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Author Topic: Napoleonic minis-gaming in WWII Occupied Paris  (Read 7066 times)

bayonetbrant

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on: December 17, 2018, 09:06:00 AM
https://medium.com/@increment/petits-soldats-grandes-victoires-ba67873534db


Quote
In December of 1943, three devastating years of German military occupation had reduced Paris to a shadow of its former self. Everything had long been rationed: meat, bread, wine, cheese, coffee, metal, leather, fuel, anything that might support the sprawling German garrison in France, then numbering more than a quarter million strong. The situation of Parisians ranged from dismal to desperate. Tens of thousands had been arrested and sent to a fate no one could yet imagine; many who remained toiled involuntarily in factories to produce vehicles and weapons for the Wehrmacht. The Allies had secured North Africa and invaded Italy, but were now mired behind the Winter Line southeast of Rome — the liberation of Paris seemed a very remote eventuality. To make matters worse, the Allies had begun bombing France to weaken its value to the German army. The BBC had a few weeks earlier warned the French people of imminent Allied attacks on industrial centers in the area, and before the end of December, a round of airstrikes on Paris would commence.

Seventy-five years ago today, in Paris, on December 15, 1943, at this extraordinary historical moment, three people executed a curious agreement. It concerned a handwritten document, of 56 numbered pages, which survives today in an antique binder labeled as an accounting ledger. But lift back the cover, and this booklet reveals itself to be Règlement de Kriegspiel, that is, “rules for wargames,” whose three authors give their names as P. Fouré, F. Dodeur, and P. Bondoux. Its pages describe a system for a tabletop wargame of the Napoleonic period played with toy soldiers. All three co-authors initialed each page of the document as read and approved, “lu et apprové,” and swore that they would propose no modification to the rules before January 1, 1945.

As a historical artifact, the 1943 Règlement de Kriegspiel clamors for an explanation. Who were these three people, who, in the darkest hour of occupied Paris, entered into such a solemn compact about so trivial a thing as wargame rules? What did wargames mean to them in that time of danger and deprivation, and what happened to them over the eventful year that they promised to honor these rules? When you tug on a thread of history, you never know what it might reveal.

way more at the link

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bayonetbrant

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Reply #1 on: December 17, 2018, 09:14:41 AM
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Perhaps the most striking feature of Fouré and Dodeur’s 1939 wargame is the division of their plywood board into hexagons. “As a square poses some difficulties resulting from the ratio of its diagonal to its side (the famous problem of squaring the circle),” their description reports, “we were led to change the shape of our zone of action: we painted hexagons on the terrain with a five centimeter diameter.” At the 1:2,000 scale, this made each hexagon represent one hundred meters of terrain, where the entire plywood terrain encompassed a space representing four kilometers by two kilometers. Each hexagon could hold only one company: effectively, the game functioned much like a board wargame from two decades in the future, where movement and missile fire ranges were given in hexes.

To anyone student of the history of wargames, Fouré and Dodeur’s 1939 description of their wargame in the SCFH Bulletin is in equal parts important and frustrating. To see such an early game employ a system where you roll pools of dice to determine points of damage against miniature figures is significant enough, and then there is the small matter of the use of hexagons: earlier boardgames had used honeycomb cells, but to find them fused into hobby wargames decades before the founding of Avalon Hill is practically revelatory. That is why we must be frustrated as well to read just a tantalizing description, not a set of rules. They allude to tables that you would use to determine how many points of damage have been scored with various die rolls, but say only that they were an appendix to the rules.

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bob48

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Reply #2 on: December 17, 2018, 10:32:21 AM
That is amazing,

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besilarius

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Reply #3 on: December 17, 2018, 11:43:09 PM
Pat Condray, a founding member of HMGS published a translation of these rules, sometime around1966.

http://vintagewargaming.blogspot.com/2012/08/obscure-rule-set-1-le-kriegspiel-by.html

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bayonetbrant

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Reply #4 on: December 18, 2018, 06:41:44 AM
that's pretty cool

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