Considering ACW Fog of War

 “Throw forward your cavalry, as soon as you approach your new position, to Culpeper Court-House, and carefully watch the whole country toward Richmond and Gordonsville.”

— Union Major General John Pope

Battle of Cedar Mountain, Aug. 9, 1862,
engraving from a sketch by Alfred R. Waud.

My feature on “Watch, Read, Play: Battle ofMidway” and one of the games noted, Sebastian Bae’s Find, Fix, and Finish, started me thinking about how two opposing forces come together on the battlefield. At Midway the battle came about through a confluence of intelligence analysis and aerial reconnaissance, with each carrier fleet probing for the other before deploying attack forces. The guessing game of Battleship came to mind as a very basic, extremely abstracted representation of this process, but Bae’s game refines it into a fast-playing micro-game modeling modern naval operations. I’ve long wanted to design an easy game around the American Civil War Battle of Cedar Mountain (not far from where I live in Virginia) simulating the fog of war as two armies move toward each other, probing with cavalry and infantry, maneuvering with limited information about enemy location and strength, and screening forces with cavalry. And I found some inspiration for game mechanics in Bae’s game, a starting point from which I began tinkering with ideas on how such a game might work.

Watch, Read, Play: Battle of Midway

“The plump silhouettes of the American Dauntless dive-bombers quickly grew larger, and then a number of black objects suddenly floated eerily from their wings.”

— Captain Mitsuo Fuchida

SBD Dauntless squadron seeks the Japanese fleet.

Many argue the Battle of Midway, June 4–7, 1942, was the turning point in the Pacific War. The engagement epitomizes the role of carriers and aircraft in naval operations as strategies relied less on massive battleships (though they’d still have a final significant moment at the Battle of Surigao Strait). Numerous factors played a role in its outcome: interception and interpretation of intelligence; preemptive deployment of American carriers; and Japanese indecision reacting to emerging threats during the engagement (among many others). All these considerations — as in depicting any historical event — prove challenging to interpret on the screen and the gaming tabletop. Given the battle’s importance, an abundance of Midway media offers many opportunities to engage with history by watching films, reading books, and playing games, all with varying degrees of quality.

The Context of Form

“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.”

— Lao Tzu

I admire discourse that challenges me to think more deeply about tabletop games, whether new perspectives or ones investigating (and sometimes affirming) concepts I advocate. I often wish the adventure gaming hobby had more such discussion geared toward the kind of hobbyists and informed generalists who wander the borderlands between more steadfastly ensconced professional and scholarly game circles. Secondary education offers some promising opportunities as young people, not yet established in our staunch intellectual silos, explore and develop their own ideas on gaming subjects. Dr. Jeremiah McCall, himself an innovator in the field of games for learning, recently mentored one of his students at the Cincinnati Country Day School through a senior independent study project examining how different media — literature, film, and video games — presents the same historical event in different ways...and to different ends. It encourages us to more closely analyze how we interact with the various media we consume and how the context of form shapes its messages.

Discerning Reality in the Fog of War

“Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.”

— Carl von Clausewitz

Games remain excellent learning tools to help train our minds to estimate the situation presented by the current game state and devise a course of action to pursue on our next turn. People use these skills of observation, collation, and evaluation all the time in various everyday situations. Some make a career out of it, like intelligence analysts, military commanders, and political decision makers. Others take a more carefully considered approach to make decisions in their everyday lives: how to find a job and whether to take one offered; how to use one’s finances to best improve one’s situation; how to proceed on an academic or career path; how to approach and resolve interpersonal conflicts. Games offer a “safe-to-fail” environment in which to practice our observational and decision-making skills, but the real world often remains unrelentingly merciless when we make mistakes. But too often the “fog of war” hinders our ability to clearly discern the reality of various situations. And while games can help hone our skills in evaluating factors in our decisions to move forward, the real world presents us with far too many uncertainties, biases, and even “bad players” intent on distorting and influencing our perception of the situation.

Game Aspirations for Summer

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”

— Heraclitus

A toast to summertime
gaming aspirations.

Our much-manipulated academic schedule calls for the local public school year to end before Memorial Day (and begin the first week in August…don’t get me started). So we’re already considering father-son gaming and history activities to stay engaged over the summer. I remain thankful my teenage son has cultivated an interest in history, one that, over the years, has matured beyond simply visiting sites and playing games into a more critical examination of our past and how we can explore it on the gaming table. This offers me some comfort in my ever-challenging efforts to engage him in anything beyond sleeping, spending time on his electronic devices, and asking what’s for dinner. He has, surprisingly, voiced an interest in several activities that would involve him in somewhat productive intellectual activity (and pry him away from his devices). Right now we have a list of very flexible objectives, but it’s a start in providing some structure to what can easily become a summer of lazy days.

The Personal View of Sweeping Events

 “There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”

— John Stuart Mill

What's it like to lead the advance at
the Battle of Great Bridge?

Too often I see history education in America focusing on broad events and key figures, the sweeping view of events, with little if any time spent on a more personal perspective of those average people living that history. I fear this has become a greater issue in the age of Standards of Learning (SOL) tests (“No Standardized Test Left Behind…”), which emphasize educators “teach to the test,” covering the basics every student should know with limited time for developing critical thinking skills about that material. (Though I’ll freely admit my own education in the latter quarter of the 20th century bore hallmarks of simply hitting the marks, with a few notable exceptions.) Certainly some exceptional teachers inspire students to take a closer look at historical topics, especially zooming in from the macro view of great events to the micro perspective of individuals who lived through history. A personal view can engage our empathy, give us a more relatable impression of history beyond names, events, and dates, and challenge us to ask questions, investigate further, and reflect on relevant issues...important to better inform our current situation and our inevitable slog into the future. Games can help us relate to that personal perspective, though we cannot appreciate it without at least a general knowledge of history to provide context.

Scenarios & the “General Idea”

 “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”

— Seneca

Everyone holds an opinion about roleplaying game adventure design, some quite vehemently, some quite inflexibly, some by ease of writing or preference for play outcomes at their own tables. Certain games encourage a particular format to which, understandably, writers try to adhere whether writing for the publisher or simply creating something familiar for fans. In the 50-year history of roleplaying games many adventure formats have emerged and evolved, sometimes tied to the ever-changing style of such games. Designing adventures can offer a somewhat displaced challenge; one essentially writes a kind of instruction manual for someone else to run themed action at the game table, a kind of toolkit to enabling a gamemaster to evoke a particular experience with players and their characters. Some prefer a step-by-step approach through encounters, others like a more free-form “sandbox” arrangement. Adventures require some degree of preparation from a gamemaster, even if it’s simply familiarizing themselves with a published game world...or jotting down notes of their own. I’ve done my share of designing and writing adventures, some for publication, others just for friends; lately I’ve been toying with different techniques, as I’ve mentioned before. Sometimes for games — as in other aspects of life — it helps to look at history, to see how others approached challenges, for insight on issues we face. I looked to roleplaying games’ pre-history, back in the days when wargaming slowly emerged from a Europe ravaged by Napoleon’s armies. And the idea of the scenario tied to a “General idea” seems core to designing an adventure serving as gamemaster resource for greater player agency.