A Fast Take: Limiting Command and Control in wargames - part 1

 

Josep Oliver, custodian of the exempilary wargaming blog, El desafío de las Águilas, has recently featured some guest posts by designer Fernando Sola Ramos entitled Mando y controlen los wargames (Command and Control in wargames). Full disclosure: I’m by no means a fluent Spanish reader, but online translation has come a long way from its early days; I wouldn’t rely on free online translation services if I was involved in trade negotiations, but the terms and rationales involved in a piece like this are familiar enough to grasp. Sr. Ramos’s article was brief but engaging and well-stated. Sr. Ramos identified six mechanical approaches that add an element of limitation to Command in Control (CiC), adding examples of use in a published game for five of them.*

I’ve been thinking about the problem of CiC in games for a while; about a year into posting A Fast Game, I wrote a short list of possible articles that would be interesting for both myself to write and visitors to read. Reflecting the limitations of Command in Control in wargames was near the top of that list, though I think I noted it in terms of “Fog of War”. I struggled to find an in-road to talking about this subject. In his article, Sr. Ramos approaches the question straight ahead – taking a half-dozen examples of how different game designers approached the limited intelligence question.**

Playing with perfect intelligence.

It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Here I would like to use Sr. Ramos’s post as a launching point to look at some variations on his themes. But I want to make it clear that I’m only following a trail that has already been clearly marked. I’m just looking at more of the landscape.

Sr.  Ramos begins his consideration with a succinct appraisal (reproduced here because he said it better than I could):

Of the combat functions applicable to military operations, three are quite well executed in wargames: manoeuvre, fires, and logistical support. However, intelligence gathering (…) and command and control are often relegated to the background or completely forgotten.

Sr. Ramos broadly defines four essential methods used by designers of wargames to mimic Command in Control issues followed by the game or series he uses as an example):

- initiative rolls for activation (leaders or formations) – Napoleon at Bay: The Campaign in France, 1814 (Avalon Hill, 1978)

The MMP edition of Tetsuya Nakamura's A Victory Lost.

- chit-pull formation activation – A Victory Lost: Crisis in Ukraine 1942-1943 (Multi-Man Publishing, 2006)

- through shared orders with a limited "budget" of orders – Panzer: The Game of Small Unit Actions and Combined Arms Operations on the Eastern Front 1943-44 (GMT Games, 2012)

Fernando Sola Ramos's first published work, the France, 1940 expansion (GMT Games,
2019) for James Day's Panzer. Sr. Ramos is also responsible for
Panzer: North Africa (GMT Games,2024). 

- activation of armies using points in card-driven games (no single example given here, but I’m sure everyone has at least one game in mind from their own experience)

- leadership-distance chain of command (Great Battles of the American Civil War series).

Formation attacks in Normandy '44 (Photo courtesy of Takeo Ichikawa, BGG).

 - limiting attacks to command formations (i.e. disallowing or limiting ad hoc formations). Sr Ramos didn’t mention a particular example here, but visually implied Mark Simonitch’s “ZoC-Bond” family of games was a good example.

I can’t fault the rationale here – of course there will be cases that might seem to straddle more then one model here, but it’s a solid starting point for what I’ve been looking to discuss.

So, let’s look at these, one by one. I’ll follow the list as Sr. Ramos laid it out. I’ll break my examination down into more than one part, mostly because my clarity of thought is probably not as keen as my predecessor, and I’ll probably get myself stuck in the tall grass on some of these. For clarity, I’m going to refer throughout to the design strategies or choices listed above as “models”.

 

Initiative rolls for activation

As soon as I read the description of this model, my mind immediately went to the Men of Iron series (GMT), probably because I’ve been helping my brother-in-law to punch and sort his copy of the MoI Tri-Pack, (Second Printing (GMT Games, 2026), now that after some confusion, he’s finally received his Errata Pack). I think this might be the purest form of the model at hand.

Volume seven of the Men of Iron series, Ermine: Battles in the War of the
Breton Succession, 1341-1364 (GMT Games, ~2027), is currently available
for pre-order on GMT's P500 page.

Men of Iron doesn’t have a turn structure. Instead, the scenario dictates which side begins the hostilities, and they choose a formation to activate. Each (colour-coded) formation, or Battle (hereon a capitalised Battle will be referring to a formation, lower-case referring to the scenario situation), is headed by a Leader – usually a member of that country’s nobility, sometimes its monarch. The first activation is a “Free Activation”, but every activation for that side is subject to an activation role with a d10; to activate, the result must meet the Leader’s Activation Rating or lower to achieve activation.

Reign of confusion. Longbowmen are no match for mounted
Men at Arms - Agincourt scenario from the MoI Tri-Pack..

The roll for the next activation receives a +1 Dice Roll Modifier (DRM) to the result. If that activation succeeds, the next has a +2 modifier, and so on (this is called Continuity). After the first failed roll, the initiative passes to your opponent, who takes their first Free Activation, then rolls for their second. The non-active player also has the option to wrest the initiative from the active player; this action is called Seizing Continuity and involves drawing a chit from a cup to establish success or failure. Some of the scenarios in the series may only have three Battles to a side; if a side manages to activate all their Battles successfully, the first Battle activated may be activated again. This isn’t likely to happen with the escalating negative DRM – in my experience you’re far more likely to fail your third Activation Check – but it’s possible.  

All up, it’s a simple, elegant mechanism to reflect the manifold variables at play in a battle at this scale – pauses in the action, second-guessing and missed opportunities – and adds the dense of the degree of collapse in command direction that marked the battles of the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period.

 

Chit-pull formation activation

I haven’t played any of what used to be called the “Red Box” series (the original Japanese releases were part of the shared-system Fierce Fight! series, which appeared in Game Journal magazine), so I can’t speak to those, but it’s formation activation by chit-pull is a mechanic that appears in a diverse range of tactical and operational games, from Ted Raicer’s Dark series to Hermann Luttmann’s Blind Swords and Black Swan† games (though in the latter the chits have been replaced by poker-sized cards).

A particularly short turn - just six activations.

One of my favourite implementations of this model is Christopher Moeller’s Brothers at War, 1862 (Compass Games, 2022). This is a brigade-level command tactical game, with regimental-sized units. As to be expected, a chit-pull activation system dictates which brigades are activated when, but there are some additional wrinkles to the model; also in the draw-cup are a number of Time markers (illustrated by a pocket-watch). As each chit is drawn, it’s placed on a chit track, which has some spaces marked with the same timepiece illustration. When two Time markers are drawn, the round ends, the cup is replenished, and the Turn marker is advanced.

Brothers at War is also a candidate for the leadership-distance chain of command model. 

A turn starts with one-or-two Time chits in the draw-mix, but each time the drawn chits reach a timepiece marked square on the chit track, another Time chit is added to the mix. This focuses the players’ attention on what they can do with each opportunity as it arrives. You need to keep your overall goals in mind as the game progresses, but you can’t count on your best units to be in exactly the right place at just the apt moment. The game requires the players to think on their feet and work within the parameters – or confines – of the available orders, without knowing what will be activated. I really like the challenge Brothers at War presents. And I’m pleased to share that, after a long wait, a second volume – Brothers at War, 1861 (Compass Games, ~2026) should be available later this year or early 2027.

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So, there’s the first part of my fast take on Fernando Sola Ramos’s CiC-limiting models. I’ll try to cover the remaining four models in Part 2, which I hope to post inside of a fortnight, but expect it when you see it.

I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments. Let me know what  Command-in-Control models you prefer, or if you like to play your games in God-mode.

 

* I would encourage readers to go read this article themselves. If you open it in a Chrome browser it should offer to translate the text into your preferred language. You can find Sr. Ramos’s original article here. Sr. Oliver has since published two more pieces by Sr. Ramos, both well worth your time. In the most recent one he deals separately with the issue of Fog of War in games. I realise not conflating FoW with the limitations of CiC was probably what tripped me up in my own efforts to write about the subject.

** I call it a problem here. It’s obviously not a problem for some players – a few even resist any kind of limited intelligence in a wargame, and that’s cool – follow your bliss. But you’ll always be dipping into the shallow end of the pool, don’t try to tell me otherwise.

† For reasons known only to the arbiters of order at Boradgamegeek.com, the Black Swan series does not warrant its own series heading. But what would I know? Maybe it’s true that Black Swan games are really just “Blind Swords” games with the serial numbers filed off.