New book by Stuart Asquith and new book on naval wargaming

Barry Carter's Naval War Games 1975 had a simple set of rules for WW1 and 2 combat.. It was a key book getting people into naval wargames after Don Featherstone's book on naval wargames. The rules are still used today for solo or two player games, where the aim is to play a WWII naval campaign in a single day.

The second book is Stuart Asquith's Wargaming 18th Century Battles; Including Rules for Marlburian Warfare 1702-1714. This book is a compilation of some of a key contributors best work into a single volume. It is the 2nd of a 7 book series to celebrate the work of Terry Wise and Stuart Asquith.

I was greatly assisted by Arthur Harman in the preparation of these works.

The project is now moving into the next phase, in which the majority of work will be previously unpublished material from the history of the hobby and from the current practice of professional wargaming.

New Book: It Could Happen Tomorrow! Emergency Planning Exercises for Health Service

After four years hard work, the Project has now published another book on serious games. this time bringing together some of the best practice in using games to help prepare health services for emergencies. Written by Russell King, it is the first book in this area.

 

Blurb from the back cover:

 

"Russell King has been a career health service manager and teacher across Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Manchester and London, specialising over the last 10 years in emergency planning and management, and collaborating with academic institutions in reviewing the broad range of activity in health emergency management in the UK.

 

Since the year 2000, there has been a heightened awareness of the need to apply emergency management and business continuity techniques to essential national infrastructure and commerce. Going back much further than that, hospitals have been prepared by formal plans to receive sudden and large numbers of patients as the result of major incidents. Russell King's retrospective review of exercises that he has written and moderated over the last 10 years is not only a historical review of preparation for catastrophe over that key time, it begins also to answer questions about the true value of exercising for disasters for senior managers and places the discipline of exercising within a wider systems planning context.

 

Contents include exercises on responses to natural disasters, a pandemic, a wide-area sporting event of world attention, as well as hints and inspiration for a wider range of exercises on supply chains, general business capacity, one-off unusual challenges, and receiving dignitaries in the aftermath of challenging events. The aim of the exercises is to give a realistic but economic method of exercising which will take a minimum of time and not disrupt day-to-day functioning of the organisation. Concise and simple explanatory notes are provided for non-health care and non-UK audiences so that the breadth of utility of these techniques can be taken up and used by a broad audience.

Useful for beginners and advanced practitioners, Russell King's account of his work in this field has been prepared in collaboration with the History of Wargaming project. "

Another Year in the History of Wargaming Project

Over the last 12 months, the Project has seen many people kindly donating material to the History of Wargaming Project. Some of the highlights include:

     Douglas Inglis (Director and Research Professor. The Texas Tech University Center in Sevilla) donating a huge collection of board games that document the development of modern wargaming. It will take me several more years to sort this lot out.

     David Bradley, Essex UK, for donating a collection of unpublished material about Lionel Tarr

      Isaiah, Athens for inspiring me to start the production of Featherstone's Wargames through the Ages series vols 1-4

     Peter Perla for supplying some early USN wargaming rules

     John Davies, with the assistance of Iain Russel Lowe, donated further material about Paddy Griffith's Wargames.
 
     and many others...

Plans for the next 12 months? I am always somewhat guarded about my publishing plans as wargamers can get very disappointed if there are unavoidable delays in a publication schedule. An example is when I discover at the last moment, just days before a book is about to go to print, that I have a lead on lost material and perhaps, with effort and a bit of luck (and perhaps the assistance of the Oxford Detective Bureau), I can track it down and insert it as new book chapter.

However, there are some works that are definitely going to print in the next few months:

1) A new book, It Could Happen Tomorrow: Emergency Planning Exercises for the Health Service and Business- after 4 years of hard graft it is going to print.

2) A new book by the semi-legendary Stuart Asquith on wargaming 18th century warfare

3) A new book on Confrontation Analysis with Mike Young- a way of modeling real world conflicts.

4) A reprint of another naval wargaming book.

5) A work on military history with Charlie Wesencraft- a previously unpublished diary of a WWI cavalry man.

One of the moments that make it all worthwhile is when I receive an email from a fellow wargamer, who kindly takes the time to thank me for my efforts. For example, I received this from Larry Foster (USA) "I also want to thank you and let you know how much I appreciate all the work you've done editing Don Featherstone, Charles Grant, and all the others and their works on wargaming.  It has been a huge impact and help to me."

I wish all my fellow wargamers who enjoy our diverse hobby, a happy and peaceful new year. I hope to continue to provide more interesting material for your book shelves.

 

 

Reveille, Bristol (UK) Wargaming Show Sunday 29 November 2015

My local wargaming club's show is on 29th November 2015 at Lincombe Barn, Overndale Road, Downend, Bristol, BS16 2RW. Link

The usual mix of traders and participation games will be there between 10.00-4.00pm.

I will be there selling wargaming books and running a participation game about modern warfare. The game demonstrates the future development of the modern British Army. The game is designed to be straightforward representation of how the British Army is changing the way it is organized in the light of defence and manpower cuts.

The Relationship between recreational and professional wargames

I am speaking next week at the UK Connections Conference at Kings College London

Connections Conference

I am talking about the tricky subject of the relationship between recreational and professional wargames.

I am wrestling with tricky questions such as can recreational games be used for military training? What problems might occur?

If anyone has any thoughts, I would be most interested.

Celebrating WRG’s contribution to Wargaming

Bristol Wargaming Society, my local club, were pondering the world of wargaming; who had contributed to launching the hobby we all enjoy? Actually, there are only a dozen or so people who were instrumental in those pioneering days of the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s. The club wanted to arrange a local event to celebrate the contribution of WRG, in particular that of Sue Laflin-Barker and Phil Barker. So I found out when Phil and Sue were passing Bristol and invited them along to the day’s celebration and to mark the launch of Sue Barker’s new book, An Introduction to Ancient Wargaming using DBA 3.0.

 

The centre of the day consisted of a small DBA competition using DBA 3.0. DBA is very suitable for multi-game competitions, the games do not take too long and so the loser can rapidly field another army in another game in an attempt to exact their revenge.

DBA 3.0 game being played under the watchful eye of Phil

The day was also the opportunity of people to play DBA against Sue Barker in some friendly games (She used the figures and scenery from her new book). Sue demonstrated that German warbands were a formidable force against Roman blades. (If a blade is forced back by a warband it is destroyed). There were also tutorials on DBA 3.0 for the uninitiated.

Nick Pope, the club chair, looking despondent after being beaten by Sue

 

Some local clubs put on DBM participation games to demonstrate the rules and to encourage people to have a go.

One of the DBM games put on by the Abbywood Irregulars

 

The Hordes of the Things (HOTT) is a popular micro game, allowing fantasy armies from all genre’s to fight it out on the table top. The club expert spent the day showing people the rules and playing a series of friendly games.

Playing HoTT against Sue and Phil

 

The Barker’s wandered around the event chatting to people in the way that dedicated wargamer’s do, browsing the various trade stands. People took the opportunity to get them to sign various books and rules by them to the extent their arms started to get tired!

One table that caught everyone’s interest was the display showing a portion of the 55 set of rules/ books published by WRG from 1969 until today.

Some of the 55 books published by WRG

 

The event was only designed as a local event, and it grew somewhat beyond the original plan. Many people contacted us afterwards and asked if we could repeat the event, on a larger scale, with more publicity. Several WRG 6^th edition ancient enthusiasts were particularly ‘miffed’ they were not able to demonstrate one of the classic games of ancient wargaming.

It was very successful day, Phil and Sue enjoyed themselves.

Thanking Phil and Sue for the contribution of WRG

 

Wargaming at the RSA at Cities 2050 Conference, UK

When asked if I knew anyone who could run a game about the resilience of cities at an invite only conference, I jumped at the chance. I recruited Tom (SO2 Simulations, UK), Stephen (futurologist who deals with the weird as a career) and Russell (disaster planner of apocalypse proportions). The attendees were senior; a few MPs, top executives of major companies, emergency planner for the Nat Grid, Caroline Wyatt (BBC), emergency planner of London, someone from COBRA… The theme of the conference is our cities are getting to become very fragile systems. One problem and the city descends in chaos. The water stops and within 2 days the city will have to be evacuated as it becomes a waterless desert.

 

An extreme example was the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan was protected by a 10m wall, which was good, except the tsunami wave was 12m. In the ensuring disaster, the reactor came close to becoming Chernobyl. If it had, Tokyo would have had to be evacuated- all 30 million people of it.

Rather than death by PowerPoint, the conference organisers (Anquan Ltd) wanted some lectures, followed by some interactive exercises. We provided two of the exercises.

The first exercise was considering how cities could be adapted to become more resilient. The player teams were given a giant map; aerial photo of a city, with hexes on it. The terrain in each tile was the predominant use of that area of the city e.g. middle class housing, retail, slums, etc… That was not to suggest each hex only had one type of terrain in it, it was just the main feature. The photos came from Google Earth and standard software was used to superimpose the hex grid. The hotspot tiles were about the size of a UK beermat, as the map was very large. The players had additional tiles they could add to their city, such as mega blocks (dense concentrations of people living in a single building the size of a small town). They were also given examples of future technologies overlays that could help the city function more efficiently.

 

After exploring their city, they were faced with a problem. Due to rising sea levels, the lower regions of Bangladesh suddenly flood and the UN is faced by 85 million refugees. The UK is allocated 850,000 and each UK major city has another 100,000 people arriving over the next two years. The player teams were faced with the unenviable task of dealing with this crises. Due to their expertise, the problems of where to house, how to provide jobs, health care, education were not abstract to them. They understood the complexity of the challenge. Each team then presented their solutions, some hoping near future technology could be their salvation.

The afternoon session was a red teaming session. The groups all moved round one table (except for one person to explain the city to the new group) and then they had to devise strategies to break the city. Most of the participants were taken aback at this twist, but threw themselves into the exercise with gusto. It would be inappropriate to discuss how this assembled mass of expertise identified weaknesses in our city infra-structure.

The conference then carried on, with the delegates having the example city they had developed (and wrecked) to relate back to. What became apparent was the interdisciplinary nature needed to find solutions to the growing problem of city reliance.

So what are the general lessons? Conferences have to develop from the traditional model of one lecture after another; this fails. Devices from wargaming- the hex map, with abstract terrain based on the predominate usage, worked as a tool for visualisation. Adding counters to the map was an efficient way of communicating. Playing the enemy is a familiar concept to any wargamer. It was a wargaming hex map, with counters and an enemy side. Some elements taken from wargaming had made the leap into a mainstream conference.