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| In 1871, the victorious Prussian army parades in Paris. |
I’ve been dabbling in game design of
various types for a few years now, ever since a house move unearthed a box load of half-realised,
half-completed (and in some cases half-baked) ideas for a variety of table top
games, both war games and RPGs. One thing had changed since I had filled all
those notebooks with scribbles: the ability to self-publish games as
downloadable PDFs. Yay, I didn’t need a publisher! I immediately set about
producing my first game, Vectis, a
hex-and-counter war game of a hypothetical French invasion of the Isle of Wight
during the Napoleonic Wars. There was no real rationale behind this scenario,
other than it sounded quite fun.
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| The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, an 1871 novella by George Tomkyns Chesney, began the genre of invasion literature and was an important precursor of science fiction. |
Producing this first game sparked a memory
of a story I had read some years before. The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer was a novella published in
Blackwood’s Magazine in 1871. Despite its age it remains a remarkably good
read, which is probably why it was included in the Michael Moorcock-edited
anthology Before Armageddon, wherein
I discovered it.
The story, written by a serving officer in
the Royal Engineers called George Tomkyns Chesney, told of a successful German
invasion of England through the recollections, many years later, of a volunteer
who fought at the key battle near the Surrey market town of Dorking. Actually,
the nationality of the invaders is not once stated, but they do speak German,
which sort of narrows it down. Anyway, if you haven’t read the story, do so
immediately: it’s out of copyright so an internet search should take you to a
free Project Gutenberg version of it.
I won’t go on about the importance of the
story as a piece of literature, though I could at some length as the impact it
had was quite fascinating. Suffice it to say that Chesney’s very clear style of
writing coupled with his high degree of military knowledge give a fascinating
glimpse of how this imaginary conflict might have played out. Wow, I thought,
this is just crying out to be made into a game! So, that’s what I did.
I started out with the same rules engine I
had used for Vectis, which I had
based on some corps-level Napoleonic rules published by Wessencraft a LONG time
ago. Of course the rules needed adapting to accommodate advances in warfare,
which mostly boiled down to both rifle fire and artillery fire being more
deadly.
But even before I started trying out the
modified rules, I needed two credible armies. This required a lot of historical
research, some repeated readings of Chesney’s story and a bit of conjecture. I
based the German Korps on a Prussian Army List from the 1870-71 war. For the
defenders, I expanded upon the few regular British regiments specified by
Chesney, using Army Lists of the period (assisted by googling regimental
histories) to come up with a credible mix of units garrisoned in vaguely the
right part of England during that period. I could find no Army Lists for the
militia or the volunteers, so I’m afraid I just made up the battalion numbers
for these two forces.
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| Map for Dorking 1875 |
Next I needed a map. Luckily, the 1871
Ordnance Survey maps for England were available as an online resource,
unluckily not as downloadable files, so I printed the relevant ones out sheet
by sheet, stuck them all together and then set about simplifying them to a hex
equivalent. I wanted the basic unit of the battle to be the battalion, and set
the scale accordingly. A key element of the battle would be the ability of the
invaders to penetrate the defensive positions, so the battlefield needed sufficient
depth (North to South) to give some meaningful objectives for the German side advance
to. The breadth of the battlefield needed to be enough to give some options for
manoeuvre. Chesney’s description of the battle concentrates on the sector
between Box Hill and the eastern end of Ranmore Common: I widened the front
line to Brockham in the east and a little beyond Westcott in the west,
resulting in a pretty much square battlefield.
Past experience gave me an idea of the
right number of units to contest an area of this size. Referring back to the
research, these numbers equated to a bit less than a German division and a bit
more than two British divisions. To make the German division full strength I
would need to increase the British numbers too, and that would make the battle
a tad too cramped for my liking. But hey, this was a fictional battle, I could
invent my own rationale! So the Germans, I argued, had left a regiment behind
to guard their supply lines, while the British had thrown an extra brigade from
another division into the mix when it became obvious the hammer blow would land
at Dorking.
Next the game mechanics. I started with my Vectis rules engine. But warfare had
moved on and what worked nicely for Napoleonics was just too simplistic for the
1870s. The main infantry weapon was now the rifle, and artillery had advanced
considerably. In Vectis, units hit by
artillery fire would only be disordered: in Dorking, they might well be blasted
away altogether. So I added a rifle fire phase, where infantry or cavalry units
not engaged in melee could pour fire on an enemy unit within range. I also made
artillery fire more deadly: equalling the score needed to hit a unit would
disorder it, exceeding it by enough would destroy it (if it was out in the
open: one benefit of cover would be that units couldn’t be shelled out of
existence, only disordered). But just what sort of score would count as being
“enough”? Here I was able to differentiate between the two sides, as there is
little doubt the Germans had the better guns. So German artillery, depending on
calibre, needs to exceed the “to hit” score by 1 or 2 to destroy a unit in the
open, while regular British artillery needs 2 or 3.
That leaves the British volunteer
artillery… and this is a good place to talk about the volunteers. While the
militia was a government-funded part-time force, the volunteers were
privately-subscribed. You paid your dues, did some training in the evenings and
hey presto, you were a volunteer. While Chesney conjectured that the government
would issue what weapons it could to the volunteers, members were pretty much
expected to equip themselves. The thought of volunteer infantry and cavalry,
wandering around with minimal training and obsolete private weaponry, is scary
enough: but there was also volunteer artillery. Quite where they kept their
guns I’m not sure. Anyway, Chesney mentions that the volunteer artillery at
Dorking was “heavy” so, assuming they would have outdated equipment, I decided
they would be armed with 32-pounder smooth bore guns that had been in service
in the 1860s.
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| A 32-pounder smooth bore gun. This particular gun is 45 cwt (hundredweight). |
It was mostly straightforward to make the
volunteers the weakest units on the field – they have less Movement Points and
lower Break values than other units, along with a penalty to rifle fire rolls.
For volunteer artillery, though, I needed to introduce a separate firing table
to reflect their reduced range and accuracy compared to the regular artillery.
Another difference between the two armies
was the cavalry. Firstly, British cavalry regiments typically had three
squadrons while German regiments had five. How to reflect this? Luckily my
research revealed that one German squadron would be undergoing R&R at any
time, while the British would struggle to get all three of their squadrons
ready for battle at short notice. So, if I used one cavalry counter to
represent two squadrons, a British regiment would be a single counter while a
German one would comprise two counters.
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| Encounter during Franco-Prussian War |
Another difference that my research threw
up was that German cavalry tactics were evolving – certainly more so than the
British. While they weren’t averse to the occasional suicidal massed charge,
German troopers were increasingly willing to act as mobile infantry, harassing
in small numbers before melting away.
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| Dispersed Cavalry Table from Dorking 1875 |
Could this be simulated? Well, I wanted to
try. In the end I came up with the option to remove German cavalry counters
from the board and place them on a dispersal table with a corresponding
dispersal marker. Dispersal markers could then be committed to the battle,
effectively reducing the break value of the British unit they were placed on.
Of course, this couldn’t be risk-free to the Germans, so the British would have
a 1-in-6 chance of breaking a cavalry unit once it was committed to action in
its dispersed state.
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| The Martini–Henry was a breech-loading single-shot lever-actuated rifle adopted by the British Army. The Mks I-IV were in service from 1871-1888 in the British Army but remained in service throughout the British Empire until the end of WWI. In 2010 and 2011, US Marines recovered at least three from various Taliban weapons caches in Marjah. |
My final consideration was rifles. The
British has a brand new one, the Martini-Henry Mk.1. Looking at its
characteristics, this was very similar in range and accuracy to the German’s
Dreyse. But the Dreyse was phased out during 1871 to be replaced by the much
better Mauser. This made me think long and hard. Despite the advantages of high
ground and cover, the British had a lot of weak units and inferior artillery.
Inferior rifles on top of that could really skew the game balance. Also, I was mindful
that I didn’t want too many different rules for the different sides in case it
affected the game’s playability. So I did the responsible thing and utterly
ignored the Mauser, which for a battle set in summer 1871 was historically fine
as its arrival in service was delayed some time.
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| The Dreyse 'needle-gun' rifle was the first breech-loading rifle to use the bolt action
to open and close the chamber, executed by turning and pulling a bolt
handle. It had a rate of fire of about 10–12 rounds per minute. It was adopted by the Prussian army in 1841. |
Of course, none of this happened in such a
cut and dried way: the numbers of units, the mix of units and the finer points
of the rules were honed during playtests. Once I was happy that everything felt
“about right” (a highly scientific approach, then), more play-testing ensued to
come up with some victory conditions. What I wanted were conditions that would
reflect the fact that the invaders needed to push the British off the ridge to
the north of Dorking and also weaken their numbers enough for a later killer
blow. So I added a meandering line to the map that traced out the key features
of the ridge: the Germans would win points for each unit that ended the battle
to the north of it, modified by a bonus for each British unit broken (and a
penalty for each German one). Two key features in the centre would also earn
the Germans points if they were occupied at the end of the game.
With that decided, the final and longest
phase of play-testing broke out. This was a bit more scientific, as I needed a
certain amount of statistical confidence to set the thresholds for the various
outcomes of the battle.
Obviously I’m biased, but I was really
pleased with the balance of the game. If
the battle is going to be one-sided, it will be because of naivety from the
British player. Standing around in the open when the other side has Krupps
artillery is a Bad Thing – and so it should be. But sensible use of cover and
some well-timed counter-attacks can give the defenders a real chance of prevailing.
The game, resplendent with my very, VERY
basic artwork, was sold as 1871: The
Battle of Dorking for a number of years, and did pretty well really, both
in terms of reviews and sales figures (all things being relative of course, not
enough to retire on, believe me!). So when Mary emailed me to say Tiny Battle Publishing were
interested in buying the rights, I was in two minds. I mean, heck, this was MY
game! But then, Tiny Battle
Publishing could bring a level of production to it that I never could,
and produce a good quality printed version – again something I could never do.
So, I agreed to work with Mary and Tom to revamp the
rules. During said revamp I discovered an Inconvenient Truth: while the
original story was written in 1871, if you check the dates in it (which I now
did, belatedly) they actually correspond to 1875. Oops. Well, all I can say is
that Chesney based the course of the battle on what he knew at the time of
writing. This isn’t a simulation of an actual event in 1875, it’s an attempt to
play out a scenario imagined in 1871. So I think it’s justified to keep the
assumed equipment (and hence the rules) unchanged, even though the real-world Germans
would definitely have been using Mausers by 1875!
It has been great to work with Mary and
Tom. They never sought to impose changes – they were consultative throughout,
and the modifications they suggested were almost always improvements.
Also,
they brought Ilya Kudriashov to
the party as the artist: his work is great, especially when compared to my
efforts!
