NAPOLEON SOLO

All-period wargaming, all by yourself

Caliver Books are about to release a new title called Wargaming World Solo: Ancient to Modern Solo Wargaming. It’s a set of guidelines and mechanics designed to allow the gamer who lacks regular opponents play games in “any scale of figures or period, with examples from 1066-1975.”

The A4, 80 page book uses a chart based system to generate an “Opponent” in a realistic but still unpredictable way. Effectively this is a paper “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) and to set this in context he references other systems that use similar ideas such as Chain of Command, The Men Who Would Be Kings

(well known for the very popular Mr Babbage system), One Hour Wargames, NUTS! Man to Man Combat, and BOHICA (‘Nam).

The author – Gregory Ward – stresses that AI wasn’t really how he wanted to describe the system and instead settled on the term the “Virtual You” or VY.

Illustrated with a large number of photographs (from multiple periods) many of which are used for mapping examples with arrows applied to show concepts, the well illustrated book is divided into three main sections of Overview (and general concepts), Preparation, Play and required Tools.

The Play section – with many charts (and utilising a deck of standard playing cards for the most part) – takes one through: Force Deployment; Game Turn Sequence; Unit Activation; Commands; Random Events; Flank and Reserve Units; Movement; “Virtual You” Reactions; Shooting; Hand to Hand Combat; and Morale.

Overall it’s an interesting read even if – as might be expected – a little chart heavy. If you need an opponent across the table to push toys around and haven’t got one you can get a virtual antagonist and it’s only going to cost you £17.50 from caliverbooks.com.