But dedicated war gamers soldier on. The Historical Miniatures Gaming Society, a nonprofit foundation created to promote the hobby, has more than two thousand members worldwide and hosts a yearly convention—four days of seminars, socializing, and lots and lots of games. Since I had never actually played a war game, I decided to check the con out—these games are too important to ignore. (In other words: Fear not, ranger. We’ll get back to D&D in two shakes of a lamia’s2 tail.)
Historicon was held over the second weekend in July at the Valley Forge Convention Plaza in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, an edge city about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The town is best known for its massive mall, the largest in the United States. It’s also home to Valley Forge National Historical Park, where George Washington and the Continental Army famously made camp during the American Revolution. But the mall gets way more visitors.
It’s easy to find the convention center, an unappealing 1970s concrete bunker connected to dusty and dated hotels at either end; the whole complex rises out of a sea of parking lots like a crashed alien spacecraft. Three thousand attendees walked through the doors that weekend to grab spots at over six hundred games. I got there early on Friday to procure one of twelve tickets for “Napoleon’s Battles Boot Camp,” a hypothetical skirmish between French and Prussian armies, intended for novice players. With time to kill, I wandered the halls.
There are certain characteristics common to all game conventions, whether they’re dedicated to historical minis, role-playing, video games, or board games like chess and Scrabble. The first is gender imbalance. Maybe men are more attracted to competitive games or more likely to obsess about their hobbies; either way, they always constitute a majority of attendees. The second is age imbalance. Convention-goers are more likely to sport gray hair than tattoos and ear gauges, probably because of the high cost of attending. Finally, there’s racial imbalance. Chalk it up to social differences or economic ones, but crowds inside a game convention are always whiter than the population outside, even in cities like New York and San Francisco.
In other words: The typical game convention attendee is a middle-aged white guy. This will come as a shock to few, but it’s worth noting. Appropriately, war gamers refer to themselves as “grognards”—a French term for “old soldiers.” The literal translation, “grumbler,” was first applied to Napoleon’s elite Imperial Guard, veterans so respected they could freely complain about orders and even groan to the emperor himself.
In the main ballroom, a few hundred attendees were setting up games on long folding tables pushed together side by side; sixty or seventy of these surfaces had been set up around the room. A historical-miniatures battle requires significant preparation compared to something like chess; there’s no set board or layout of pieces. Instead, participants build scale dioramas, usually representing the location of an actual battle. The simplest of these may be a flat tabletop overlaid with a few pieces of fabric and a handful of plastic soldiers. But many war gamers—particularly the hard-core grognards who go to conventions—strive for the detail and artistry of museum pieces. Their game tables feature tiny plastic trees, realistic hills and valleys, and meticulously painted buildings. And all of it’s to scale, usually so that the period-accurate toy soldiers are between ten and twenty-eight millimeters tall.
For one game, simulating the English invasion of a French castle during the Hundred Years’ War, the organizers had re-created a medieval village and keep; the plastic resin castle at one end was easily four feet wide and three feet tall. The biggest display, tucked in a far corner of the ballroom, consisted of a fifty-foot-long model of the main street from an Old West village, complete with villagers, horses, stagecoaches, and dozens of buildings, including a saloon, a jail, a market, and a butcher.
In the dealer’s room, located in a subbasement of the convention center, row after row of merchants sold the gear required to make these models. To start a game, you need a battlefield. Thrifty players can get away with a tabletop, but wouldn’t you prefer to cover that surface with a Wargames Terrain Mat? It’s a six-by-four-foot chunk of coarse fabric available in “Forest Green” and “Scorched Grass Brown” and costs $29. Of course, once you’re simulating grass you’ve got to decorate the battlefield with details like plastic trees ($7 per thicket), rivers ($8 per ten-inch stretch), and hedgerows ($12 for a pack of four). Get really into the details and you’ll want to add buildings like a one-room hut ($17) or a stable ($23). And maybe you’d like a nice old barn ($65), a bombed-out house ($80), or even a church ($120)?
Then there are the actual soldiers. You could buy kits—a set of forty-two twenty-eight-millimeter Napoleonic infantrymen costs $29—but then you’ll have to glue them together and paint them. Factory-painted plastic figurines are convenient but costly—eight Roman auxilia troops for $16, or $2.25 each if bought individually. Then there’s the top-of-the-line, hand-painted cast metal figurines. They’re gorgeous but crazy expensive: twelve “Boxer Rebellion Boxers,” $96; twenty late-Roman foot soldiers, $175; twelve French lancers, $220.
The need for all this equipment creates a high barrier for entry and makes it incredibly difficult for a casual gamer to get rolling. All told, a hard-core historical-miniatures gamer could easily spend thousands of dollars on his hobby.
After checking out the dealer’s room, I wandered through the corridors of the adjoining hotels, where games were under way in a dozen hot, cramped meeting rooms. As I padded into the deep reaches, I started to feel like the kid in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, my footsteps beating rhythmically on the carpet as strange tableaus flashed by. Through one open door, a guy that looks like Santa Claus waving a yardstick, bellowing about assignment of artillery casualties; through another, a room-sized naval battle, fought with foot-tall model clipper ships; then a Japanese castle, surrounded by a thousand brightly painted samurai; Normandy on D-Day; William Wallace at Falkirk; the Battle of Britain. Finally, it was time to play.
Few of us slept the night before the battle. At sundown, Napoleon’s damnable artillery began raining death on the center of the Coalition lines. Our position, in the north, was unscathed, but we lay awake listening to the roar of the cannons, a constant rumbling reminder of what was to come.
The sun was high over Saxony when the word finally arrived: The French lines were moving. Our orders were to occupy several small villages in the Bohemian foothills, hold the line, and stop the French advance.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher. After Napoleon’s Grande Armée was driven from Moscow, Prussia finally drew its sword against the invader; now we fight the Befreiungskriege, wars of liberation. We will drive the French from our land and finish Napoleon once and for all.
We checked and rechecked our muskets, sharpened our bayonets, and prepared to fight.
The Napoleon’s Battles Boot Camp was staged near the center of the main exhibit hall, on a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot table. As befitting a beginner’s game, the battlefield was simple: a surface covered with green felt, with two long “roads” of balsa wood crossing at the center. Five small plastic houses served as the only ornamentation, each representing a small town—one at the crossroads, and one at the midpoint of each road segment.
Our volunteer game master explained the scenario: Twelve players would fight out a hypothetical engagement between the French and Prussian armies, six to a side. The goal was to force the opposing army to flee from the map. If the game hit its four-hour time limit before that happened, whichever army controlled more towns would win.
The armies consisted of long lines of toy soldiers, arrayed at the edges of opposing sides of the table. At a game scale set to fifteen millimeters, each miniature soldier stood just over half an inch tall. Since each mini represented an entire unit of one hundred twenty soldiers, there were something like thirty thousand men on the table, ready to go to war.
Each player was assigned to an army—I randomly drew the Prussians—and given several “stands” of miniature figures
representing a specific regiment. I got two stands of line infantry, each one consisting of sixteen little plastic men in blue uniforms, with rifles drawn and bayonets fixed. Since each soldier was so tiny, they were standing in groups, four minis to a single base. I also had a stand of sixteen Landwehr infantry, the volunteer troops that proved critical when Prussia and its allies fought to liberate Europe from Napoleon in 1813. My Landwehr regiment traveled with a twelve-pound cannon, a piece of artillery on a base about one inch square. When the soldiers moved, they’d need to make sure the cannon moved with them. Finally, I had a single regimental commander, a guy on a gray stallion, perched on his own miniature base. As commander of the First Brigade, he represented my divisional leader—at all times, my regiments needed to be within three inches of him on the table in order to receive instructions.
Major von Lehndorff ordered the regiment into a march column, and we set off for a valley between two villages, about a mile apart. To our left, a division of heavy cavalry would take one town; General von Zastrow himself led the brigade to take the other. Our job was to plug the hole between the two, hold the center, and keep the French at bay.
As we marched to our duty, we made a pretty picture. Like a line of toy soldiers glinting in the sun.
At fifteen-millimeter scale, an inch on our battlefield represented fifty yards of distance. To get my troops into place between the center and northernmost villages, I had to march halfway across the table and change formation into a defensive line. This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds.
Under the Napoleon’s Battles rules, each military unit has a different movement rate, and the rate varies depending on the unit’s formation. In their starting configuration, a four-man-wide-by-four-man-deep column, my line infantry could move ten inches per turn. But change them into a long marching column—two men by eight—and they could move sixteen inches. Landwehr infantry move eight inches in column, a cannon nine inches, and so on.
As such, the first few moves of our Napoleonic battle—the first hour of the game, really—consisted of little more than moving pieces around the board. On my turn, I’d lean over the table with a tape measure, mark ten inches’ distance from the front of my line, and then carefully move each mini to traverse the gap. At the same time, I’d have to measure the distance from my commander to each regiment, making sure nothing was too far away.
By the time we could see the French they were half a mile distant. They had stopped their advance and formed lines; directly ahead of us, light infantry chasseurs made a wall of green coats a hundred yards wide. On either flank, they were protected by cavalry—four hundred horses pawing at the earth and flicking their tails, their riders leaning back in saddles, muskets at rest.
At that distance, we had little to fear from the infantry, whose muskets barely had the power to hit a target a hundred yards away. But those horsemen could close the distance between us in half a minute and tear through our columns before we had time to defend ourselves. So the major had us stop our march and form a defensive square, twelve men to a row and twelve to a column, muskets bared on all sides. Facing a square, a cavalry charge is useless—all they can do is ride around it in circles. Come too close, and they’ll get a half dozen bayonets up the ass.
The disadvantage of forming a square, at least from my position, is that you can’t see what the hell is happening. Standing two men back on the left flank, I had a good view of our light artillerymen, who had unlimbered their cannon and were ready to fire. But I couldn’t see the Frenchmen and had to guess how they’d respond.
We held position for long minutes before I couldn’t stand the tension and turned to my friend Leopold. “What’s happening? Why aren’t they attacking?” He opened his mouth to speak, then froze—we both heard the answer on the air, faint but coming closer, something like an approaching hailstorm: hundreds of boots beating a rhythm across the dry earth. An infantry charge.
Behind us the major’s bugle sounded three times, and we scrambled back into line. As I fell into place, I could make out the French formation coming toward us—l’ordre mixte, a combination of line and column meant to break through enemy infantry. Through my regiment. I raised my musket and waited for orders.
We didn’t fire until we could see the fringe of their woolly epaulettes. Two volleys in quick succession: our front rank, kneeling, then the second, standing behind them. Our muskets belched smoke, and the French line twitched and staggered. A dozen chasseurs pitched forward onto the grass, but the regiment held formation. They stopped, lifted their muskets, and returned fire.
It takes me around twenty seconds to reload my musket, but when someone’s shooting at you, twenty seconds feels like an hour. I tried to concentrate on the routine and to tune out the sound of the French guns. Detach the firelock from the shoulder, open the priming pan, open the cartridge box. To my right, I heard a thud and felt my friend Johann stumble. Take a cartridge, bite off the top of the paper, fill the pan with powder. Something whizzed past my ear like a fat, angry bee. Close the pan, swing round the weapon, empty the cartridge into the barrel, tamp it down.
Cock the gun, shoulder it. Return fire.
Fighting in Napoleon’s Battles uses a system of modified dice rolls: To attack, both players roll 1d10—one ten-sided die—and then add or subtract based on factors like type of soldier, location, and formation. If the attacker ends up with a bigger number, they’ve killed a few enemies.
A fight is further complicated by rules for morale: If enough soldiers get hurt in a regiment, it will become “disordered” and can’t return fire or initiate hand-to-hand combat. Fail to recover from disorder and you could get “routed,” forcing your troops to run away from combat. If they happen to run into another regiment as they flee, those guys panic as well.
It’s not an easy system. Each player was given a photocopied “training scenario information chart” describing all these modifiers, but it was so complex as to be useless: When you need nineteen footnotes to explain a single page of information, you know you’re in trouble.
All this complexity even flummoxes the experts. Tom and Paco, our two volunteer game masters, spent a good portion of the match debating rules between themselves and issuing conflicting instructions—and I don’t think they were doing a bad job. It’s just the character of the game, complex and confusing. War games are meant to provoke discussion, not stimulate the imagination like D&D.
The fact is that in any historical-miniatures battle, only 10 percent of the match is really spent playing. Half the remaining time is spent arguing about history, and the other half arguing about the game’s rules. War is hell.
A round us, I could hear panic and pain. On our left, the cavalry was being routed, falling back and exposing our flank. But my regiment held its position. We traded three volleys with the French infantry. They kept advancing. They were only forty paces away when our cannon finally opened fire.
The explosion took me by surprise, and I nearly dropped my ramrod. I reflexively turned to look but caught only an instant of motion—the big gun rolling back and digging into the earth—before it was enveloped in a huge cloud of thick gray smoke.
Then I heard the screams. The gunners had loaded the cannon with canister, a mix of scrap iron and musket balls—ineffective at long distances, but murderous up close. The shot tore into the French line and shredded its front ranks. The shocked soldiers who remained panicked and were routed, turning heel and fighting back through their own men—anything to get away from the big brass gun.
At this point, I was ready to declare Prussian victory. But one of the peculiarities of Napoleon’s Battles is that soldiers get routed all the time. Just as a player manages formations, he must also manage morale, rallying troops and reimposing order to keep as much of his army fighting as possible. The idea is that everyone gets their butt kicked, but good players know how to take a beating. A successful general advances like the tide, surging and breaking, losing ground one moment but gaining the next.<
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The French learned this lesson quickly. When their light infantry was routed and fell back, I marched my Landwehr regiment forward into the hole, hoping to pursue and destroy. But on their very next turn, the French commander was able to rally the unit and stop their retreat.
At the same time, he moved two more infantry units toward my position. I needed a turn just to change formation from march column back into a line. So by the time I was ready to fight, I had exposed myself to fire from three separate French units. When the French attacked, their commander would roll 3d10 and add them together; my only way to avoid slaughter was to roll higher, but I’d get only a single d10.
He picked up the dice and tossed them on the table. One, one, and four.
I rolled a ten. Somehow, my troops not only avoided destruction but also took no casualties. My infantry was immune to bullets.
Game master Tom leaned across the table and smiled. “What’s the difference between a fairy tale and a war story?” he asked. “A fairy tale begins ‘Once upon a time,’ and a war story begins ‘No shit, this really happened.’ ”
The victory was short-lived. When our game hit the four-hour time limit, the French army held three out of five towns on the map. Napoleon took the day.
I thanked the game masters and left the table, the ballroom, and the conference center. I traced a march column across the parking lot, unlimbered my car, and sent two hundred horses down the left flank of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Four hours of little war was enough for the weekend—or for a lifetime, really.
Historical-miniatures battles aren’t for me. It’s not just that there are too many rules—I can handle rules; I love rules. It’s that these rules are too complicated, and they’re the absolute focus of the game; it’s not about telling a story and having an adventure but about accurate simulation. For me, at least, historical-miniatures war games have too much regimentation and not enough imagination.
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