 | British Army Tactical Wargame (1956) | |
Playing the Game by Martin Rapier
We played a game last week using the recently de-classified British Army Tactical Wargame rules from 1956 - very interesting, as essentially it is entirely a planning game - designating axes of advance, forming up points and most importantly, a timetable/coordination plan for the all the various activities so e.g. a full divisional assault takes 24 hours to plan, whereas a hasty Battalion attack only takes a couple of hours.I went for the players vrs umpire approach to avoid having teams of umpires and split tables, and it all worked very well. The commanders (representing divisional or corps commanders) have absolutely no influence on a particular engagement once it has started, apart from the management of reserves, they just have to wait and see what happens when it it resolved and they don't even know how long a particular engagement is going to be. Movement rates, force densities, casualty rates and chance sof success for particular engagement types based on OR from WW2 and Korea.
Not a normal wargame in any sense of the word, and not even that similar to other more modern military training games I've seen as it was designed as an OR research tool to investigate battlefield tactics in conjunction with tactical nuclear weapons in Germany.