Tips on running a double blind game?

[Dukewilliam]

Men,

I would like to run a double blind game of the battle of Iuka at the regimental level. I have run double blind games before and they always seem to go on sooooo long, and one side has to leave the room while the other moves. It doesn't make for the optimum playing experience.

Does anyone have any tips? How do you do it?

Any help/insight appreciated.

Steve

[Cat]

I played in a fun one once where the terrain was set up to match one of the Panzerblitz boards.  Each commander had the counters for their units on their own hidden board.  The GM would place miniatures on the table that were in line of sight of each other.
 
Movement on the boards was done with the PB movement rules.  Movement and firing on the tabletop was done with the miniatures rules we were using.

[has.been]

I & my friend played in one decades ago. It was an enormous Napoleonic
affair, that was what the club had the most of. We took over a church hall
for the whole day! 'Napoleon' & 'Wellington' were stuck in a tiny side room
& didn't see the actual battlefield until after the game had finished. They
based all of their decisions on the tiny map they had been given. Where I
faced my mate (we were on opposite sides) was at the extreme  flank (right
for me, left for him). Throughout the day both of us sent in requests for
INFANTRY, but time & again those idiot generals kept sending us cavalry.
The terrain in front of us was an ENOURMOUSE forest, why would they do that?
The answer game with the post battle discussion. On their 'map' the wood was tiny,
& there was masses of space, ideal Cavalry country.


Assuming you don't want all of that palaver (was fun though) I suggest an age old
way of doing 'Fog of War'.  Rig up a curtain across the table. Players will get some idea
of what is going on behind the curtain, but not the details. e.g. They are moving/massing
troops on their left flank, but what? Inf. Cav. Art.?
When troops advance past the curtain line, they are deployed on the opponents side
of the table. If you can get some 'umpires' to do this the lack of knowledge is maintained.

Then they rode back, but not
   Not the six hundred.

Worth a try & a lot easier than the whole Church hall. 

[LazyStudent]

Played a similar game to has.been in the past. But it was a WW2 eastern front based scenario. Again we had a village hall, with the two HQs set up at each end behind a screen. On the back side of the screen was a map, the commanders moved their maneuver elements on the map by sending them orders via the umpires. The umpires (there were two), moved the elements on a master map in a different room. They then set up a number of encounter tables when two forces arrived into the same map square. The FOG of war was created by the time lag between the orders and the fighting. With the orders for the next turn needing to be sent in within a short time window at the start of the current turn's fighting. We had about 6 players per side and it worked very well as they were engaged nearly the whole time with either playing, working out orders, or setting up tables for the next games. The games were kept to a reasonably tight time limit, to allow for the whole thing to play through several turns over a whole day of gaming. If players had only gotten half way through their tables they had a possibility to continue in the next turn, but often the umpires would call the game. I seem to remember each game was representing several hours in "real" time. It was all calculated by the umpires.

I must admit, while it is rare I get the chance to play these types of games. I really prefer the whole day Operational set up, compared to the 2hr skirmish. But as time is always short, I am still happy to play a 2hr skirmish if I can! 

[Tom Reed]

My good friend Greg Novak ran several really spiffy games called The Wilderness Project. The first was a huge ACW campaign. This took place at the University of Illinois Foreign Languages building on campus. The main floor was several separate rooms. Generals were in their own rooms with maps of the area. Every other room in the building had one area of the map built up with terrain. The generals had to send runners along the roads on the maps to their subordinates in the various rooms. Each room had it's own game judge in case there was a battle. It was really a fun time.

I remember one year we did the same thing only it was a modern game, Soviets vs. NATO.