"Polemos (1883-1890)" Topic

There does not seem to be a thread here dedicated to this fascinating old game, designed by a Dr Griffith and first published in 1883. It has been mentioned in the past in other threads, particularly by TMP user Bob Cordery ( although difficult to find, obscured by many posts discussing a more modern game called Polemos ) . He also made some excellent blog-posts about the game ( link ) and most importantly he transcribed the rules for second edition and wrote about the game for the History of Wargames book The British Kriegsspiel ( 1872 ) Including RUSI's Polemos ( 1888 ) : Early Wargames Volume 2 ( link ) .

That book also contains the full text and illustrations from at least two contemporary newspaper articles about the game. I browsed the British Newspaper Archives for a few hours and found a few more mentions of the game as well as some ads from the publisher. It looks as if the game was actually somewhat popular among British officers of the 1880's and early 1890's before fading into obscurity.

The first two versions ( 1883 and 1886 ) were sold with pre-painted miniatures mounted on painted bases, plus unbased miniatures used as reserves to be scattered on the table representing losses. I wrote some more details about how that worked on bgg ( link ) .

Third edition ( 1890 ) abandoned miniatures for classical Kriegsspiel-blocks.

Both versions were played on supplied gridded cloths, to which ( likewise included ) terrain could be added. Hills were included as cardboard contraptions placed below the cloth to deform it. The flat hill-tops had different rules from the slopes formed around them ( different impact on LOS and protection from enemy fire ) .

In late 1890 the designer Dr Griffith was invited to the War Academy in Germany to present the game to The Emperor and some of his generals. I wrote a bit more about that on bgg a few days ago ( link ) .

While the game in all editions were deterministic without dice, there was various types of hidden information that made it impossible to know at what moment a specific enemy unit would be eliminated. Third edition had losses tracked on paper, but players were not allowed to look even at their own loss-sheets during their own turns. Even that form of light fog of war for your own units is not very common in games from any era.

The complete rulebook for either second or third edition is just a few pages. The second edition rulebook available in that book is probably of more interest to miniature gamers. But in that version the rules for entrenchments and terrain are not included. Third edition book is available in the British Library and you can order scans from them and that will give you the rules for entrenchments and terrain that probably work as-written also for second edition. I plan to write up a summary of them on bgg sometime and if there is interest I can paste that here as well. Even if I think second edition rules look like more fun and really recommend that anyone interested buy that book from History of Wargames playing without terrain on just a plain grid probably gets old very quickly.

Ummmm so Baccus stole their Polemos title from Dr. Griffith!?

Well that's just not cricket is it!? Surely they can't do that?

Polemos is a Greek deity. See here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemos. Baccus did not steel a thing.

Interesting, Porthos' link goes to a page that states: "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." because the period at the end of the sentence is included in the URL. Without the period, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemos , the link does go to the correct page.

Jim

Sorry, and thank you, Jim !

The original POLEMOS rules are very interesting on many levels. For example, in the miniatures version each side has twelve units, and each unit is represented by a single base with several figures fixed to it. Rather ahead of its time!

The casualties each unit suffers are hidden from the opposing player (each unit has a separate section in the game's box where their spare figures are kept) and are recorded by spare figures being taken from the relevant section and placed on the tabletop.

The design is well worth studying just for the ideas it contains, and even if you don't like the deterministic combat system, it would not be too difficult to replace with a simple dice-based combat system.

I am not a fan of deterministic combat, but I think in this game it is worth trying because not knowing how many hits each enemy unit can take, but knowing about your own units, might lead to some interesting situations.

The earliest game with multiple miniatures on a base I have seen was Strategonon in 1830 that I posted about on this forum in the past. That game interestingly also uses a square grid with 3D terrain, although hills are made from layers of wood placed on boards made of cardboard, rather than using a cloth map like Polemos. Both games have deterministic combat as well. I do not know if there is a connection between the two games or if there are any other similar games linking the two in the half-century that separates them.