Solo Miniature Wargaming (Part 1)

Solo wargaming did not come naturally to me. I don't like to think of myself as competitive, it goes against my upbringing but I will confess that there was a time when facing an opponent across a table full of miniatures brought out a powerful urge to win in a younger me. When I retired early to the country with most of my gaming opponents living anywhere from 100 to 2,000 km away  I decided that I needed to learn to play solo.

Stuart Asquith and Don Featherstone were my main guides, helped somewhat by CS Grant's Programmed Scenarios and a slough of other incidental sources. The result is recorded in my 2008/9  Game a Week blog   where 39 of the 52 games were played solo as I taught myself how to do it and have fun. The battle reports are very brief and say little about how I did it, but those games laid the foundation for my enjoyment of the solo aspects of the hobby since then.

A face to face game with friends still trumps a solo game, and I enjoy the occasional game via internet video chat though I could really use better equipment and better lighting for hosting, ( See Posts about miniature wargames via the internet .) but solo wargaming is now a leisurely joy to me in its own right rather than a desperate last resort.

Sep 2013: Rob's view of a Rough Wooing game on my table 2,000 km away.

There are a lot of ways to go about solo gaming but for now I'm just going to write about how I go about it. Feel free to leave questions in a comment, or if shy by sending me an email (address at top of blog). No questions are "dumb" or offensive, all are welcome.

OK, this intro is getting  a bit long so I'll have a quick look at how I get started once the decision to play is made  and the next post will get into a play by play account of a game including how and why decisions were made and so on.

The first thing I do is pick a period and scenario and adapt it to my troops, rules and setup. I find published scenarios invaluable for putting some exterior limits on myself though if push comes to shove, there is always the option of writing up a new scenario when none of the 300 or so published ones I have seem to fit my mood. That includes scenarios found in scenario books, magazines, and rulebooks even if not using those rules that day (Blastoff Bridge anyone?).

If the scenario includes a programmed option such as in CS Grant's Programmed Scenarios then sometimes I will pick a side and follow the instructions for the other side but normally I just "change hats" during the game, doing my best as the "Blue" player and then as the "Red" player but I always pick one side as "me" and make all the choices and accept all the responsibility for decisions good or bad.

For the "other" side, I will usually make the obvious decisions but where there is more than one good option I will use an old technique of setting out a couple of valid choices, weighting them if appropriate, then choosing one with a die roll. We will see examples of this as we do the play-through. Everything else goes as normal with me rolling for both sides with utter, ruthless, honesty and the courage to accept that my favourite unit just rolled three 1's!  In the end, it is my decisions about battle plans and tactical choices that make or break the game for me. Did a gamble work? Did I have that reserve in hand? Did the "enemy" and the decision tree die pull a manoeuvre that I hadn't thought of when I made my last move and can I recover? This is where identifying with one side helps inject some emotion so it is more than an intellectual exercise. For me that aspect is crucial to the depth of my enjoyment.

40mm Scruby War of 1812 US and British infantry with an Irregular General and my own original homecast Riflemen and Infantry officers.

OK the table is set, tomorrow we will look at the chosen scenario and get the game rolling.