One-Hour Wargames: First Impressions

A few weeks ago I started to find mentions of the book “One-Hour Wargames: Practical Tabletop Battles for Those with Limited Time and Space” by Neil Thomas in several of the blogs I follow. This book seems to have made quite an impact around 2014-2015, then the interest somewhat waned in the small portion of the blogosphere I routinely check – but there are people out there who keep using these rules almost exclusively to this day. This has to mean something, I reasoned. Moreover, I’m a firm believer of the fact that complicatedness (as opposed to complexity!) in wargame rules is seldom necessary, and – very often – the result of sub-optimal design. Due to this, the main premise of the book intrigued me; I ordered the book and just devoured it in one go. First things first: English is not my native language, but I’ve found Thomas’ prose concise and vivid at the same time- a very pleasurable read.

You can tell whether I liked a book or not by the number of earmarks and improvised bookmarks. I count 3 bookmarks and 2 earmarks on OHW – not bad for a page count of around 150!

I’m not going to provide a detailed review of the book here: first of all because many bloggers with finer minds than mine already did. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check these reviews first:

https://johnswargames.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/one-hour-wargames/
http://shaun-wargaming-minis.blogspot.com/2014/11/ancient-game-with-8-yo-daughter-and-one.html
http://daleswargames.blogspot.com/2019/12/one-hour-wargames.html
http://hereticalgaming.blogspot.com/2014/09/neil-thomas-one-hour-wargames.html
http://keefsblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/one-hour-wargames.html
http://darkages40and25.blogspot.com/2014/11/neil-thomas-one-hour-wargames-review.html
http://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-solo-wargaming-guide-and-one-hour.html

I think there’s a clear overall trend emerging:

1)     Everyone agrees that Neil Thomas’ OHW rules are very simple.

2)      A not insignificant fraction of reviewers/commenters think that they are too simple to be actually enjoyable as a wargame; but most think they’re just fine.

3)      Among those who think they’re fine, most say that they are perfect for casual/occasional gaming, novices, kids, spouses, etc; a precious few think that they’re just really fine as a full-fledged wargame, with no tags attached.

4)      Everyone agrees on the fact that the scenarios are very cool and supremely useful even if you don’t plan to use OHW rules.

5)      Everyone is compelled to write house rules and mods immediately upon reading the book – often you see variants and mods discussed in the reviews themselves! These rules can’t be left alone. I think the above happens for two distinct reasons:

5a) Rules themselves are short, but they’re not tournament-tight as presented in the book. It’s not like there’s anything strange or difficult about the rules themselves – but Thomas always describes the various game procedures in simple (but somewhat vague) terms rather than specialized jargon. So, players are practically required to come up with their own answers to several open questions before (or during) play. Fortunately, that’s not difficult at all – and you can find several perfectly fine examples in the blogosphere (along with some very thoroughly-considered examples, e.g:

http://ecw40mmproject.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-missing-in-one-hour-wargames-rules.html)

5b) OHW rules are very robust, but at the same time very bare-bone. This combination makes everyone (myself included, I confess) want to beef it up in some way, often before actually trying them out first.

Before I continue, I’d like to elaborate a bit on point 5b above. In many ways, I find there’s a strong conceptual link between what 1^st edition D&D does within the ‘RPG continuum’ and where OHW resides in the ‘wargame continuum’. Before the recent ‘old-school renaissance’, which brought forth a wide re-evaluation of mid-70’s roleplaying games as valid and functional designs, they were often ridiculed as ‘too simple’ and ‘primitive’ by RPG players from the early 80’s on. Just as an example: in the ‘original D&D’ (often called ODD) rules-as-written, entering combat means simply trading blows in turns, with successful strikes whittling a (very limited) pool of hit points. Accruing hits have no mechanical impact unless you tick all of them off – in that case, you’re toast. Sounds familiar? Well, it’s almost exactly identical to the combat mechanism used in OHW – in fact, the combat rules found in a (very cool) ODD-inspired game actually are the mechanical equivalent of OHW: https://www.bastionland.com/ [Edited to add: I can’t believe it, but when I opened the Bastionland blog to paste its url here I found a mention of… Neil Thomas’ OHW! Now that’s some synchronicity, or serendipity, or something].

 

 

Still the best version of D&D... provided that you know how to approach it. Source: WoC website

The point is, there is literally nothing else in ODD’s combat rules. You can’t scan through your character sheet, find a cool power, and say “I’ll use this to win” - because practically nobody has got cool powers. Entering combat is often just accepting to trade damage for damage until one side collapses - which is (1) not very fun, and (2) often a losing proposition from the start. So, how do you approach combat in ODD if the rules themselves don’t offer you anything useful to work with? The most popular answer is that you basically don’t. Since there are no advantageous expected outcomes in a straight ODD fight, you must not accept fair fights; you should instead maneuver your character into a better fictional positioning before committing to an attack. Yeah, ODD rules don’t really encourage heroic combat – they encourage war. The interesting thing is that this is not achieved through explicit rules, but with their absence. I think people used to call this ‘the fruitful void’ in Forge RPG theory jargon a long time ago.

What I’m awkwardly trying to hint at is that rules in OHW basically do the same thing. If you just engage enemy units frontally, one-on-one, in clear terrain… the resulting game is quite dull (the same might be said about Arty Conliffe’s masterpiece Crossfire). But! Since no one has much to gain from this kind of fighting (you’re just accepting to trade damage for damage, with a very costly victory likely going to whoever initiated combat)… the game is effectively telling you that you must try to pile on whatever kind of ‘extra’ advantage you can muster. There’s no ‘lazy’ playing in OHW – each move poses a small tactical question, however basic or abstract. And the rules are so lean and transparent that you find yourself mostly thinking about your tactical choices rather than about rules themselves – a rare accomplishment in wargaming.

Before going on, I’d like to stress that OHW’s simple rules cannot be judged in isolation. As the author himself notes in more than one occasion in the book, the chosen scenario is a fundamental part of the toolbox. In other words, the game cannot live on the strength of ‘rules’ itself; in a direct parallel to an established mantra in the ODD community, the game only puts the player in an interesting situation and empowers him with meaningful, impactful choices. In absence of any of the two items, functional gameplay is seldom obtained. In addition, OHW also provides another tool of almost equal importance: random force selection rolls. If you take the number of tactical questions posed by each scenario, and multiply it times the different ways in which you can answer them with different force compositions, then again times the nine different period rulesets… You can get an awful lot of thought-provoking tactical exercises from this book – I’d say much more than what you typically get from many mainstream games of comparable (or much higher) complexity. Excellent!

However. While all of the above might mean that we’re looking at a very good game, nothing I said so far does guarantee that we’re looking at a very good war-game. Think about chess and draughts. They’re surely tactical and thought-provoking games, but nobody would consider them wargames… I think the main distinction to make here is about which kind of tactical questions the game poses. If the rules reward and punish player choices on the basis of mechanisms that are too far divorced from what a real military commander would take into consideration, then the game is probably not a ‘real wargame’, at least not in the sense I mean. But OHW rules are laser-focused on rewarding sensible, down-to-earth tactical choices that result in broadly historical behavior if answered conservatively (with some exceptions that I will almost certainly ramble about in future posts).

Some of these choices are rewarded in an explicit fashion: e.g. “when fighting in close combat, it is 200% more advantageous to attack the opponent’s flanks rather than its front”. But most of those explicit rules also create a cascade of implicit rewards to reap. As an example, even if you can move your units however you please, forming an ordered battle line is often advantageous, simply because it’s the most convenient way of not exposing your flanks to the enemy. There are many other examples of these implicit effects in OHW, with direct consequences on fire discipline, time/space trading, concentration of force, reserves etc.

To wrap everything up: there’s much, much more than meets the eye in OHW. And since every little detail is important, rules for the nine historical eras definitely do not offer the same gameplay. I did not playtest all of them yet, but my impression is that some of the nine rulesets are totally legit (in fact, brilliant) little wargames, while others are quite weak and unsatisfactory, for a variety of reasons. I’ve got the same feeling from the scenarios: some of them seem to be worthy of dozens of replays, others give the impression of being quite boring (in some cases, only when played in some of the eras) or artificially ‘gamey’.

Anyway: since this ‘first impressions’ post is probably longer than what you need to read to play your first OHW game, I think it’s time to call it quits. I’m planning a series of posts to discuss One Hour Wargames in further detail.