"France's Tea Party or 2nd French Revolution Rules?" Topic

Seems things are heating up all over in France, and not just in Paris.

So, has anyone come up with wargaming rules for dealing with large-scale riots and rioters, for scenarios like this?

Looking more towards the macro scale of these, since normal skirmish rules would probably work for the man-to-man/woman scenarios.

There are a lot of these going on all over the world, so it might make for interesting and challenging gaming, due to unique modern issues – confined city streets in some cases, modern vehicles – moving or not, large vehicles with water cannons, IFVs/APCs/Trucks, etc..

Seems to me it'd be a lot like a push of the pike battle, and/or a rugby scrum, though perhaps a bit less chance for injuries/death.

Seems to me, when they get going with their various battle lines, it's a bit like dealing with battle lines from ancients warfare forward, though with the odd chance for other events too – tear gas, water cannon, shock grenades, rocks and bottles, rubber bullets, molotov cocktails, smoke from burning tires, incendiary kites, aerial drones, etc., etc..

Perhaps a good chance for both sides to have morale failures, and to have their lines suddenly break, causing chaotic loss of formation cohesion, which the opposition can then exploit.

Perhaps more chances now, of the rebels being better coordinated, due to the widespread use of social media and call phones, which of course, the authorities will be monitoring, and then may shut down.

The lack of wide-open battlefields like in most other, dense, formation line battle rules seems as if it would make this more challenging.

Generic rules would be best, which can then be tweaked for various scenarios:

1. the current French "Tea Party", or 2nd French Revolution;

2. Venezuelan riots;

3. Domestic US riots;

4. Hong Kong protests against Chinese rule;

5. Pro-Con Brexit Protests; and/or

6. other riots of your choosing.

Irregular Miniatures sells a set of rules entitled "Riot" that may fit the bill:
link

The "2nd French Revolution" stood in July 1830.

Riots and/or civil disobedience is a genre I've always been tempted to game. I should pick up Irregular's ruleset and have a look through. In my first hand experience of civil disobedience, the general masses were upset about an issue and protesting at different levels of passion. Some were just along for the ride. The danger were the other individuals who weren't necessarily there to protest the issue but there to use the mass of people as a vehicle for a different agenda (vandalism, assault on authorities and even lotting). The challenge was to deal with these actors while containing the masses of protesters and keeping them from escalating the level of disobedience.

In a game, make the protesters random or umpire driven reacting to to the actions of the police. The police goal is to maintain a perimeter and deal with the nefarious actors operating within the masses without escalating the actions/reactions of the protesters.

Maybe make the table a grid. The players allocate police resources to handle the events at different locations on the table as they occur. The board game pandemic has some good mechanics, maybe introduce a card draw to create the random events that the players have to deal with. If a player uses a lot of force or resources, they may contain that incident at the risk of agitating the protesters which would create more incidents.

Just some brainstorming but I think it could be done!

I think Jim Wallman wrote an article for the Courier some years ago that described a riot- style game. SPI's "Chicago, Chicago" boardgame might have some useful ideas if you can track down a copy.

I remember that game ! I had a subscription to S&T in my youth for over a decade. Still have all of them in my "Black Library" …