Conference of Wargamers 2024

 Another July and another COW rolls around, a whole weekend of games. 

Once again we were back at Missenden Abbey, an excellent venue and a worthy replacement for Knuston Hall where we went for any years.  Some of the old abbey remains, but it is mainly a hotel and conference centre now.

This COW had the highest number of attendees and sessions ever. There was the usual scrum around the timetable and signing up boards on Friday evening. 

There were 42 sessions and I didn't have a hope of getting to all of them, but I'd planned to float around several to make notes.

The plenary session featured the Papal Conclave of 1559, and various machinations to elect a new Pope. I was cast as Cardinal D'Este, and while I had very little hope of being elected Pope, I managed to achieve all my other objectives by assiduously backing all sides, and being paid large sums of cash to woo mythical voters and run non existant assassination campaigns. My friendship which Machiavelli and Cardinal Sforza helped a lot with that. You may now call me Archbishop and admire my extensive estates. The game also featured street fighting in the Rome, conducted by Tim's lovely figures (above). 

I followed up with a trip to Nick Riggs "Challenger Troop Commander". This had come on a long way since Shrivenham, and now featured a real map and troop sized elements for each player rather than individual tanks. 

I'd only meant to observe but got roped in to command a troop of Leopard 2s. We were Canadian so used their slightly eccentric call sign system. Here are the chaps deployed in wedge. 

The enemy locations are those sinister red blocks, while our heroic tankers are the green ones. Only troop markers are on the map, we each maintain our own troop formations etc offtable.

My guys deployed in line to engage some red tanks. It costs an extra command point to manouvre in line, but provides maximum forward firepower. Each tank crew is rated for skill, and also one tank in each troop has a mine dozer as we have an obstacle clearance task. 

That was a lot of fun and nice to see how the game is developing.

Next morning I went along to Mark's wonderful War Plan Orange, which started with a video introduction to the balance of naval power in 1920 provided Bob Cordery. 

The game had an astonishing amount of moving parts, a strategic map using AHGCs Victory in the Pacific, technology development tracks, shipyards with current and in construction ships, naval squadrons etc. 

The current (1920) Japanese Fleet, small but mostly modern stuff. 

The US Fleet, large, but loaded down with tons of obsolete kit from before WW1, and the shipyards choked with half built battleships. 

The player team were the US high command, who had to deal with priorities for ship building, technical development, intelligence interpretation, overall strategic approach (War Plan Orange) and operational deployment. Each turn was a a year, and as new ships took a few years to build, launch and commission, a degree of forward planning was involved.

Eventually the Japanese attacked the Philippines in 1925(?), and their modern BC squadron inflicted heavy losses on the obsolete defending squadron. 

The US Fleet sailed to the rescue and a huge battle developed in Manila Bay. 

The US had just managed to modernise their fleet enough to win, and the Japanese were sent packing, despite their nascent carrier fleet. 

The strategic map, with the fleet counters. 

What a great game that was, hats off to Mark for pulling it off. Watching the USN command team go through the stages of storming, forming and norming into a coherent group was a joy to watch, and well done Chris Ager for figuring out how to become CinC and stay there. The only real wrong step the US made was to overly focus on battlecruisers, which were all duly sunk in the battle of Manila Bay, as were the Japanese ones, while the stately battlewagons rolled along.

In the afternoon I ran another session of my One Hour WW2, the Brochow 1939 scenario again as this had various more eccentric unit types compared to last years game, and more asymmetric forces. Battlefield from the north. 

As a reminder, this is set during the Bzura counteroffensive, so the Poles are attacking from the west and the Germans from the east!

Early exchanges of fire in the south as Polish cavalry face off against the 4th Panzer Div AT battalion. Unusually this is an encounter battle, whoever controls most of the six objectives wins. The Poles had a reinforced cavalry brigade while the Germans had part of 4th Panzer Div and SSLAH.

SSLAH push forward in the North against Robs Polish Cavalry, and are given a very bloody nose indeed. The Germans fed units in piecemeal up here.

Later in the game, the fighting concentrated on the south, as the Panzers with air and artillery support duelled with ever increasing numbers of Polish cavalry. The Germans had a superior combined arms team but the Poles were more numerous, and in the marshy terrain, rather more mobile on their horses.

It was all terribly unpleasant! Both sides knocked lumps out of each other, but on this part of the front the Poles have concentrated five combat elements against three German.

Battered Polish cavalry withdraw to reorganise. The Germans had superior resupply capabilities and the Poles didn't have enough logistics to keep all units up to scratch.

Sensing a weakness, the Panzers assaulted Brochow bridge covered by air and artillery under concentric fire from the Poles. 

It was the Germans last gasp however, and although they took the village, the tanks were ejected by a determined counterattack at which point the Germans conceded. A well deserved Polish victory. 

Many thanks to the players for taking part, and the positive feedback. Interestingly this session took much longer than our normal remote games, as the player teams engaged in a lot of discussion about various options as they got the grips with the characteristics of the various unit types and the game options.

That was followed by John Curry's session on British and German WW2 Tactical gaming. John has recently published a book collating various items of material. We started with the German approach, which was fairly rough and ready, and based on the 1934 Kreigspiel Fibel. 

A German rifle company advances across the sketch map against 'red' MG positions. The German approach was quick and focused on decision making rather than extensive planning. Parts of the exercise were also wound back to examine different approaches or address serious errors. 

In contrast, a detailed British "sand table" with a detailed terrain map. 

Another company assault, but this one was much more structured and took longer to prepare, plan and execute. We actually had to come up with a plan, issue orders etc. I had rather foolishly assumed this was the village clearing exercise from the 1944 manual, so did it by the book and found that the Germans had very unfairly put MGs outside the village!

John noted that one of the lessons of both WW2 and the Falklands was that all the outflanking manouvres practiced in training rarely worked in practice as, funnily enough, the enemy usually had units on their flanks too. In the end we stonked out way in frontally behind a ton of 25pdr fire.

Final wash up around the significant differences in approach. 

That was a really interesting session and we managed to pack a lot of stuff in.

In the evening was David Burdens updated version of SPIs City fight. This is played double blind by two teams on identical tables. This scenario covered red and blue trying to find a downed VIP.

One of the updated maps, it uses squares instead of hexes and the terrain and unit types are much clearer than the original. Units are activated individually and can fire, move or search - searching is a sort of battleships style unit location mechanism with a random element based on calling out the mega square (group of 9 squares) you want to search.

After a few turns, both sides had actually found something of each other! Those white counters are detected enemy units. Unlike battleships, the units can move away again of course, so you need to pin and destroy enemy elements before they can slip away. Easier said than done in a dense urban environment of course.

tbh I'm not sure that is something I'd want to play - it was quite slow and painstaking with an awful lot of modifiers to dice rolls going on, but it was quite a clever hidden movement system. The rules for the original Cityfight are available for download on the SPI games download site.

An interesting contrast was Pete's modern sewer warfare game, which was also fought double blind and used a variation of 5Core Company Commander for combat resolution.  This featured small teams of troops down in the sewers, and was pretty fast and furious. A key feature was various forms of illumination (torches, NVG etc), and the combat system used the shock and suppression dice familiar to various 5Core games.

The late night entertainment was John Bs very cheery "NKVD Special Squad", set in Leningrad during the worst part of the siege in January 1942. Here the comrades plan how to deal with treacherous Trotskyite saboteurs. I gather this session never took place and no-one attended it.

Sunday morning was Risto's excellent session "In the footsteps of our father's" covering a training pack of exercises for modern Finnish local defence companies in Karelia. Risto is a reserve officer in the Finnish army. 

It was a fairly typical training exercise, in this case covering a 'Blueland' company defence against a motorised battalion attack from 'Redland'. 

Each player team had a series of planning activities to undertake. Fascinating to me was the emphasis on signals security and concealment against a range of detection systems (thermal, cyber etc) which just didn't exist in WW2. The signals plan for the various force elements was a vital part of the defence scheme, and featured a lot of telephone cable! 

Various solutions were presented and discussed. Redland threw a spanner in the works by deploying a multi drone EW system which flew around jamming and collecting all the mobile phone signatures in the area. 

Eventually everyone had set up reasonable defences, which were refined in the light of various run throughs against an unfortunate Redland BMP2 recce platoon, which was mortared, shelled, blown up on mines, wiped out by NLAWs etc etc.

The final phase of the exercise was dealing with casualty evacuation, and a rather scathing comment to the team who had decided they weren't going to evacuate any casualties, and concluded with writing letters to the families of the soldiers killed in the battle.

As one of the participants commented, 'it was all very real'.

T

My final session on Sunday was Grahams excellent presentation on Diggers and Levellers in Northamptonshire. It was really interesting and I learned a lot of stuff about a period and movement I was ignorant about before.

That was a great weekend, there was something for everyone, the venue was fabulous and I even managed to sell more than I bought. Many thanks to the organisers and looking forward to next years.