Monday, April 2, 2012

Wargaming for the Small, 1: Old Soldiers arrow-men

How to use wargaming to teach maths to the young'uns!

My two oldest sons, Benjamin 6 and Alex 4 (almost every wargamer has a son called Alexander), are fairly fascinated by my wargames figures and by the games they see played at home or Down at the Club. This is only natural.

And of course they are mad keen to have some of their own and play wargames of their own. So to amuse them I based up some old Airfix Robin Hood and Ancient Briton HO scale archers on big multi-figure bases, gave them a D6 each and taught them a very simple set of rules so they could amuse themselves fighting on the spare bed while I paint. We decided to call these rules Old Soldiers.

Each player has one stand of archers (or "arrow-men" as they are apparently called). Throw a D6 to see how many base depths your stand can move. If at the end of the move you are in range (the distance from the tip of your thumb to that of your outstretched pinky) of an enemy you both shoot by throwing a D6. If the loser's score is less than the winner's but more than half, the loser goes back one base. If the score is half or less, curtains!

After a while I felt a bit guilty about fobbing them off with the manky old (like, 30+ year old) Airfix, so I did a quick paint job on some GW Brettonian longbowmen I had lying around.


These were single-based, so I modified the rules. Throw a D6 to determine how many men you can move. Movement was initially set at one handstretch as above, then modified to the short edge of a piece of A4. When you have moved all the men you can, check to see who is in range. Add up the number of men shooting and add the throw of  a D6. If the loser's score is less than the winner's but more than half, one of the loser's men (the closest to the shooters) runs away one move-distance. If the score is half or less, curtains for the nearest man!

When you have lost half your men, you have lost the game.

It was instructive to see how many times a small party of men was sent to their deaths because a player was unwilling to wait for the rest of the force to catch up, and to watch the slowly dawning realisation. It was also interesting to see how quickly Benjamin can now calculate halves and doubles....