Wargames are not 'Playing Toy Soldiers'
Gluing guns to your pieces does not make boardgame into a wargame.
The Fatigue rules in Chainmail stick out when compared the rest, not only because most wargames do not include sufficient rules for troops to tire, but because they are the least of the rules by rank in quality.
Men Don’t Change
One of the more interesting parts of historical observations of antiquity is the unchanging nature of man. The concept I would like to bear to mind specifically is the movement speed of figures on a battlefield.
The marching speed, and troop movement rates of large contingents of men for war are practically identical in the modern age as they were to the Romans.
What this means, is that we can use modern understandings to color our investigations and gain meaningful insight.
The modern US Army marching speed is ~120 BPM with a 30 inch step1.
Some quick maths would give us 60 inches of movement per second, 5 feet, over 60 seconds is 300 feet per minute. If we convert that to yards we are looking at 100 yards in one minute at a standard marching pace.
What might surprise you, is that the movement rate of a Heavy Foot troop in Chainmail is 9 inches per turn. This would only surprise you if you didn’t know that the ground scale was such that 1 inch is equal to 10 yards, and that one turn is equal to one minute.
That means our Heavy Foot, moves 90 yards in one minute. Assuming that a Figure on the table represents 20 men in a tight formation, it is beyond reasonable to assume a healthy 90yards per minute can be traversed while performing a standard marching maneuver.
Hitting the target
Lets look at another angle, archery.
One might think that the designers of Chainmail looked at the range of movement, the types of armor, did some math, and decided that it felt right for an archer to be able to loose an arrow 15 inches, and you would be wrong.
If we remember that Chainmail uses a scale of 1 inch to 10 yards, we can see that 15 inches is 150yards, or 300 feet.
Reading any literature on longbows of the mythic English and Welsh will give you very different numbers, but 200 yards seems to be a broadly accepted distance for minimum military target practice. If we look at various accounts of the famous ‘Battle of Agincourt’ the bowman were setup to start firing at approximately 200 yards.
This would tell us that while the bows *can* fire rather comfortable into the 200 yard range, is it not their optimal distance.
Let us look back to Chainmail, Longbows fire at 21 inches, and regular bowman fire at 15 inches. These numbers are very acceptable as historical assumptions, even with modern understandings and investigations.2
Money Makes the World Go ‘Round
Troops on the march will only do so for a very small list of reasons.
To take a famous and extensively documented case, we can look to the American Revolution under George Washington. I will not make comment on the campaign as a whole, or to Washington’s ability as a general, but one undeniable fact is that he, multiple times, made drastic and unprecedented movements with his troops based on the availability of money.
When faced with a congress that hadn’t promised more money, he knew that his men wouldn’t continue, no matter how noble the cause may be.
The stability of pay, food, and supplies to an army on the march is practically the most important factor to the men doing the marching.
If we look to Chainmail we see rules for establishing where the baggage train is, and how troops will react, *in the middle of battle* to being too close to it without an enemy to fight— they abandon their military duty and run to the money!
This rule, combined with the Instability due to excess casualties rules, demonstrate and understanding of realty, warfare, and the actions of men when placed in such stressful situations.3
It’s Still a Game
But there must be a game, here. These are war-GAMES after all. The ability to actually process actions and reactions outweighs the simulation of every detail.
Some rules are in the book for the experience at the table. This is contrast to rules that need to be made up.
One one hand, we have rules such as ‘how many casualties do a volley of arrows produce’. This cannot reasonably be simulated or depicted with any kind of accuracy at a playable speed. We must find some sort of playable answer and move on.
On the other, more egregious hand, we have rules that break the simulation on purpose. They go against the grain of the wargame, they break the connection to reality on purpose, making a line in the sand that his part of gameplay is more important than nods to reality.
Fatigue
It is insulting to even entertain the notion that trained soldiers would be ‘weary’ after marching for 5 minutes at a standard pace, and reaches a level of absurdity difficult to articulate with the English language.
From Chainmail:4
FATIGUE
Continued activity brings on weariness:
Moving 5 consecutive turns.
It isn’t for the simulation, this one is for the game.
One of the many concepts that is prevalent when playing wargames is this push and pull from realistic simulation to playability. What staples wargames to their place of honor is the unrelenting drive to keep as much simulation in place as possible, while giving as few quarters to playability as necessary.
Wargaming is a serious hobby. It is complex, refined, mature. It is a template for life: you should strive to understand, improve, and demand excellence of everything you do. You should find a group of people you trust, and you should collectively drive each other to be better. You should learn from history, and aim to brighten the future.
While it is all fun and games to talk about marching, no one is actually out there measuring steps and blasting a metronome. There is obvious variance but we will use these numbers for now. I believe that most marching is at a slightly slower pace, 112-116 BPM, but this doesn’t change my point.
One of my favorite bits of math that come from game design comes into play here. Indirect fire in Chainmail reduces effective range by 1/3, which would play the longbow at indirect fire, 1 inch shorter than standard bows at standard range. Nothing to do with history, but a very beautiful way the math works in favor of playability and diversity of actions.
Also important to add the rules for mercenaries. The rules of chainmail are very clear to point out that elite mercenaries are quite a bit more useful and able than most troops. You might take this to be ‘gameplay balance’ that they are such a fickle lot, but this point is taken directly from history. In the period that chainmail is attempting to emulate, serious and full time mercenaries were rare. Most men engaging in war were knights or levees. Having a large swath of professionals would have been a large, difficult to control, boon.
Do I need to do some copyright shenanigans ? I wrote words from a book written by someone who died a long time ago? I hate this timeline.