Conference of Wargamers 2023

 The Conference of Wargamers (COW) has for many years been hosted at Knuston Hall in Northamptonshire, sadly the hall has now closed and is up for sale. In 2021, the conference was hosted (at quite short notice) at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, but this year we moved to a new venue in Buckinghamshire, Missenden Abbey.

The Abbey was founded in the 12th century, and has been extensively added to since then, although some parts of the original building survive. It is now a University conference centre and event/wedding centre, and ideal for our purposes with plenty of rooms for games, good on-site accommodation and fairly centrally located in England.

There are also lovely grounds and gardens to walk about in. Or possibly host lawn games...

I put on a couple of sessions, took part in a number of games and observed a number of others. I'll probably report on a number of the games as (short) separate posts, but a few highlights. 

The Conference opened with a large plenary game involving all the attendees and covering the opening days of the Weimar Republic in 1918/1919.

As might be expected, decadance and violence went hand in hand as the various factions vied for power. I was cast as Karl Leibknecht, leader of the Spartacists, I can't think why. As our brave street fighters were crushed by right wing Freikorps, it soon became apparent that Germany wasn't ready for world revolution, so we made our escape to Paris with 11 Billion Reichsmarks and enough weapons and ammo to start a small war. Better than ending up floating face down in a canal anyway.

I ran my venerable 'Good Morning, Good Morning' (WW1 in Three Turns) game on Friday night. It is a quick single player game covering divisional level trench assaults on the western front in 1916, 1917 and 1918. It first came to COW in 2001 but I have tweaked it a bit since then.

Mark F, one of our regular remote gaming group, put on  a big naval campaign game using a mish-mash of Nimitz and the old AHGC 'Battle at Sea' (?) WW1 naval rules.

Tim G, another Sheffield regular, put on a session with his 'Little World Wars' 54mm WW2 game. I was roped in to command the Support Company. The first outing for his 54mm British.

I took part in a great session playing Toms' The Information Game' - a military training game around modern (as in current) intelligence gathering and assessment. It has aspects of cyber and data management, so a bit coals to Newcastle for me, but very interesting to see how to game these non kinetic activities. I think we've found the target (finally).  

Graham ran an intro session for his new RCW rules ' It Rolls for Ivan', featuring lots of cavalry and a huge armoured train with lots of flags.

John C put on a game around mid 2022 operations in Ukraine using the current Fort Leavenworth tactical microarmour rules. A Russian company(+) vs a Ukrainian platoon(+). The rules 'bear a very strong resemblance' to Fistful of TOWs, albeit with weapons effectiveness data based on current intelligence. 

Along with his naval game, Mark F put on a Vietnam session, featuring the Australians. 

And Dave Burden put on one of the products of his PhD work on wargaming urban warfare, WW2 street fighting with 'Rubble Town'.

I took part in one of Russells ever cheery nuclear war planning games in the 'Wintex-75' series, set in the mid 1970s. This time we were the BBC editorial team tasked with coming up for the programming for the post attack 72 hour TV broadcasting loop, which involved a lot of cutting up of copies of the Radio Times. I was head of childrens programming, and managed to fit in Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley. We also managed to slip in an episode of 'Survivors', albeit the cheery Xmas edition, as well as repeats of the 1966 World Cup.

I ran my One Hour WW2 variant, with the Leshnov 1941 scenario. Here 12th Tank Division bravely assaults Leshnov.

Although sadly things didn't go quite as well for the rest of 8th Mechanised Corps as they were pocketed by 11th Panzer Division.

Finally I went along to Chris Ks session presenting the latest version of NQM. I'd already had a bit of a preview when I went down to Wellingborough to visit him. I was very pleased to see my suggestion of ammo depletion on a '6' had made it into the rules, so much more satisfactory for the firing player than depletion on a '1', and it has some vague real world justification that all those hits are because you've used up your ammo. I claim no great originality as the rule was originally in Victory Games excellent 'Hells Highway'.

Chris demonstrated the game with a few turns of a Soviet Army level assault vs a position defended by a Panzer Corps in 1943. It ended up involving every player in the room (well over a dozen people).

That was a great weekend, very enjoyable and a fabulous new venue which I hope we will return to in the future. As always it was great to catch up with people, and also to watch and play lots of interesting games.