Never, ever reinforce failure!

I had hoped to write a battle report about the first play-test of my redrafted RED FLAGS & IRON CROSSES rules ... but after setting up the table and gaming through the first three moves, I walked away. Basically, the rules worked ... but were so cumbersome and clunky that I was not enjoying the experience. Furthermore, they failed what I term ‘Cordery’s Second Rule of Wargame Design’.

This rule states that:

‘If you are not enjoying a wargame and you wrote the rules, how do you expect other people to enjoy them?’

Now I try to design rules where the player should have picked up the basics by the end of the third turn, and can pretty well remember the rules by the end of their first game. Once they have reached that stage, they should only need to look at the text of the rules to clarify a point.

The draft of RED FLAGS & IRON CROSSES looked as if they complied with this, but by the end of the third turn I must have spent more time looking at the charts and text, and still I managed to miss things ... and don't forget, I wrote them! I kept reverting to the modern version of THE PORTABLE WARGAME and forgetting the relevant game mechanism from RED FLAGS & IRON CROSSES. Furthermore, the movement distances in RED FLAGS & IRON CROSSES were so short that I knew it was going to be an age before any proper combat was going to take place, and I kept forgetting that unlike in THE PORTABLE WARGAME, artillery does not fire at the beginning of the turn and but during each player's section of the turn.

It is a well-known military maxim that you should never, ever reinforce failure ... and to my mind this 'new' set of rules are going to fail. I am therefore going to leave them as they are, and fight my first mini-campaign battle using the modern version of THE PORTABLE WARGAME as featured in DEVELOPING THE PORTABLE WARGAME.

This setback could have been very disheartening, but I re-learned a valuable lesson. This is that 'if it ain't broke, it doesn't need fixing!'

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For those of you who do not know, ‘Cordery’s First Rule of Wargame Design’states that:

‘If players consistently ignore a rule because it does not make sense or hinders the flow of the wargame, then the rule should be discarded. If players do not notice that it has gone, then it probably should not have been there in the first place.’