The Virtual Conference of Wargamers (VCOW) started during lockdown in 2020 and was so successful it has persisted as an annual event in winter as a supplement to the main summer conference. Here is the general session list. Some are open to all attendees to just turn up, some need to be booked but all are run via Zoom and Discord.
The VCOW 2026 session list is above, but that image is a bit hard to read, so here is a summary.
Friday- Virtual Battlefield Tour – Defence of the Realm 2026
- Welcome & Introduction
- Battle of Britain II 2026
- The Peninsular War
- Solitaire to Multi Player
- The Eagle’s Den
- Tactical Wargame ‘Accuracy’
- When Governments Play
- The Iron Curtain Descends
- 1066
- The Coral Sea
- The Omega Men
- Nuclear Wargames of Cold War 1
- Of AIs and Metaverses
- Eagle’s Flight
- Beneath the Med
- Practical Game Implementation
- If We Dare…
- US Army Wargaming
- Firearms in Popular British Music
Some of those game titles may sound a bit familiar, as we've played them already on our regualr Tuesday night sessions! I gave those a miss so other people could enjoy them. I'd also picked up a bug on my African travels and was feeling quite rough, so didn't want to commit to any booked sessions.
Despite not being very well, I attended several sessions though, first up was Micheal D'Alessandros excellent Virtual Battlefield Tour of the UKs air defences. A mixture of virtual trips around radar sites, control centres and gun sites from WW1 and WW2 and an overview of the current critical national infrastructure, air defences and likely enemy attack options.
It also included a consideration of situation when the UK was last under sustained cruise and ballistic missile attack - 1944/45, comparisons with readiness and resilience then and now.
I thought it was a fabulous session, very interesting and thought provoking and with links to tons of (public domain) material on the current situation. I'm frankly amazed that the RAF has as many fighters as it does.
On Saturday I attended Nick Riggs session on Tactical Wargame Accuracy. Nick had posted two different surveys around various wargames groups and forums and this session was a summary of the results. Some of my research gular readers may even have participated in these.
There was brief summary of the research aims of the surveys. I'll skip over a lot of the slides, and just pick out one or two.
And (many) charts showing the results. This was one of the headline ones.
And its converse about what they get wrong, with some write in stuff too.
Areas prioritised for improvement.
And some not very surprising conclusions. I thought the whole thing was very interesting, although obviously different people will have different ideas what a 'tactical' wargame is about. As I've often said on the blog, personally I think it is one of the hardest level of warfare to game due to both the intense fog of war and confusion, as well as very variable psychological impacts. Once you get to battalions and above it is much more about number crunching and eg the DSTL force ratio/posture/success tables are aimed at battalion/brigade sized engagements.
In the afternoon it was time for a cheery session, 'The Omega Men', a discussion panel around post apocalyptic games which become increasingly popular from the 1970s.
This sort of thing = Twilight 2000, Aftermath, Car Wars etc. We had a series of short presentations followed by breakout group discussions and feeback sessions around particular topics eg what was the appeal?
I like the mix of presentation and interaction in these sorts of sessions, but I have to confess I've actually played very few of these games at all - maybe Car Wars and Zombies. I prefer to get my post apoc fix from books, TV, films and playing computer games, particularly the outstanding Fallout series. It was interesting to reflect on the enduring popularity of these games though, presumably the result of most of being fed a never ending diet of disaster films/TV shows and growing up the shadow of the Bomb and climate breakdown.
Omega Men was followed by an even more cheery session on nuclear wargaming! This covered both hobby and professional games over several decades. Dr Curry had actually given this talk in the US as a prelude to a session on modern (as in current) nuclear wargaming, in a world which is rapidly moving away from MAD etc.
This was one of the hobby games I didn't have, although have (and still have) quite a few nuclear wargames including the classic 'Ballistic Missile'. The professional games were perhaps more interesting, although I've played a few of the declassified ones and it was nice to get namechecked for my contribution to the re-published '1956 British Army Tactical Wargame' - which isn't tactics but operations, and includes tactical nuclear weapons.
A lot of the professional games were committee/decision type games although some were technical ones around strike planning. During the session we were presented with some of the decision points in the games to work on as groups eg in 1961, the DDR shoots down a NATO cargo plane in the Berlin air corridor. What is your response? An interesting problem as 1961 is pre Berlin Wall, there is no Kremlin hotline and NATO powers didn't recognise the DDR government.
I particularly enjoyed the missile allocation sub-game with missile availability and reliability rates, how many (nuclear) missiles do you allocate to each of 20 targets to ensure their destruction. You can try that at home, missile availability 75% and reliability 75% (which is wildly optimistic based on test firings of Polaris).
It was a really good session, and the very short group activities which interspersed it helped to break it up and made it very engaging.
A bit of lighter relief was Nick Riggs 'Practical Wargame Implementation', which was essentially a demo of how to set up a game from scratch on Table Top Simulator. it was something I vaguely looked at during lockdown as a means to run remote games, and tbh, setting up something from scratch looks horrendous. Fortunately, there are zillions of pre-done games which other peopl have made, which saves a lot of hard work, and the user interface for actually manipulating the pieces is very nice indeed.
I think for around 15 quid, that is well worth a pop.
I also attended James Langhams session on US Army Wargaming, 1948 to 2019. I'm already familiar with the some of the older games which were essentially TEWTS or staff rides (often across ACW battlefields!), but the umpires guide is very handy as it includes umpire notes for resolving combat etc.
The core of the discussion was around the pros and cons of the 1970s era Dunn Kempf rules, largely based on the modern WRG set, as well as touching on 'Firefight' and the Canadian Army's 'Contact'. I do have a copy of an operational set of US Cold War rules too, whose title escapes me right now.
The core of James argument was that the rules were overly focussed on technology, with little account taken of quality and command issues. Given DK are based on WRG, that is entirely reasonable. Their big strength was that it gave individual units the ability to fight out hypothetical engagements in their actual area of operations using tables modelled on their assigned areas in Germany, which they hadn't really had before.
There was a really good discussion around this one, although it is possible we may have got a bit side tracked as to when NATO noticed the T62 had been superceded by the T64 and T72. Interestingly the 1978 British Army Tactical Wargame was still putting Chieftans up against T62s, so it wasn't just the Americans....
That was followed by a more light hearted examination of firearms references in popular music from the 1940s to the twenty first century. My humble contribution being 'Armalite Rifle' by the Gang of Four, and I was cursing as I belatedly remember the Clash referencing both Thompson SMGs ('Tommy Gun') and Stens, as in the line 'Sten guns in Knighstbridge' from '1977'.
That was a great (virtual) conference and I'm really glad I could attend, particularly after missing COW 2025.
No comments:
Post a Comment