Modding One Hour Wargames, Part 1: The Basic Elements

As nearly everyone starting to dabble in One Hour Wargames rules and scenarios, I started to keep a list of the amendments I’d like to make to better suit my view of certain eras and/or aspects of warfare. I have the impression that Mr. Thomas purposely simplified OHW rules-as-written (RAW) to the utmost extreme in order to maximize accessibility and speed of play, at the expense of almost everything else. And it's a perfectly valid approach, as testified by the fact that you can get tactically rich ‘haiku’ wargaming from the combination of one of the scenarios, random force rolls and the RAW.

Of course, several of the tactical nuances characterizing conflicts of given era are lost in this sort of broad-brush depiction; basically, I’d like to inject some extra period flavor in my OHW games, while keeping its minimalistic simplicity.

You might ask why I want to modify OHW instead of using one of the many, (and more detailed) rulesets available on the market. Well, first and foremost because I’m a rule junkie and I really like tinkering with stuff. But in addition to that, because I think that the majority of wargames published these days are seriously over‑engineered, with a plethora of complicated procedures which often fail to actually add something to the game when compared to their predecessors. I’ve become convinced that one can build reasonably good models of various types of warfare by judiciously combining the basic elements found in OHW’s rules.

Now, OHW seems so simple and bare-bone that it’s easy to dismiss it as trivial or boring upon first skimming through the book. But I’ve found that its recipe is surprisingly rich, and some of the ingredients are not immediately self-evident on first reading. This is a list of how general warfare concepts are modeled in OHW:

1) Combat endurance: Hits (representing casualties, morale erosion, supply depletion), Armor
2) Lethality: inflicted hits per attack (possibly dependent on target)
3) Power projection: Attack ranges, Attack arcs, Line-of-sight requirements
4) Asymmetric unit protection: ‘Vulnerable’ arcs of units
5) Assault Capability: how units can/cannot combine movement and attack
6) Mobility and Maneuverability: Movement allowances; Restrictions on pivoting
9) Density and Concentration of Force: Actual size and shape of the unit, Interpenetration
10) Terrain: access completely restricted or limited; situational advantage/disadvantage for attacks
11) Engagement and Evasion: Movement in melee and/or under attack. Imperviousness to some attacks.

I've come to realize that this list contains all the basic elements needed to (coarsely!) model force on force interactions of just any kind at a sufficiently high unit level (think brigades/legions rather than battalions/maniples). Even though some universal aspects of warfare – like fog of war or battle tempo – seem blatantly absent at first sight, I think it’s possible to model them implicitly via careful combination of just those basic elements and their emergent interactions (but I’m jumping ahead of myself here)…

My point is that if a given OHW ruleset feels too bland, unhistorical or tactically ‘flat’, it’s just a minor design problem, in the sense that the system itself is flexible and robust enough to be made to work somehow – you only have to tweak it to your satisfaction. And that’s exactly what I’m planning to do in the immediate future! I already have tons of ideas I’m jotting down in these days… OHW rules (ahem)!

However, I want to be sure I really understand the RAW in all their ramifications before I commit to anything. In the next posts, I’ll discuss each (…most? …several? …at least a few?) of the basic elements listed above.