You are not moving pieces on a board. You are a brigade commander at a table some way behind the firing line, with a map, a pad of order forms and a few orderlies. Everything you know arrives on paper and is already out of date. Everything you want done leaves on paper and takes time to arrive. If you try to play this game as though you were pushing counters, it will feel as though it is fighting you. It is not: it is modelling the thing that actually made command difficult.
The order pad is on the right, under the Orders tab. It is a printed form with four blanks in it:
Choose the officer, the task, the ground and the manner, then press Seal and send by orderly or the Enter key. You may also click a piece of ground on the map to name it in the order, or click one of your own blocks to select that command.
The manner is not decoration. It is the part of the order that decides whether the attack actually closes. With caution means he will stand off and shoot rather than risk his command. At all costs means he will go in and keep going in whatever it costs, and will not break off when the umpire asks him whether he ought to. Between those two there is a great deal of room.
There are no sides taking turns. Both sides' standing orders are carried out at the same time, in two-minute impulses, ten minutes to the turn. You are not asked to press a button between impulses; you set the clock running with Space and it runs until you halt it, an urgent report comes in, or the light goes. T advances ten minutes at a stroke.
Because of this, the useful question is never "what shall I do this turn?" It is "what will still be a sensible instruction by the time it arrives?"
The map is a hex grid; each hex is about a hundred and fifty metres across. You do not move units hex by hex. You name ground and your subordinate finds his way to it, keeping to the roads where the roads help. What you should know about the ground:
| Feature | What it means |
|---|---|
| The chaussée and lanes | Roughly twice the pace of open fields. |
| The Aulne | Runs along the hexsides. It cannot be crossed anywhere except at the two bridges and the ford — and those are worth points for exactly that reason. |
| Woods, villages, walled farms | Slow going, but they give cover from fire and are hard to take by assault. |
| Rising ground | Costs to climb, blocks a sight line, and lets guns on top of it shoot further and better. |
| Zones of control | A body that walks into the ground next to a formed enemy stops there. It cannot slide past. |
| Stacking | Two units to a hex, no more. |
Fire is physical and is worked out from the range: how far the rifle or the gun reaches, what formation the target is in, what cover the ground gives him, and the condition of the men firing. You can read every one of those numbers under Conventions. Nothing is hidden.
Everything above that level is judged. Whether a charge goes home; whether a battalion carries a farm at the point of the bayonet; whether shaken men stand, break or rally; whether an officer who has lost a third of his command goes on. There is no table for those, because in the free Kriegsspiel there was no table for those. An umpire decides, and he writes down why:
11.36 — Do they break?
2e/32e de ligneBroken. They are going to the rear and cannot be stopped by paper.
- they have lost more than two men in five
- no fresh support at hand
- they are among houses and will not be moved easily
the umpire’s die: 0.14
The whole book is in the Umpire tab, in order, for the whole affair. Read it. It is the best explanation of what has gone wrong that the game can give you, and it is the only one you get.
Your commands report every twenty minutes or so, and at once if something urgent happens. Every report is stamped with the hour it was written and the minutes it spent on the road. Read the first hour, not the second.
On the map, your own blocks sit where they were last reported. Enemy blocks are hollow and dashed: that is where an officer thought the enemy was, at the hour printed beside the block, with a strength he could only estimate. The dashed circle around it is how nearly he could place it, and it grows as the report ages. Press U and the umpire will show you the true position — he allows it, but you are on your honour, and it is not how the game is meant to be played.
Each scenario names a few pieces of ground and what they are worth. You score them by holding them when the light goes. Ground that neither side holds clearly is worth two parts in five. On top of that, the balance of casualties is worth up to forty-five points either way, so a victory bought by wrecking your own brigade may not be a victory at all.
The umpire announces a finding on a band — from The attack has failed up to Decisive Prussian success. Those bands are not guesses: two machine commanders were set to fight the Affair at Vieux-Moulin one hundred and twenty times, and the middle of Indecisive was placed on the median result. If you beat the machine you have done something the machine could not.
There is no way to lose outright before time, except by having nothing left in hand. An affair in which you have lost a third of your brigade and hold the bridge may still be the right answer.
| Action | Mouse and touch | Keyboard |
|---|---|---|
| Move the map | drag | Shift + arrow keys |
| Change the view | wheel, pinch, or the buttons | + − 0 |
| Select a command | click one of its blocks, or its card in the list | N / P |
| Name ground in the order | click the ground | — |
| Read a hex aloud | hover a block for its card | arrow keys move a cursor |
| Send the order | Seal and send | Enter |
| Clear the named ground | — | Escape |
| Run or halt the clock | Let the clock run | Space |
| Advance ten minutes | +10 min | T |
| The true position | Umpire’s map | U |
| The conventions | Conventions | C |