28 years later: My small part in the early development of the Matrix Game

Some time ago I was discussing wargame design with someone from the US professional wargaming community when he asked me if I had ever taken part in a Matrix Game. When I chuckled and replied that not only had I taken part in quite few but had also been one of the first people to write and run Matrix Games in the UK, his reply stunned me. 'You're not mentioned in any of the academic literature', he stated ... and he did it in such a way as to imply that I was not being completely truthful. At the time this stunned and shocked me, and it has been niggling me ever since. I therefore decided to put on record my minor involvement in the early days of Matrix Games, if only to assuage my annoyance.

The first time I came across Matrix Games was in 1988(!). Chris Engle – the real instigator of this method of wargame design and someone whom I think is worthy of much greater acclaim and acknowledgement within the whole wargaming community – wrote an article entitled VERBAL ANALYSIS WARGAMING that was published in the May 1988 issue of THE NUGGET (No.44). In it he outlined the first tentative concepts that eventually evolved into Matrix Games.

By the time the next issue of THE NUGGET was published in July 1988 (No.45), the concepts were beginning to come together and develop into a far more practical system. Chris stated in his article MORE ON VERBAL ANALYSIS GAMING that:

The process of play of a MATRIX game involves a dialogue between two conflicting players with a referee. The dialogue can be used to resolve several types of critical situation. Institutions can be "attacked" by problems from within that make the institution ineffective in doing its job (for instance, over-hunting in a primitive culture that hunts for food). Dialogues also resolve any situations where other player's moves may critically affect the first player. Obviously there are more ways to use dialogues but I have not thought of them yet. In any case, the players present logical, opposing interpretations of the outcome of an event. They then argue as to which argument is better. If they cannot reach a decision in a short amount of time the referee decides.'

At COW88 (the 1988 Conference of Wargamers) Chris Kemp – the former editor of THE NUGGET – put on a session where we attempted to play a Matrix Game. It was reasonably successful and fairly well received, and both the late Paddy Griffith and John Armatys wrote encouraging offside reports about it.

In the 1990 WD (Wargame Developments) Annual, Chris Engle submitted an article entitled THE SWASHBUCKLERS – A MATRIX GAME. In it he described a 'Dastardly Pirate Game' that he ran for a group of gamers aged nine to thirteen. It was laid out as a skirmish and each of the players took on one of the characters. He included a description of the prompt or 'cue' cards that were used to help the players formulate their arguments, these cards being split into 'topics' (e.g. Motivations, Emotions, Fencing, Brawling, Results), each 'topic' containing relevant cards (e.g. Lunge, Walk, Wound, Anger).

By the end of 1990 Chris Engle had begun to publish EGG (the EXPERIMENTAL GAMES GROUP newsletter) and as editor of THE NUGGET, I was able to keep members of WD aware of Chris's thinking about games design. I was even able to publish one of Chris's non-Matrix games – AGAMEMNON: AN ANCIENT WARGAME – in the October issue (No.60). When Tim Price took over as editor, he continued to publish Chris's articles about game design in general and Matrix Games in particular.

At COW1991 Tim Price and I felt confident enough to stage a Matrix Game based upon one of the scenarios Chris Engle had written. PENINSULAR WAR 1808 accommodated seven players – each with a specific player brief that included victory conditions they had to try to achieve – used a large hand-drawn map of Spain, a number of figures to represent the characters and any military forces that had under their command, and what had by then had become the pack of standard 54 Matrix 'cue cards'. We ran the game twice ... and by the end of it we were convinced that the basic Action, Result, and Three Reasons structure worked, and that players did not need the 'cue cards' once they had played through a couple of turns.

Photographs of the PENINSULAR WAR 1808 Matrix Game run at COW1991. The map is hand-drawn and the playing pieces were selected from Tim Price's extensive collection of LEGO figures.

Spurred on by this success I finally designed a Matrix Game of my own. It was entitled THE BALKAN LEAGUE and followed the general design of Chris Engle's designs but with a larger pack of Matrix 'cue cards' (108 rather than 54) in order to enable all the players to be able to exploit the Matrix. (This game was published in NUGGETs Nos. 73 and 73 in early 1992, and subsequently in WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED No.66 in March 1993.)

Later in 1992 Chris Engle published his CAMPAIGN IN A DAY: A MATRIX GAME, CAMPAIGN IN A DAY: READY TO PLAY SCENARIOS, and STUPID SIMPLE RULES booklets. The latter were a set of wargames rules specifically designed to go with the campaign booklets, and contained some innovative ideas which still remain to be fully developed. By this point I had become convinced that there was no need for the Matrix 'cue cards', and that they could be replaced by a laminated list that each player could be given, and not long afterwards Chris adopted this innovation himself. (My modified Matrix Game Playsheet was published in THE NUGGET No.79.)

Up until this point Matrix Games had been essentially kept 'in house' in the UK by members of WD, but at the Victorian Military Society's Show in January 1993 and at SALUTE 93 in March I and a group of members of WD – including Tim Price – ran a revised version of Chris's SAVE GORDON! Matrix Game a number of times in front of the general wargaming public. The responses were interesting, and at SALUTE 93 they varied from 'It's just a boardgame' from two young men who forced their way through the crowd of people around the table – and who then promptly left – to one chap who stood and watched two games because he enjoyed the interaction between the players. His parting comment was to the effect that he had never thought that wargaming could be a spectator sport until he had seen a Matrix Game in action! SAVE GORDON! subsequently appeared in WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED No.77 in February 1994.

I designed my most ambitious Matrix Game in 1994, and presented it at COW1994. Entitled VIVA LA MUERTE!, it was a Matrix Game about the Spanish Civil War. The one significant change that I made was to make each player give two Arguments; one had to be Political and the other Military. Furthermore each player had present them in written form, and they were deal with by the umpire – me – in the order in which they arrived during each turn. This had the dual effect of driving the pace of the game along and not allowing players to concern themselves with producing counter-arguments to what other players might propose to do. The whole text of the game was published in the 1994 issue of the WD ANNUAL.

My final involvement in the development of Matrix Games was to run a play-by-mail campaign during 1995. I chose Chris Engle's THE MARCH TO THE SEA, which was about Sherman's advance through Georgia in 1864.

It involved players who were located in various places across Europe – including Tim Price, who was on active service with NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in Bosnia – and used the 'first come, first adjudicated' system that I had developed for my Spanish Civil War Matrix Game. The campaign lasted for eight moves and proved to be very successful, and a full transcript of the campaign was later published in WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED.

I think that I can justifiably argue that I did my little bit to push the development of Matrix Games along in their early days, and hopefully if or when someone records a history of their development, I might just qualify for a small footnote.

For examples of some of the Matrix Games I have designed and/or run, visit the following links to the MapSymbs website (which also contains a whole section about Matrix Games):

• VIVA LA MUERTE! Matrix Game (N.B. This is a zip file)
• VIVA LA MUERTE! Matrix Game Map
• MARCH TO THE SEA Matrix Game Campaign (N.B. This is a zip file)