"Trouble keeping it small?" Topic

I am always interested when gamers complain about how slow a rule set plays, only to discover they are playing a mega game with micro rules. Some recent examples:

• Club playing Nuts! with 10+ tanks per side. In a game designed for maybe a platoon of infantry and 1 or 2 vehicles. no *wonder* it went slow. You track each crewman separately!
  
• The Flames of War parking lot. It is an excellent game but when you put 3' of tanks on a 6' table, parking lots and the attendant slowness are a result.
  
• Many tactical Napoleonic games when playing Wagram. If you have 200 battalions and have to decide on the formation and skimish deplyment of each, the game will, by definition, slow to a crawl.

I play Flames of War in 6mm in "half scale." I put 2500 points on what is effectively an 8x12 table. Never seen a parking lot there.

I've run Nuts! (and it's SciFi and Vietnam variants) and things always move along quite fast, games typically lasting maybe 3 hours. Players command a squad, not a battalion.

I'm as tempted as anyone to run BIG games (I'm working on Leipzig now) but that always launches a search for appropriate rules sets. I'm going to run a very strealmined Grande Armee for Leipzig (each stand = 1 brigade on a 7x10' table).

What is your experience with this? Ever get sucked in?

This is coming out in the "love/hate" TSATF discussion.
We used to run games with 20-30 units per side. And we wondered why it took so long to play to a conclusion.
Well, that's not quite true. We KNEW why, but loved the spectacle.

One of the major complaints against Empire is that corps commanders are shaking out skirmishers, deciding if a battalion should form square, etc.
The simple solution for 50% of the complaints is … wait for it … Don' play as a corps commander.

"But I have thousands of figures painted and want to play with them all!!!!"

Play small games.

Did you ever notice how willing a player with 5 or more units under his command is willing to sacrifice … quite a few of them to achieve his victory conditions?
I am primarily thinking of The Sword and the Flame here.

Now, give him command of ONE unit, or at most two.
See how more conservatively he plays. Not so willing to sacrifice the third platoon now, is he?

I stumbled on this using TSATF to play the Wyoming Massacre. I apologized to the players because I didn't have hundreds of figures to throw on the table. Each guy had his own small group of neighbors, mob, platoon, etc and that was it.

I also noticed that suddenly the "hated and time consuming" melee rules suddenly came into their own.

Yes. Played Battleground Kursk the first time with everything and the kitchen sink, because my friend and I had the whole day devoted to wargaming, so we thought (foolishly) we could try an unknown ruleset with all our toys.

Well, we didn't finish, and were not impressed with the rules. We did not dislike them, but just not motivated enough to play them again.

But someone new appeared at the club, who really, really like BG, so we tried it again, with just a reinforced platoon. And lo and behold – it was a lot of fun!

Although it was not a factor in our first game (as we used a 8 x 12 table) I have noticed at conventions the tendency to fill the entire table with figures, so there is no room for manoeuvre. Even worse, sometimes it is a multi player game, and to save time, the organizers deploy the troops.

So, as a player you get no control over your tactical deployment and have no room to do anything but march straight forward against a poor bastard on the other side who is in the same situation! It just becomes a long day of pointless attritional die rolling.

Fewer troops and large table that allow lots of manoeuvre room are always a much better game than vast quantities of lead filling the battlefield.

I'm terrible for 'super sizing' everything.

That's one of the reasons I've switched from 28mm to 15mm Slammers.

And even then I have trouble (hence Salute 2013 and 33ft tables… link )

So: yep. A big problem for me. Despite appearances, my eyes are still bigger than my belly…

John T

I find you can bog down with only four or five players in a dinner table sized engagement.

So I try to design scenarios for 2 or 3 player decisions per turn. I think this is a reasonable and fun amount of action, and keeps the game going pretty fluid.

Similar to Winston, each player gets a small number of units to work with and there are obvious scenario constraints that favor keeping units together or in a small number of independent sub-groups.

We also use Gentlemen's Rules(TM) that allow different parts of the board that aren't going to affect each other to progress through turns for the current round independently. Even for two player games … You go ahead and finish that up over there. I'm going to start moving these other guys.

I have a huge number of Napoleonic figures. When my inherently sensible pals come over for a game, the pressure is to place way too many units on the table for a comfortable day's play.

It is, as indicated above, about the spectacle. I have learned to be strong and use reasonable sized armies so we can come to a conclusion.

I prefer small games so it's not a problem for me, but back in the day, we always tried to make our 40K games bigger and bigger and they kept getting worse and worse, as a result.

If you play large games, there is no use for things like the Perry or Fife and Drum amusettes, or Firing Line dismounted dragoons.

When I was a young'un, (late 70s early 80s) the local gameshop had a set of fantasy/ancients rules the used, fairly complicated and the setup was a table 6' deep and 12 to 16' wide (made up of six 2' x 6-8' folding tables). The two tables on each edge would be full of figs-full. 18" x 12-16'. "T'ousands of 'em" as Colour Sergeant Bourne would put it. (The Evils were mostly just spray painted black, with silver paint on the swords).

No real maneuver or tactics, just slam forward and grind away-but everyone got to play with ALL of their toys. I never played, couldn't see the point.

I do think you can play larger games the more familiar you are with the rules. Less time needed to look things up.

We started off small with Battleground WWII and as we gained more experience with the rules, the size of our games grew. However, we had to be conscious when too many new players were invited. lol

Duane

LOL John T, all of us. As I now solo a lot I find my solution and fun is to make sure I limit the sizer/points of the force (with experience you get to know what is 'right') to table size. I'm very much in love with the points/unit sizes of Lions Rampart for this reason. And find the 2FL rules can shape force and table size for good interesting games perfectly. On the other hand my mates in Windy City like top play big (Waterloo is up in 28 mm wit 5000+ on the table in a few days, good luck lads (about 12 players :)
Cheers all keep have fun.

This is one of the things I like about One Hour Wargame rules – when you have a max 6 units per side it speeds things up

I also tend to supersize stuff but have learned my lesson and even though I can field 30-plus regiment SYW armies I keep the armies for gaming to managable sizes

I used to have "trouble" keeping it small, if that is a problem, but I never thought so. Now, not so much. I kind of have to work at it, but everything still works, so I can't complain….

I just don't have the time for really big games anymore. That is why I loved DBA, till the 3.0 version of the rules came out and ruined that game for me. I now enjoy converting old board games to miniatures. The game scale is manageable and the older board game rules are better written. I am also enjoying a foray into Star Wars X-Wing gaming these days. I need to get back into Command Decision as well….although focusing on smaller actions.

It is far too easy to get sucked into going a level (or two) up from the size of game the rules were envisaged for. Some rules scale better than others, but they will all take a lot longer to play, if only because of the sheer phsyical amount of stuff to move around.

What are these 'small games' of which you speak…?

To pile the table with figures.
To hear the table groan under the weight of lead.
And hear the lamentations of the people who live downstairs.
That is best.

I'm doing it for Waterloo. Big Bloody Battles works well when each side has perhaps 80 infantry bases or so. I have a couple hundred per side on the table for our game, which slows down the play a lot. But it is the 20th anniversary and I've never staged all of Waterloo in one game before. After this I'll go back to being reasonable. We don't do it often and the guys agree it looks really good. Plus I painted up a canvas game mat for this.