications. You could realistically put a time limit on the Zulus (because of Lord Chelmsford's approach) but I still doubt that would make it a better battle to game.

But this is not to come up with better ways to fight Omdurman, more to discuss battles which SHOULD make brilliant wargames… but didn't.

Cain v. Abel
Joshua v. Jerico
Iran v. Iraq in the salt marshes
Japan v. US at Pearl harbor
US v. Japan at Hiroshima
Rome v. Israel at Masada
Sioux Nation v. Custer at Little Big Horn
Teutonic Knights v. Rus at Lake Peipus
Zulus v. British at Isandalwana

Pearl Harbor

If you are going to fight THE Battle, how do you force Kitchener to screw up badly enough for MacDonald to save the day?
You CANNOT force him to. (cf "Stupid McClellan rules…) Otherwise you have a clumsy moving diorama, and not a game. Kitchener did not know that the Dervishes were out there. If you insist on doing THE Battle, how can he NOT know?

Are you going to force the 21st Lancers to charge? If not, then it is not THE Battle.

Battle of Tanga.

This discussion reminds me of when I was reading up on some Napoleonic campaigns a while ago. It became clear that the large set piece battles are meaningless without the context of the maneuver campaign that surrounded them. Most of each campaign consisted of marching troops around and trying to catch the enemy off guard and create a local superiority. Only then would a general commit to a battle and this phase is what made Napoleon so hard to beat. Then, once battle was joined, the outcome often hinged on who had nearby reserves that could join the battle and tip the balance. The take home message for me is that you need to play a campaign that will occasionally produce set piece battles rather than trying to replay historical battles where all the important variables are pre-set and well understood.

I think any refight is prone to hindsight concerns. The only way for the French to win Waterloo is to overwhelm the Anglo Dutch before the Prussians arrive. Antietam is a walkover if the Union player knows that in reality he outnumbers the confederate by 2 to 1. Chancelorsville as any number of intriguing variants. If Hooker does nto freeze upon completing the flanking movement. If Howard actually sets up to recieve an attack. The battle as it played out was not especially interesting.

John the OFM

And therein lies the problem of fighting these epic encounters – too much latitude in the rules / allowance for hindsight etc and you can avoid making any mistakes – or, like in the example cavcrazy gives, blow up La Haie Sainte. Not enough, and you are just doing a 'clumsy moving diorama'.

So which epic actions allow you to re-fight them without having to 'force' a player to do x, y or z to make it reasonably plausible?

I find beer helps ensure that I am rarely disappointed in my gaming.

I have always thought that once you have the right OOB, the players are on their own, and entitled and required to make their own mistakes. Your game, and the way you played it, did not allow this.

Omdurman NEEDS hidden movement.
This is the method that I have started to use.
TMP link
It would work here, and if you consider dust clouds an intervening feature blocking LOS, or limit British visibility (to 24"?) you might be able to incorporate the charge of the Lancers and MacDonald's heroics.

Obviously, the British DID "have to get from here to there". The Mahdists were not invading Egypt, after all. The British were invading the Sudan!

There was certainly a fear among the British that that Dervishes (the Mahdi had died years before – but are they still Mahdists?) wouldn't attack in daylight, and one could use cavalry attacks to 'prick' the Dervishes into action. But my brother's plan (and it was a decent enough one) was for his whole army to hang back and wait for me to attack him – which seems rather ahistorical. Should he have been 'allowed' to do it? Well, who knows. The Brits had a water supply at their backs and if they moved in a day or a week, would it have made a difference?
I always thought the most interesting 'what if' of Omdurman was a night / dusk attack which is not totally implausible and gives a bit of a chance to the Dervish commander.

Agincourt with FOG.

The French cavalry didn't even bother to flank, you get about one completely ineffective volley before they run over your positions. So far for the longbow. Men at arms on foot did better as they were wiped out in two turns rather than one.

Maybe Henry V rolled a lot of 6s that day?

"So which epic actions allow you to re-fight them without having to 'force' a player to do x, y or z to make it reasonably plausible?"

Bulldog69,
For me, the short answer to the question you ask is 'none of them'. 'Dream game/battles' almost have to come up short due to the artifices need to re-create a moment in time.
I love playing a one-off battle when someone else has done all the work, but I prefer a campaign- and if said battle evolves in a manner from the campaign on to the table, thats great- but I want the circumstances that lead to battle to be what drives the battle, in their many possible permutaions, and I am not that interested a necessarily flawed replay of history, and trying to account for specific variables and oucomes on a single day in history with rules mechanics and game systems.
Not that the 'refights' aren't fun in their own way-they are..just not interesting enough to me personally. I know some feel as i do, and many do not, but each to their own!

I agree with John the OFM that hopeless fights like the Alamo and Camerone can be especially fun to game. The outcome is a forgone conclusion, but how long the defenders last and how much damage they inflict makes 'last stands' enjoyable.

I can never roll enough 6s to match a historical epic stand or last stand. I did a refight of Teutoburger Wald and lost even more Romans than originally were lost. It was hysterically funny because we all started placing side bets (m&m's iirc) and even with that motivation I couldn't survive. Played a Little Big Horn as Custer and the only Sioux that died did so when his damned horse tripped and fell during a gallop and the rider died. I accused the game designer of loading my dice instead of my rifles and pistols. Both games were hugely entertaining for all, except me.

And I think that's the trick, there has to be something in the game, even if you're running a hopeless wreck of an army, to make it a good game for you, otherwise why bother? Better to go drink beer.

Agincourt,
Utah Beah,
and any of the Burgundian battles against the Swiss!

The totally hopeless battles can be fun to game (I did see the Texans win the Alamo once). It is the ones that were close in real life that shouldn't have been that can be frustrating.

Antietam comes to mind. Unless you load the Union down with all kinds of restrictions they win in a walk simply by sending all 80,000 men forward on turn one. Few gamers can be pursuaded to be as timid and misinformed as McClellan.

That said, battles like that can be made to work if you don't tell the players what battle they are refighting. We did Antietam as an ECW game once and it worked out quite well (though it did involve some creative lying to Lord McClellan…I mean Fairfax)

I'd say any battle that historically involved a big surprise or trap.

Are you really going to get a Roman player to blunder into a Cannae?

Fredericksburg. I played the Rebs and was positioned behind the Stone Wall. My opponent, the Union, had pontoon bridges to cross the river and could take cover inside Fredericksburg with an unlimited number of troops. From Fredericksburg he could reach the wall in one turn. He piled about five or six divisions into Fredericksburg and charged them all at once at the wall. One move to get there, I delivered closing fire disordering some units but he charged me with th erest and I was utterley overwhelmed within one turn.

I predicted beforehand that it would end like that, but took position behind the wall for historical reasons and the woods behind me were even worse ground.

What was too bad was that the Union player had a real chance in this game to overwhelm us on his left wing, actually tried that maneuver but completely crushed us across the wall that was unpassable in reality….

We re-did Teutoberger Wald – had the Romans in march column in the middle of the game and had the Germans come on from both sides

Actually, the Roman players regained their composure well and actually managed to get a fair number of troops off the board

I think that last stand battles (the Alamo, Camerone, Rorke's Drift, Omaha Beach, etc) can make for good games because the options are limited: one side attacks, one side defends.

The battles which are really tough to game are the ones based on one side's inaction or other extreme example of the fog of war. Chancellorville or Mars La Tour are great examples. Without artificial restraints, there is no way a lucid player will fail to engage the enemy with his superior numbers. If I'm playing Hooker, why would I ever just sit there why Jackson marches on my flank? If I'm Bazaine, I'll commit my forces and destroy the Germans in detail.

Omaha beach as one never makes it off in a game!

I think any refight is prone to hindsight concerns. The only way for the French to win Waterloo is to overwhelm the Anglo Dutch before the Prussians arrive.

I know some players may not like it, and I may be too heavily influenced by the movie, but I like to change the reinforcement possibilities.
Give a slight chance to have Prussians arrive earlier or later.
Maybe a slight possibility that Grouchy managed to interfere with the Prussians or even, that Grouchy makes an appearance.
Its hard to get players to agree on it, but I think it can be fun to try to recreate some of the unknown factors going into a battle like this. Especially if they were real concerns the commanders of the time faced.

Battle off Samar. WWII naval battle. Japanese battleships, cruisers, and destroyers vs US Escort Carriers, destroyers, and aircraft (some carrying depth charges). Not pleasant for the U.S. player. Fun to paint up and test out myself, but way too uneven a fight. Some of us can handle uneven battles, but I think most people want some sort of chance.

"Most disappointing battle to wargame?"

Pretty much any historical refight when played purely as table top game using original dispositions, particularly if it involves a historical "surprise", lousy commanders on one side but not the other or a drastic imbalance in numbers/weapons.

That's the problem with re-fighting historical battles. Better to do campaigns, or hypothetical scenarios, or what-ifs.

Few gamers can be pursuaded to be as timid and misinformed as McClellan.

And yet, SPI sold quite a few boardgames with that very premise.
They got quite creative in forcing that.

All of them.

Reasoning that battles happen for a reason, and the bit on the table is just the final stage. Where a general did pull one out of teh bag it is usually for a number of reasons that can't be replicated in a game.

Then of course there is hindsight – of course the Dervishes didn't attack, they knew what happened.

I beg to differ, Tanga is a great battle to run.

"Utah Beah,"

sorry, meant Omaha beach indeed.

I don't set up historical reenactments. Like one episode of Magnum PI. The very uptight character wanted to reenact some battle. No game involved. Not much fun, either. Not worth the bother.
What I do instead is use troops for each side that could have, would have been there. On likely terrain.
Oh, and "winning" can be throwing the Germans off their time table in the Bulge. Or the Dervish could wipe out a British unit before they evaporate. I mean other than the 21st Lancers.
The game on my table now is a good example. Yugoslavs in the spring of '41. Having a short battalion of two rifle companies, plus the machinegun company, a platoon of medium mortars, and an antitank platoon with two Bofors 37mm antitank guns facing a full Panzer Grenadier battalion, plus a light Panzer company. One might feel it's no contest. But the idea is to see how much damage the Yugoslavs can cause. And who knows, maybe they can actually stonewall the Germans?

I agree completely with those that like to throw in variables. To not have them seems to totally get away from what the actual commanders went through as far as decision making. It is a problem, say with Napoleonics, you certainly don't want to hide a large portion of your toy army after spending hours painting them! Using Waterloo as an example:
1. There are obvious variables about how much of the British army was available that day. This could be subject to chance.
2. The Prussian arrival should be variable.
3. The weather conditions, what time the battle started.
4. Could Grouchy arrive before the Prussians?
5. British hidden battle line.
These would be the basic variables I think every Waterloo game should have.

I dunno, Samar can be rather amusing for the USN player when you remember that there are two *other* Taffies throwing their air groups at the IJN, so there should be about 400 planes attacking in waves during the battle to save Taffy 3.

You have to find some way to have fun when commanding the side that has no chance of winning the battle.

A long time ago (in a game room far far away…) I played GDW's "Case White" about the German invasion of Poland in WW2. I was the Poles. Of course, there's no way Poland can actually defeat the Germans; just perhaps make them take too long or lose too many troops.

The Germans set up historically with the bulk of his forces in Slovakia and East Prussia. He had minimal forces on the German-Polish border. So I moved my entire mobile force of roughly 3 battalions of armor and cavalry to the German border, punched a hole through the light defenses, and proceeded to run through the German countryside, paying a visit to all the friendly German airbases along the way. Did that for about 2 turns and then made my way back into Poland after destroying numerous squadrons.

Poland still fell. But the look on my opponent's face…

I agree with Rrobbyrobot. For some of our "Historical" re-fights, as part of the victory conditions we will include the phrase "better then the original commanders" and allow a point system for victory. This way Custer doesn't have win, just live to tell about it. We gamed the "Retreat from Moscow" in which all the French player had to do was have an army at the end of the game.
Any battle can be set up to be fun, what has ruined some games for me is when rules are either changed or added during the game to make it "fair".

I've had trouble with Adrianapole, Salamanca and Waterloo. Bussaco is much better as a typical head-to-head godlike vision wargame than the real battle would suggest.

Regards

To make a better game when I re-fought the War of 1812 battle of Queenston Heights recently I allowed all the New York militia to cross the river to help in the US invasion. Historically many of them refused to cross the river, in mid-battle! Didn't like the sound of the Indians.

I actually think that running games of lesser-known battles (or parts of battles) at conventions counter-acts the omnicience of historically clued-in players. You can usually count on several gamers who know little to nothing about the battle, and who can be counted on to perform actions that seem wise to them at that moment, but history has already proven the folly of.

Omaha isn't all that much fun, so I'd say that despite the importance attached to the events, it's high on the list of most disappointing to actually play.

Actually succeeding at it with the Flames of War rules depends on getting your LCs to the beach. Even if you do get your reinforcements, any of those invasion scenarios is an exercise in deploying troops, watching arty and MGs shred them, and putting them back in the box.