Grids in Wargaming

[DivisMal]

I don’t have that much experience, but I’m dying to try out Of Armies and Hordes - Hobgoblin’s points are indeed pretty convincing. And years ago I did play Demonworld (hex-based) and while the grids never looked as good as our Warhammer/Fantasy Warriors tables, the eliminated 99.9% (actually 100%) of all the hassle about that quarter inch you lacked or maybe not for ranges, angles, unit footprint etc.
That was quite a positive effect!

[Easy E]

I guess to me, the grid is trying to solve a problem that I have rarely encountered. 

However, the idea of "remote" play makes a ton of sense.  I also like the idea of "areas" of the board. This is common in RPGs that aren't D&D. 

[jon_1066]

Grids are visually unappealing.

They create strange effects in terms of frontage depth being different in different directions, even hex grids have that.  So they distort the ground.

Small grids allow greater differentiation in terms of movement but become more fiddly, larger grids/areas means less movement differences.  Do light and heavy infantry and cavalry all move the same, how are they differentiated?

What about obstacles and features?  Do they occupy the grid square or form the boundary?  Still lots of potential for issues.  Ditto with line of sight.  It is still not cut and dried often.

Ultimately miniatures are about visual appeal and having a grid detracts from that for me so I wouldn't get a rule set that uses them.

Edit.  Oops forgot about Blood Bowl - but that is a board game in my mind

[mellis1644]

I like some games which use grids etc but the danger is whether such a game tends to be better without min's at all. Done badly, or at IMO the wrong scale to figures to what the units are, all the visualization magic of models on the table is lost and for me it is better to be playing the game as a true board game.

Rommel is a classic example of that for me. I like the game but it generally works better as a straight board game due to the scale of units/terrain. Models distract from what the game is about. A few figs or 1 building breaks not helps my visualization of the game and what it represents. it's better as with counters/markers and a map for my view.

But games like to the strongest and Bloody Barrons v2 for example are the opposite. The grid takes away the fiddlyness/lack of precision for measuring in figure gaming and allows players to just get on with the game. To be honest BloodBowl would be another great example of a figure game which works better with a grid than if you tried to do it without one.

[DivisMal]

I hear all these objections against grids (and share them to a degree), but would like to turn the question a little around: why is no one of us bothered about the often pretty strange and unrealistic base sizes then?

Why do we assume it’s perfectly acceptable to arbitrarily give a unit a frontage and depth that is more the result of gameability? And why don’t we feel that way with grids?

Maybe we need to forget the old „chessboard on the tabletop“ grids and rather think about it in the way as A Song of Armies and Hordes does: irregular grids deliminating areas?

[Harry Faversham]

Unlike Harry I believe if you are playing with Toy Soldiers you should have Toy Soldier terrain, like my Salute 2021 game:

To be fair that set up looks Brill!!!

 

[fred]

…but would like to turn the question a little around: why is no one of us bothered about the often pretty strange and unrealistic base sizes then?

Why do we assume it’s perfectly acceptable to arbitrarily give a unit a frontage and depth that is more the result of gameability? And why don’t we feel that way with grids?

This a very good question. And I see this a lot in Napoleonics with 28mm figures - there seems to be a desire to have 2 or 3 ranks of figures in depth, but only 10 or 12 figures wide. This gives a completely non-representative unit foot print. For some reason the frontage is based off the figure to men ratio, but the depth is much too deep to give a look.

This seems to be a frequent problem in linear warfare games.

At a different level it can be seen in skirmish games where tanks or other vehicles are involved and the in game ground scale is suddenly totally distorted by the size of the vehicle.

[mellis1644]

At a different level it can be seen in skirmish games where tanks or other vehicles are involved and the in game ground scale is suddenly totally distorted by the size of the vehicle.

This is one reason i dislike 'big skirmish' games in 28mm - bolt action and chain of command being the obvious 'elephants in the room'. 28mm looks nice but distorts ground scale so much in such games to make any excuse for them to be based on reality just not work for me. When pistols are able to shoot the length of a tank and tanks can only shoot across a street the visual aspect of the game breaks for me or a unit of 10 guys can't fit into a house.

Such games in 15mm at least start to allow a little more of the feel of the period to be reaslistic. It's just my opinion but some people care deeply about say the uniform of a model but then care nothing for the actual tactical esthetics. I'm more the other way around.

[crafty]

I love grid games, I own To The Strongest & play a lot of Bloodbowl, recently picked up Undaunted, which I would like to 'miniaturise'. I also play a lot of Fistful of Lead & Lion Rampant...

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that the 'boardgamey' look of a grid on a tabletop - while it may be unappealing to some - is often a very accessible concept for people that are new to tabletop wargaming. To be sure, most punters love the look of all these highly detailed tables with diorama like details, but I would wager that the average non-gamer is still fairly intimidated by a bunch of people with measuring sticks, tape measures, dice & templates. 

But I do think that a grid on the table translates clearly to people that it is a game. People can see that things move from here to here.

I often speak to people - adults & students - about this hobby and they are honestly bamboozled by what we do. They just don't get it.

When I listened to that 'We have ways' WW2 podcast on wargaming the other day, one of the hosts seemed just as confused about the simple task of *moving* the figures on the table. The Fat Lardies bloke did a great job of trying to explain the concept of wargaming, but even the simple notion of how things move on the tabletop got lost in the chatter about jump off points, action points & activations. I guess it is hard to translate that information in the rambling discourse of a podcast.

Gridded games work on that visual level without having to hard sell an explanation. People can instantly see that things move from here to here.

I am a high school teacher so I am very used to being reductive in an attempt to simplify things for young people.

Grid games are a good mechanism for designers to reach out to the younger set and 'non' gamers.

[DivisMal]

This a very good question. And I see this a lot in Napoleonics with 28mm figures - there seems to be a desire to have 2 or 3 ranks of figures in depth, but only 10 or 12 figures wide. This gives a completely non-representative unit foot print. For some reason the frontage is based off the figure to men ratio, but the depth is much too deep to give a look.

This seems to be a frequent problem in linear warfare games.

At a different level it can be seen in skirmish games where tanks or other vehicles are involved and the in game ground scale is suddenly totally distorted by the size of the vehicle.

Yes!!!!! Totally true.

And I can say, the same things can be said for Bronze Age and Ancient warfare. In many cases it’s not really known, but in others, people just love geometry too much and also blocks… with skirmish systems and weapon ranges there are so many really, really silly things that I’ve given up… it’s only now that some Indie systems acknowledge that rifles may shoot over the whole table if this is meant to represent a 1:1 ground scale!

[fusilierdan]

A gridded game we played last night.


 

[SJWi]

Crafty, you make some excellent points and I would encourage everyone to listen to the most recent "We Have Ways of Making You Talk" podcast where the Historian James Holland and Al ( The Pub Landlord) Murray talk to Nick Skinner from Two Fat Lardies. Nick does quite a good job of explaining the hobby to two WW2 obsessives but who have never played a game. He also goes through the history of wargaming which is quite thought provoking .Whilst you don't necessarily agree with everything he says as all roads lead to the TFL's gaming system it is a good listen.

As for grids I actually have some friends who hated "big battle"  figure games for some of the reasons set out already, but as a boardgamer has adopted TTS and is now a regular player.

I'm going to an event at Stevenage Museum next Saturday where a local club is putting on a  historical demo. It will be fascinating to see what the public make of our wonderful but sometimes bizarre hobby!     

[ced1106]

>  I do think the Of Armies and Hordes non-geometric 'grid' is really good - essentially just dividing the table into 'areas' rather than 'squares'. So the implicit order is 'move down from the hills and into the farmland' rather than 'move two squares forward'.

Good point! fwiw, With boardgames, these tend to be "dudes on a map" games, although areas are more often geopolitical, rather than terrain based. Risk is a classic example. But terrain would be good, since you could "build in" the terrain costs into the map. For example, field terrain, which is easier to cross, would be larger areas, but, since they're harder to defend, might have more adjacent areas. I guess you'd want to go further with a 3D game table, so the "area" size and shape of a hill would be more intuitive for the terrain. Of course, this would "interfere" with the modularity of a game table.

Speaking of modularity, I have the Terra Tile hexes, available at Ravenkeep.net , and use them for solo play. While I don't formally use a grid, the lines on the board make it easier to measure movement, or I use the vertices and edges as "snap to grid" when moving figures, to speed up play! You can also see how I'll use an entire hill hex to indicate blocking LOS.

[Grumpy Gnome]

Grids are visually unappealing.

They create strange effects in terms of frontage depth being different in different directions, even hex grids have that.  So they distort the ground.

Small grids allow greater differentiation in terms of movement but become more fiddly, larger grids/areas means less movement differences.  Do light and heavy infantry and cavalry all move the same, how are they differentiated?

What about obstacles and features?  Do they occupy the grid square or form the boundary?  Still lots of potential for issues.  Ditto with line of sight.  It is still not cut and dried often.

Ultimately miniatures are about visual appeal and having a grid detracts from that for me so I wouldn't get a rule set that uses them.

Edit.  Oops forgot about Blood Bowl - but that is a board game in my mind

I would echo this. I was disappointed that Battle Systems pushed the use of grids in Core Space First Born following their more ambivalent take on grids in the original Core Space.

Basically, I dislike the aesthetics of grids, square or hex. It is one of the things I dislike about Dwarven Forge terrain.

[SteveBurt]

Gridded games certainly don’t need to have poor aesthetics. The terrain does not need to fill squares or hexes. Most times when I play a set of rules that uses a grid it looks no different to any other tabletop gamer