Demo game? Participation game? Hybrid game?

In issue 399 of Miniature Wargames with Battlegames (which, BTW, has been added to the growing index of all wargaming articles ever published ;-)), there's an article by Nick Hughes discussing the type of games we see at conventions.

Roughly speaking, at the European convention scene, there are two types of games:

• Demo games: a gaming group demonstrates a specific game setup, a period, a ruleset, ... The intention is not participation by convention visitors, but the game is rather a starting point for explaining visitors what the game, rules, etc. are all about.
• Participation games: the game is set up with the purpose of visitors participating, and might vary in length between let's say 15 minutes of fast fun and a few hours.

When games are run well, no matter the type, there are distinct advantages, and are a good addition to any convention. But there are also disadvantages. Demo games take up space, and interaction with the public is not always a success due to various reasons. Participation games might take too long and hence fail to attract participants. The times when visitors would spend an entire day at a convention - and hence could devote several hours playing a single game - are long gone.

So, the article proposes a hybrid: the visual spectacle of a demo game, but with the intention of letting visitors taking control of the game for a few turns.

This reminded me very much of the type of games we have run with our gaming group Schild & Vriend during various conventions - mostly CRISIS in Antwerp - over the past 10 years. We have designed our games around the idea of micro-participation - i.e. allow visitors to take part in the game for only a few minutes. The game would run all day, and the flow of the game is the result of a sequence of turns taken by many players over the course of an entire day.

Arnhem 2005

The first game of this type we ran was our Arnhem game in 2005. The design was based on Free Kriegsspiel. A gamesmaster would run the game all day long, and when a visitor passed by, he would be offered a decision to make: "These platoons have been hiding in these woods. Do you think they should shoot at the enemy, or move forwards?" Once the player hade made a choice, a few dice were rolled (e.g. determining movement distance, or outcome of the fight, ...). The player could stick around for a few more moves, or could move on.

Attack on Fort Stanley 2008

In 2008, we tried a different approach. Set in Darkest Africa, a fort was under siege. The besiegers were controlled by the umpire, but the besieged were under control of whatever visitor was present at the table. The system was run using cards. A5-size cards - displayed prominently - outlined the actions a player could take, including requested dice rolls and chances for success. The only thing a player had to do was pick a card, move the figures, throw a dice. When the action was complete, a new card was drawn. Again, this allowed for a few minutes of quick fun.

Red vs Blue 2013

Our largest experiment in this style was Red vs Blue, in 2013. We had printed over 1500 custom playing cards, which we dealt out in the entire convention hall: at stands, at the entrance, at the bar, ... At the gaming table, there was a real-time clock, indicating what side (red or blue) was "on". When you came to the table with one of the cards, you could participate immediately, following the actions on the card. The cards came in many different variations: movement actions, artillery bombardments, reinforcements, etc. At then end of the day, we logged over 250 participants.

So, yes, it is possible to design games around the idea of micro-participation. It takes some thinking and some preparation. But, it also is very exhausting, especially of you want to run the game all day long. Red vs Blue ran for 6 hours, in real time, non-stop.

Will we repeat such mass-participation wargames again? Perhaps, although I do not have plans for the immediate future. I feel that with Red vs Blue we reached the limit of what this genre could do - unless a lot more people get involved in the running and participation. After all, we usually did this with 2 or 3 people on the organizing team ;-)

More Crisis games added

In the process of making available most of our gaming materials from our past Crisis games, I have added pages for:

• Arnhem 2005
• Red vs Blue 2013
• Poltava 2010

Poltava picture:

Schild&Vriend Crisis Games 1997-2013

As some of you know, our little gaming group Schild & Vriend runs a demo/participation game every year at the annual Crisis wargame convention, held in Antwerp. We started doing this in 1997, although we had run some games at other conventions before that. That makes 17 wargames total. During four of these years, we have won a trophy for either 'Best game of Show', 'Best participation game' or 'Most innovative game'.

With our 18th game at CRISIS coming up, I felt it was time for a quick overview ...

1997: Wild West Gunfights

We were in our "Wild West" phase during those years. We played the "Shootist" rules, a small leaflet I picked up during one of the Fantasy World conventions held in Antwerp years previously. I even had written a small C-program that generated random gunfighters. These were collected in a big listing with 1000 entries, which we called the "Shootist-O-Matic" (roll a D1000 and a random shootist came out). I still have it lying around somewhere ...

So, no surprise we staged a Shootist game that year during Crisis.

Shootist game using Geohex terrain. All figures from Wargames Foundry. Gathered around the table (left to right: Frank Vleugels, Bart Vetters, Dominique Coene, Maarten Logghe, and unknown.)

Some more pictures of Crisis 97 can be found here.

1998: "For a Few Tusks More"

This was the period in which Foundry released a large number of Darkest Africa figures. Some very nice jungle scenery was constructed (still in our possession), along with special desert terrain tiles.

For a Few Tusks More. Maarten Logghe is at the far left.

More pictures and report of the game can be found here. The scratch-built fort and the jungle scenery were later re-used in our "Attack on Fort Stanley" game in 2008.

1999: "Mons Badonicus"

This game featured an Arthurian battle on custom-made terrain. Sadly, no pictures were recovered, and the terrain itself has also been liquidated.

This game was awarded "Best of Show"  by the show organizers.

2000: ACW game

A large American Civil War game, featuring mostly Foundry 25mm figures. Alas, we have no photographs to back things up, but the figures and most of the scenery are still in our possession.

Update October 2014: recovered pictures!

2001: "Raid on Zeebrugge"

We decided to stage a Belgian battle, and after some rummaging through one of the books written by military historian Luc De Vos ("Veldslagen in de Lage Landen"), we ended up with the Raid on Zeebrugge. This raid was set during WW1, and involved British troops storming the mole at Zeebrugge harbour. We made the gaming boards in the garage of Bart Dils' parental house during several weekends.

The Raid on Zeebrugge setup.

I recall we spent quite a lot of cash on this game. All model houses, railways, etc. were all bought from toy stores. This was also the time at which the standard of wargames at CRISIS was not yet terribly high, and thus a game like this was a real showstopper. This resulted in a 2nd place for 'Best Game of Show', nicknamed 'Best Scenery' - which was quite a disappointment for us at the time. We got a gift voucher for roughly 30 euros, if I recall correctly, to be used at one of the trade stands.

More pictures of the game can be seen here. The scenery of this game was re-used for our Crisis 2004 game "Operation Shield Friendly", and also made an appearance at one of the Red Barons shows.

2002: Wild West meets Indians meets ACW

For this game, we re-used a lot of material from the ACW and Wild West games we ran a few years earlier. We also used the Shootist rules again, playing out some small inter-linked scenarios on a huge gaming table.

Sadly, I cannot find any photographs of this game.

2003: "Legionnaires in the Desert"

This was a very special game, made completely out of wood - and that includes the figures! When I was living in the US, I became a big fan of the Woodens range of flat wargaming figures. The idea for this game revolved around creating a wooden landscape out of MDF-wood. It produced a nice visual look, and got a lot of attention during the convention.

All figures are Woodens, scenery elements in resin.

Some more information about this game and the figures can be found on the Woodens page

2004: "Operation Shield Friendly"

2004 was another year in which we apparently did not have much inspiration, since we re-used the Zeebrugge gaming table from a years before, but now we staged a WW2 landing operation. Again, no pictures of this game, we still do have the flyer.

2005: "Arnhem"

In 2005 we organized a Kriegspiel-like setup. Based on the 1944 operations around Arnhem, we staged a 6mm game that allowed participants to contribute a micro-move to the game.

This was one of the first convention game we designed around getting as much participants involved as possible. The idea was that the umpire would act as narrator, and provide decisions to onlookers. Every decision to be made revolved around some particular unit, and involved at least some dice rolling. Here's a blogpost describing the game in more detail.

This game also resulted in an article (our first!) we wrote for Wargames Illustrated.

This game was also appreciated by the organizers, since we were awarded with the "Best Participation Game" trophy.

2006: "Dogfights over Flanders"

After the efforts we had put in the Arnhem game, we decided to stage something lighter in 2006. We ran a hexified version of the WW1 dogfight rules "Wings of War". This provided some short, 15 minute games. IIRC, this was also the start of our love for Kallistra hex-tiles.

Some planes are visible in the background in this WW1 dogfighting game.

2007: "The Blue Lotus"

This was a game based on the famous TinTin story "The Blue Lotus". My original idea was to run a pulp-game set in 1930's China, more or less based on the adventures in the comic book. The modeling of the town was done pretty well, if I can say so myself, but the big drawback was we actually did not have a game to run ;-) All time had crept into painting and modeling - literally up to a few hours before everything had to be packed in the car. I still have all the scenery and figures, so at some time, we should run an actual game using this setup.

1930s Shanghai modeled after a Tintin comic.

2008: "Attack on Fort Stanley"

This game was again an effort in getting as much participants involved as possible. The game was set in Darkest Africa, and recycled scenery and figures from our 1998 convention game. Fort Stanley was positioned in the middle of the jungle, and was attacked from all sides by natives.

The game design itself revolved around large action cards, which were made available for everyone to see. Any bystander could pick one of the action cards, and execute the order listed on the card. This mechanism consolidated some of my thinking w.r.t. mass participation games, something that would prove useful a few years later.

Fort Stanley, still in our possession. Also notice the wildlife.

2009: "AquaZone"

In 2009 we staged a game that I had been thinking about for quite a few years. I always wanted to do a scuba-diving game of underwater combat, and so over the years I collected plastic fish, plastic scuba divers, etc. The game itself featured our time-tested system of each figure having a number of action points, and combat resolution was resolved using opposite dice.

Notice the whale in the middle of the gaming table. From left to right: Eddy Sterckx, Bart Vetters, Phil Dutré.

2010: "Poltava"

Bart's obsession with the Great Northern War produced this excellent game featuring the battle of Poltava. Again, we wanted a game that targeted audience participation. A card-driven system drove the battle forwards, with each card offering some choices for the players.

2011: "Papierslag"

In our quest for providing some original game settings, I stumbled upon the paper armies from Billy Bones' Workshop. We spent quite a few evenings cutting and glueing together these excellent 2D figures and scenery, and built an entire ECW battlefield.

The new look-and-feel charmed many players, including the organizers, who awarded us with the "Most Original Game" trophy.

2012: "An Der Schönen Blauen Donau"

The Danube was featured prominently in our 2012 game. Instead of moving troops, players would control the currents in the Danube to make sure various flotsam and jetsam was bumped into French pontoon bridges, such that the battle of Asspern-Essling would be won by the Austrians. A fun and original game, and we also published in article about this game in Miniature Wargames with Battle Games.

2013: "Red vs Blue"

My lingering ideas of running a mass-participation wargame finally came all together in our Red vs Blue game. We printed several thousand participation cards, handed these out in the convention hall, and inviting players to come to our table to participate for a few minutes. The game ran continuously in real-time. At the end of the day, we clocked over 250 participants. This game gave us the "Most Original Game" award. An article about this game is currently in the pipeline ...

2014: ??? 

Our drive for setting up games during CRISIS is still burning strong, so watch for our game this year!

Arnhem 2005 Flyer

For those who want to download the flyer we handed out during our Arnhem game at Crisis 2005, it is available here.

Simply print it out double-sided, fold it together, and presto!

Phil

Crisis Photos

Crisis 2005 - Arnhem


Originally uploaded by ahuyton.


Frost advances towards Oosterbeek






Crisis 2005 - Arnhem


Originally uploaded by ahuyton.



Kussin shot up again, if only he had been more careful





Crisis 2005 - Arnhem


Originally uploaded by ahuyton.



The second landing, now everything will be fine!





Crisis 2005 - Arnhem


Originally uploaded by ahuyton.



Massive German attack on Oosterbeek, destined for failure




Crisis 2005 - Arnhem


Originally uploaded by ahuyton.



Hurrah, it's 16.30 and here comes XXX Corps across the railway bridge, valiantly recaptured by Maarten

Crisis 2005 - First thoughts

This site has been quiet for a couple of weeks as your much missed authors have been slaving away to get our big game finished for Belgium's big wargames convention, 'Crisis'. That was yesterday, and we came away with the prize for 'Best Participation Game', a migraine for poor Bart but a very satisfying day's gaming.

We set up a long table, representing the road from the Ist Airborne's drop zone to the famous road bridge in Arnhem itself. Bart built the terrain, to his usual high standards and the overall efffect was quite stunning. We populated the terrain with hand made trees and, largely cardboard buildings bought from paper terrain and Fiddlers Green. I painted the figures, at a scale of one base of 7 figures euquivalent to a platoon. I think we had some 2500 figures on table, with assorted transport, guns and German armour.

The innovation of the day came from the game system we used. This came about from a conversation at last year's Crisis, where we had put on a nice game using 'Rapid Fire' rules. We realised that, despite our best intentions, we were falling into the common trap of Crisis games, that clubs set out pretty terrains and then played a rather unsatisfactory game, with players torn between participating and going off to do some shopping. And given that every year the quality of the traders at Crisis is improving, this temptation is pretty heavy. So, we concluded that we needed a new approach. The game had to be fun, had to involve passers-by, but only ask for a small contribution to the game. The answer lay in a freeform game, with no set rules. Each visitor to the table would be welcomed, the game explained and then the newly promoted General would be asked to make a decision to keep the game rolling. Then maybe a die would be rolled, with a simple 1= failure 6= success type system.

So we put this into action, we added some nice touches such as medals (stickers showing a VC imposed on the Schild en Vriend club symbol) for each participant. And I must say it worked very well. I thought we had a really positive response. Many old friends passed by and enjoyed making a few decisions, often with amusing results that nicely simulated the fog of war (for instance the Airborne anti-tank guns sent off on the northern road by one player because 'it looks like the easiest way to the town and then sent back by another player who knew the stiry of Arnhem better - this created anguish and amusement to Dave, who faithfully played the role of Frost through the morning).

The game itself was fun, and at the end rather exciting with a massive melee in Oosterbeek fought out by old Schild en Vriend faithfuls, Maarten and Bart D. This for me was a new experience for Crisis quite frankly, and so it actually meant that not only did we fly the wargaming flag but we had a good gaming day. I will write up a story of the battle separately, but for those who are interested, and maybe participated in the game but didn't see the end of the game, here are the events in bullet (ha ha) form fashion:

• John 'Dave Black' Frost led his troops into Arnhem and occupired the area around the bridge, other battalions followed more slowly and occupied the area around Oosterbeek and the railway bridge
• Massive German pressure led to Frost deciding to quit the bridge
• At the subsequent battle in North Arnhem suburbs, Frost was captured
• German attacks on Oosterbeek put the British under pressure, big casualties sustained by both sides.
• Germans launched an attack against the railway bridge,infantry supported by AA guns and a Tiger 2 detachment 'Mad Dog Koen' and his girlfriend launched Para platoons in hand to hand combat aginst the Tigers, but they were heroically massacred. Koen won the VC for this action!
• The Germans kicked the British off the railway bridge, but Maarten with now only 1 effective battalion left in Oosterbeek took the risk of a counter attack on the bridge. At this point very subtle rules came into play, we each rolled a die, the highest would win the bridge! Maarten's bold attack won the day, the Germans taking big casualties (guess what? we each rolled a die to see how many stands were lost) and they retreated, dispirited.

Meanwhile, Urquhart and the laggardly 3rd Para held off the vast forces of Von Tettau, now under the capable control of Bart D, and at 16.30 we decided that the British had done enough and XXX Corps would arrive on time.

That was fun. I think the system is excellent, and vastly preferable to long complicated rules. As Dave said yesterday, we should just write up a one page summary of how it can work in practice. Perhaos we can do that here on these pages? Personally, I found it particularly interesting to deal with an enthusiastic teenager, who was with us for about three hours and a very serious Colonel from the Belgian army, dressed up in Para gear, who made some very interesting decisions leading to the Battle for Oosterbeek.

On the downside, we were over-optimistic about the system. We had thought it would be possible to run the game with one umpire, while the others could go off and shop or meet people. In fact the opposite was the case, we actually needed four umpires and reserves to allow for the socialising and spending. A lesson for next time.

A further problem was that we had not thought out properly the scale of the game, so we had absurd amounts of troops on the table, which proved difficult to organise and move. Another useful lesson.

Overall I thought it was fair that we won the participation prize, and that Durham won the Best Game, with their lovely terrain and 42mm superb figures. Our terrain boards were magnificent, but our reconstructions of the buildings were only adequate really. I guess the scale of the figures was also a factor.

The trophy went home with Phil, the brains behind our operation, who came up with most of the good ideas for the game system. And particular thanks to Dave Black for helping us play the game for several hours, even if his successors caused his Colonel Frost character to end up in a Stalag somewhere in the East.

On that note, I leave it to others to comment. Photos to follow.

Oh my god, we're doing Arnhem

The high point of the wargaming year in Belgium is without a doubt Crisis, [TSA](http://www.tsoa.be)'s yearly convention. Each year since 1997, we have presented a participation game there, and so will we in 2005.

Each year also sees a long and convoluted decision process on what the game for that year will be, and this year was no different. We quickly settled on a [participation game system](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000040.html), proposed by Phil, but had not decided on a game yet.

We had the faint idea of doing something really spectacular, then dropped that idea and focused on the Battle of Halen (famous Belgian victory over German cavalry in 1914), but that was probably a bit too ambitious to do in full S&V style.

The latest suggestion is to do Arnhem 1944 in 6mm, and I quite like this. I've always been interested in this tragic battle, and when our recent love affair with [Blitzkrieg Commander](http://www.wargamesdirectory.com/html/bkc/default.asp) incited a renewed interest in WWII gaming, Alan came up with the idea (the suggestion was mentioned innocently in a game of War of the Ring and took hold from there) of doing Arnhem in 6mm for Crisis.

The plan is to use BKC rules, combined with the participation system (Phil, that's your job :) ), as the game system. For the terrain and OOB's, we'll use the excellent [Rapid Fire](http://www.rapid-fire.uk.com) supplement on Market Garden. The terrain will probably be in the order of 3x1.5m and we'll be representing the entire Arnhem - Oosterbeek - Wolfheze sector, featuring the entire 1st Airborne division and all of the German units represented.

It's a tall order, but I'm fairly optimistic we'll be able to complete the game on time. And when it's completed, it's just a question of doing some extra troops and terrain boards to be able to do the whole of Market Garden. Megalomaniacs'r'us, indeed.

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