Bob's Solo Wargaming Scrapbook by Bob Stewart Table of Contents 1 . The Solo Wargames Introduction 2. Common Questions and Answers for Solo Wargaming 3. Solo Wargaming as an Evolutionary Change 4. What is Modern Solo Wargaming? 5. Why Play Solo Wargames 6. Motivational Factors in Solo Play 7. Modern Solo Wargames In Comparison to Face-to-Face Tournament Practice 8. Why Play a Solo Game Rather than a Computer Game? 9. Different Types of Solo Games, and Various Viewpoints 10. Some Common Intuitive Approaches to Solo Wargaming 11. Stepping Out into Greater Uncertainty 12. Deck of Cards versus Dice for Solo Games 13. Maps and All Things Terrain 14. Pick Your Type of Battle: What’s Your Oreo Cookie? 15. Cinema Production style wargames 16. The Birds-eye-view of Solo Wargaming 17. Mass Battle Mechanics 18. Generic Solo Opposition Using Unit-Personality Cards 19. Scouting for Solo Wargames and Variable Terrain 20. Baggage Trains on Campaign, Transportation and Supply 21. Stretching Our Solo Wargaming Imagination 22. Keeping and Maintaining Roster 23. Adding Pics a Better Solo Wargames After Action Report 24. Thoughts on Setting Up a New Historical Wargames Campaign 25. Maintaining a High Level of Activity 26. Some Thoughts on Better Design for Solo Play 27. Twelve Best Kept Secrets Toward Keeping Solo “Fresh” 28. The Solo Gamers Mythic GME Revolution 29. Using Mythic for Solo Miniature Historical Wargames 30. We started off with looking at a path that might help in the "evolution" from a traditional face-to-face wargamer, into a Solo wargamer. We talk about this evolution coming in progressive layers, like building a snowman. I lay out a series of topics that could lead us up to where we are NOW as a collective. 1. The Solo Wargames Introduction Issue 0.4 3 Aug 07 Preamble This whole series of articles was started in July 2007 because of a web-comment by David Southall about there being no detailed (and current) "How to play wargames 101" being available, and his insight seemed dead on the mark. Surprisingly, the “need” has been echoed before, but it seems like the best books on the subject are mostly 40 years old, by now (thinking of Don Featherstone’s Solo-Wargaming). Maybe there's a place for walking new Solo converts through the “evolution” that many of us have already undergone, from playing mostly over-the-table wargames (or using and modifying over-the-table rules) then moving on toward more and more Solo Wargames. The bare bones of the typical metamorphose seems to be: The Hermit Evolution The idea is that most Soloists "evolve" by progressively adding thin layers of Solo structure to their games, almost every time out. Few Solo players simply “shake-a-box” (read a book; listen to a pod-cast) and as a result become seasoned ready-to-Solo wargamers. If we could outline the basic steps in the Solo Wargames evolution, then maybe other new-to-SoloWarGames people could go read those articles first, to get that first boot-strap upgrading to Solo play. Nothing too dramatic or too scary (no borrowing from D&D role-playing or similar spooky-to-wargamers stuff, at least to start), just outlining some simple mechanisms that we all use in Solo games (in one variation or another). Common Shares It has always seemed strange that more Solo waramers never felt the urge to share their undoubted wealth of knowledge and put together some collective guide on How to Play Solo Wargames. The people behind this effort all strongly believe that the dissemination of information, the discussion of ideas, balancing more realism and more playability, and finding some sort of common ground, is a good thing and is to be encouraged not shied away from. As Solo wargamers we can all adopt the Frank Sinatra "I did it my way", but that tends be a rather hard and lonely road. Far better to put forward a set of common ideas and goals, and set some sort of a platform from which future Soloists can grow. The intent here is to offer some generic advice that would apply to many periods of interest, and that could be run with many different “base” rule sets. So it doesn’t matter if a reader favors ancient battles, or the Napoleonic Era, Colonial wars, an ACW set up, or even WWII --- the advice is being presented in a generic enough way to be able to adopt most of it, without a big struggle. Why This Update? Chapt 1.3 Issue 0.2 3 Sept 07 Seems to me there are only a couple of good reasons to “revise” an old standard, whether we are talking about rule sets, or Solo game procedures. However, when the majority of the hardcover books are all 40-years-plus old, then several things pop to mind: 1. We may have more historically accurate information to do our simulation --- many of the old wargamers didn’t have the Internet nor all those historical research books that we take for granted, these days. And we have inexpensive copies of “primary text” available to us, in English for most periods, often as CD copies of Official Reports (OR’s) 2. We may want to integrate multi-level play (map, scouting, skirmish, battalion), where most of the old timers did one of the above, and rarely thought about trying to integrate all of them into a multi-scale-sized inter-related game. 3. We may want the ability to use more of an RPG (Role Playing Game) flavor, and then we can write up more interesting After Action Reports. We can improve the “Scrapbook” aspect (using digital pics, for example). This also includes using a more modern presentation for Psychological profiling, perhaps differentiating by the Ranks (Officers, NCO’s, and the Grunts). 4. We may want to explore what level of “uncertainty factors” we want, and also what levels of “variability” we want to allow --- things like sighting distances, firing ranges, and even charge ranges can vary, if we like. We choose the “Fuzziness” factor. 5. We may make better use of laptop’s (for write ups and orders), for e-groups (like SoloWarGames), and other web-resources (maps-on-line, Berthier software, other magazines on line, research through sites like MagWeb.com) 6. We may have a better understanding of our own motivational drives --- what keeps us playing an extended Solo campaign; so we can spice up our efforts with self- motivational input that keeps us interested over longer periods of time. 7. We may want to investigate some better time allocation --- working on parts of the hobby (like painting) or improving the Solo game itself (like more captivating AAR’s) that are of the most interest to us 8. It’s a condition of modern life that we all work (and play) within smaller slivers of time, and also within more compact spaces (thinking of using “scenes” now, instead of whole wargame tables, cause we may not have the luxury of the larger space). We all seem to struggle with the “portability” of our efforts --- finding ways of taking some part of the Solo game with us during the day, to use those slivers of time 9. We like to use different viewpoints, to keep the interest levels up. Not just the old staid bird’s-eye-view or “compassionate overwatch” where we play even-handed judge between to evenly matched sides that simply try to go at it, head-to-head. Equally, nothing says we can’t play the “bad guy”, trying to beat the system (or an Afghan trying to outfox the British Colonial’s stranglehold) 10. Most of us like to share some of our better Solo inventions in a somewhat more organized manner, as well as share motivational inputs (be they historical novels or movies as an example) with like-minded friends. Email and web-groups open a whole new venue for this sort of thing. We can even set up our own website and hook into like-minded web-rings, if we choose. Solo wargaming doesn’t have to be a lonely pursuit, any more! In fact, it is best when shared with different communities of like-minded friends. Nibblies One last point of advice! Sip, don’t gobble! Start slowly and enjoy the journey (it‘s like wine, it gets better with age) but give yourself time to savor and enjoy each step. There is enough information here to choke a horse --- Too much too soon causes frustration, disillusion and causes people to quit. The road to becoming a happy Solo player is littered with people who galloped ahead and adopted more and more complex systems before they became comfortable with playing less complex Solo games. This is, or should be, a journey of discovery and it’s objective is FUN first and foremost. Its not a question of inability to rationally “understand” the more-advanced Solo concepts, but more a question of getting “comfortable” with playing a game that evolves further and further away from what we might have experienced with face-to-face play. The strange thing is, that as you progress you will realize the shortcomings of certain aspects and then begin to address them, one at a time, checking at each stage that the adjustment does not throw other things out of kilter. Solo play isn’t better or worse, just different from tournament play. But the ability to tailor a game to OUR way of thinking becomes addictive, to the point that few long-time Solo players would ever want to go back to “just” playing face-to-face opponents.