Preferred battlespace?

[qamie]

Hi Guys,

Just a quick poll on board size.

At the moment I use a standard 24" square board, but I look the look of the larger 30" square type. In you comments could those of you who have played on both sized boards let me know how the games differ?

Also, what size do you use for BBDBA games?

[JamesLDIII]

I prefer a larger board, whether 28, 30, or 32 inches. I don't like the kind of battle where one's opponent lines the board from edge to edge, and I'd say that happened in a plurality of tournament games I was in (though obviously based on the board terrain and army list).

[Lee Shackelford]

If you come to Taiwan to play, I promise..... none of my students corner-sit :)

Lee

[Dauvitius]

This post relates to 25mm, but please read on.

We still use the original 4' square board but with the later 100 paces to 40mm in place of DBA's original 100 paces to 50mm at this scale. This gives us a larger effective playing area. The extra space provides more opportunity for manoeuvre and so makes for more interesting and challenging games. In addition, we feel it simply looks better. I guess that puts us in the larger (30") camp for the 15mm discussion.

[Stephen Webb]

I prefer to use a 36" square board, with an appropriate increase in the number of pieces of terrain.

This allows the mobile armies to use their mobility.

[Roland Fricke]

30 inch definitely. Mobile armies have a chance. We started using 30" boards a few months ago at club events and out of eight players only one dislikes it. It not as open as you think because the generals 12" radius truly limits the open flanks. At Hoplites Heyday a few years ago I won on 30" boards and I fought Thessalian, Early Acaemnid Persian, Early Carthaginians - beating all three more mobile armies. The open board tends to draw players into wide sweeping maneuvers and then just as battle engages they find they ran out of PIPs if the spread too far.

We started cutting the boards to 29.5 inches however since the standard banquet table is 30" and that 1/2 inch less gives us a bit of extra room so we don't bump the board.

If you never tried 30" I recommend at least trying it once. You might change your vote then.

[Pthomas]

I prefer the 30" board. The command and control range of 12" is the true limiting factor, but less careful generals can find themselves in difficult straights with the extra board available. It also gives the more mobile army the space necessary to exploit its mobility advantage. There is still enough terrain available with the normal terrain rules to not disadvantage primarily bad going armies. All in all it is better.

[El' Jocko]

Also, what size do you use for BBDBA games?

We use the NASAMW rules for BBDBA board size: 60" x 24". Though it seems that we should use 60" x 30". Maybe there's a reason that I don't recall at this point.

- Jack

[David Kuijt]

We use the NASAMW rules for BBDBA board size: 60" x 24". Though it seems that we should use 60" x 30". Maybe there's a reason that I don't recall at this point.


The reason is relatively simple. The community that played BBDBA at the big conventions (Historicon and Cold Wars) realized within one or two years that doubling the 24" board was entirely inadequate for Big Battle. The resulting game was cramped enough that a consensus quickly emerged to try adding another 12", and the consensus was strong enough and broad enough that we even managed to convince Bob of the merits of the argument. We've been playing on 60" boards ever since.

The movement for playing regular DBA on wider boards was completely separate -- and since regular DBA is played across a far broader world than Big Battle (which was invented in 2001, in its current form) it is much more difficult to form a consensus.

The movement towards larger boards (32" square originally; 30" to fit on tables after Phil reduced the 25mm table size to 36" from 48") in single DBA started before Big Battle existed, and is ongoing. The movement towards adding another "half-board" to the size of the Big Battle playing surface gelled nearly as quickly as resistance to BUAs did. The two movements were subject to different forces and acting on different populations.

[Pavane]

David, I think what Jack was saying (because I was thinking the same thing) was that 60" x 30" is two 30" x 30" DBA battlefields side by side. This is more convenient than 60" x 24" if you already have a couple of larger DBA boards on hand.

I've build two 24" square DBA boards, but I am convinced that 30" is an improvement so I am now working on a pair of those. I am also going to make a pair of 36" square HOTT boards for 25/28mm. I don't want to make a 60" x 24" board on top of all of those.

It would be nice if we all agreed to use 30" square boards for DBA and a pair of DBA boards for BBDBA.

[Don Ray]

Having had my Skythians driven off the edge of the world by those dastardly Macedonians ;) , I'm willing to try the 30" board!
Don

[David Kuijt]

David, I think what Jack was saying (because I was thinking the same thing) was that 60" x 30" is two 30" x 30" DBA battlefields side by side.

Oh, I understood that.

I have been a wider-board advocate, one of the first and one of the loudest, for a long time.

I wanted to make clear that 60" width was not picked just because it would be 30" twice. It was a number reached experimentally, and proven successful independently, of the effort towards larger boards in regular DBA.

Note also that the terrain rules in regular DBA are NOT doubled in Big Battle. If Big Battle went to a doubled 30" board, some testing should be done over a year or more to determine what terrain density resulted, and what the terrain rules should be for that board size.


I've build two 24" square DBA boards, but I am convinced that 30" is an improvement so I am now working on a pair of those.

I'm glad you're a convert, Will. Most times the hardest thing is getting people to try the larger boards; in my experience if I can get them to play two or three games on the larger boards they realize it is a better game.

The first time DS and I ran a tournament on wider boards (32" at the time, in Fall In like four years back) there was some resistance, but every single player was a convert by the end of the tournament. Well, every one of them except one -- he admitted it was a fine game on the wider board, but he said it took away from his Spartans because they couldn't anchor on both board edges at once.

As you will imagine, my sympathy for his argument was limited.

[El' Jocko]

Note also that the terrain rules in regular DBA are NOT doubled in Big Battle. If Big Battle went to a doubled 30" board, some testing should be done over a year or more to determine what terrain density resulted, and what the terrain rules should be for that board size.


More than terrain density, I suspect that the deeper board would have a substantial affect on deployment in depth. It's not unusual in BBDBA to see one command deployed partly or fully behind another command. And that's on the 24" deep boards. An extra 3 inches of deployment zone would make deployment in depth even more attactive (and quite a bit easier in some situations). Whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know. My original urge to make the BBDBA board 30" deep arises from an overly rigid sense of symmetry with the regular rules, not a problem with the way BBDBA plays.

- Jack

[Pavane]

Note also that the terrain rules in regular DBA are NOT doubled in Big Battle. If Big Battle went to a doubled 30" board, some testing should be done over a year or more to determine what terrain density resulted, and what the terrain rules should be for that board size.

I assumed that 30" wasn't a random choice, but someone mentioned to me that 30" was chosen over 36" because of convention table widths (which made sense to me as a practical consideration). If I had a BBDBA army (sometime in Q1 '07) and played more then a handful of DBA games outside of conventions, I would be happy to volunteer to test terrain densities of 60" x 30" boards. I think that once the optimum DBA board size is determined (which I think it has) then the BBDBA should flow from that, rather than be independantly decided.

[David Kuijt]

I assumed that 30" wasn't a random choice, but someone mentioned to me that 30" was chosen over 36" because of convention table widths (which made sense to me as a practical consideration).

Not quite. 30" was chosen over 32" for those reasons.

The genesis was like this (approximately).


The 24" board was too small in 15mm scale. (arguments not repeated here for brevity). An army lined up covered 79% of the width of the board; with two gaps and leaving spaces on the edges too small to fit through, an army could extend from edge to edge. I (and others) started experimenting with a 36x24 board. It was nice, but the ability to rotate the board on four angles was important in terrain deployment, so after some time we abandoned rectangular boards.
In 25mm scale, the board size was 48" (twice as big), but the base size was 60mm (1.5x as big). An army lined up covered only 59% of the width of the board and it was impossible to fix both flanks on the edge of the world.
A 32" board is to 15mm scale base widths exactly the same size as a 48" is to 25mm scale bases. I (and others) started advocating use of a 32" square board. WADBAG started running tournaments on 32" boards; they were very successful.
We pestered Phil.
When he came out with 2.0, he reduced the 25mm board size to 36". Which made a lot of 25mm players unhappy (but quickly made them realize what we 15mm players had been complaining about).
With the symmetry between 32"/48" boards no longer true since Phil changed the 25mm scale map size, after a few years most proponents of larger boards shifted to 30" boards, as Roland said, because it is essentially the same size and it happens to fit on a standard banquet table width (the size of tables used in all major US gaming conventions) None of the above is intended as blowing my own horn -- many people were involved; I mention my own involvement only because I was one of the loud ones, and to give credence to my expression of the timeline above. Mike Stelzer, Roland, Mark Pozniak, ... many others participated in the experimentation, playtesting, and debate. (Mike D -- I don't remember if you debated -- sorry if I've left you out by mistake).


If I had a BBDBA army (sometime in Q1 '07) and played more then a handful of DBA games outside of conventions, I would be happy to volunteer to test terrain densities of 60" x 30" boards. I think that once the optimum DBA board size is determined (which I think it has) then the BBDBA should flow from that, rather than be independantly decided.

Oh, I agree. But I'm thinking long-term. As you see from the responses on this poll (almost exactly 50/50 at the time I write this), there are lots of people who prefer 24", for various reasons. Some of them, I'm sure, because they've never tried 30", or perhaps because they've never been frustrated by the stupidity of playing a Cav army against someone with both flanks anchored on the edge of the world. But lots of them for other reasons too.

To start pressuring for 60x30 Big Battle Boards is to assume that the debate is finished on 30x30 boards. A 50/50 split is not a consensus, so the debate is NOT finished. I have no wish to make anyone feel pressured, or to make anyone feel that the "Wider is Better" faction are pushing things too fast.

In the long run, I want 30x30 to be "the" size. Perhaps because I can convince Phil to sell (to a Wider-Board Supporter) the rights to DBA the way he did to WRG 7th a decade ago; perhaps because a consensus is built among players as we did with shooting from the rear or BUAs. But I'm patient -- I've been agitating for wider boards for more than six years now. And the 30x30 board has gradually built support -- not because people are agitating, but because people tried it and liked it. When WADBAG ran the first Wide Board tourney at Fall In (four years ago? Five? I forget) I would guess that less than 5% of the DBA-playing public had played on anything but 24" boards. Now we are half a decade later, and most of the convention-playing DBA world between the Mississippi and the Atlantic have played on 30" boards at least a few times, are familiar with the issues and differences, and have had the chance to form an educated opinion. If someone had run this poll five years ago, 24" boards would have "won" by 10:1 or 20:1 numbers. I am very encouraged by the trend.

[David Crenshaw]

Just to complicate matters even more....How about 30" x 24", thus retaining the original intent to have the armies in fairly close proximity (which has the added bonus of speeding up the games), but gives the extra elbow room on the flanks for all those LH crazed fanatics. I've never actually played on a larger board, but it has always seemed like a good idea. Then of course the 60" x 24" BBDBA boards wouldn't be a problem either.

David

[David Crenshaw]

Ooops, just read the comment about not be able to rotate an oblong board for terrain placement. Guess I should read before I type. Does anyone use 30" boards, but increase the original starting deployment to 8" or 9" from the back edge?

David

[Chris Brantley]

Does anyone use 30" boards, but increase the original starting deployment to 8" or 9" from the back edge?

That's our standard convention in WADBAG and when 30'' boards are used in HMGS-E tournaments....9 inch deployments on a 30 inch board, so armies still start 12 inches part.....so you don't slow down play. Camps are still deployed on the base line.

[Paul A. Hannah]

I used the non-standard, 30" square boards for the first time ever last month at an event at "Fall-In". It played okay. Wasn't nearly as dramatic a difference as I had expected. I think by the third game of the tourney, I even caught on to their house-rule that one can deploy in further than usual 600p from one's base edge. (Grins.)

[APHooper]

As a simple player of DBA, the idea of using a larger board is only mildy provoking. My expectation is that if you played the same armies on two different sized boards, and gave the players the same sequence of PIP rolls, you'd end up with the same result in the great majority of cases. I've certainly wished I could ride around an opponent's flank, or close the door on the end of an enemy's line without fearing that I would recoil into the board edge if I blew the combat die roll.

But as the eldritch keeper of the Grand Compendium of DBA Results for the Northwest Ancients Gamers, I find that the suggestion of chaging the board size makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. We're constantly wrangling with the issue of what constitutes an "official" game, and what should be classified as "Off-Book" results, using forces, terrain, special conditions and other elements that deviate substantively from the DBA rules as published. Our "Off-Book" file includes results using armies from Luke Ueda-Sarson's DBA for Middle Earth lists, Napoleonic and Victorian Colonial battles using the Humberside Extension and HFG, and weird battalions derived from HoTT lists, like Incas with Alien Mind Control Robots. It took a few months of discussion in order to agree that matches between non-historical opponents belonged in the Compendium, so now the Post-Mongol Samurai cheerfully fling themselves onto the bronze-tipped pikes of Tien & K'un-Ming, and the results are duly Compendiated.

Paul Hannah, sly man, managed to slip a bunch of terrain-altered results by me in the "Divine Wind" event at Enfilade two years ago, when he allowed the Early Samurai to select either their appointed Hilly home terrain, or a littoral board to represent their opposition to the Mongol landings. And I've happily included the many set-piece battle fought on the "Ice-Rink" at Lake Peipus. So the whole issue of non-standard terrain is a murky one for us, and I really don't know what our reaction to 30" or 32" boards would or will be. But as a matter of canonical policy, I would probably "quarantine" "big-board" results in "Off-Book" limbo until it became clear we were going to use the larger boards in a significant number of NAGS-reported games. There are a lot of changes that I might make to DBA if I had the opportunity, but I resist implementing them on anything other than an experimental basis, because I'm anxious to preserve the unity offered by the use of the rules as published.

What I find really kind of surprising about all this is the way that increasing the board size actually HAS inspired a measure of consensus within a significant segment of the DBA community. Most suggestions for adopting variants in play are met with counter-proposals or even open hostility, so it seems remarkable that such a fundamental change in the mechanics of the game has been adopted by so many gamers. Perhaps we NAGs are not sufficiently competitive or tactically astute that the enlargement of the board has yet seemed any sort of imperative to us. There is a growing movement toward Big Battle play among the Olympia-area NAGs, so they may visit the even more complex issue of board-size for those contests soon. But anyone planning to play DBA at our area conventions, like, say, Enfilade, will probably find themselves fighting on 24" boards.

Yours in Unreasoning Orthodoxy,
Andy Hooper
Bacteria Valley, Seattle

[David Kuijt]

I used the non-standard, 30" square boards for the first time ever last month at an event at "Fall-In". It played okay. Wasn't nearly as dramatic a difference as I had expected.

Yup. Not so dramatic.

One of the original fears we had to fight was that 30" boards would make heavy foot armies non-competitive. (Which has the ironic implication that the only reason heavy foot armies are competitive is the edge of the board :eek:)

Turns out to be not the case. The first and second place finishers at the first ever Wide Board tourney at Fall In were my LPIA City (9 heavy foot) and Larry Chaban's Mongol Conquest (a zillion LH). More recent winners have included my Koryo Korean (9 heavy foot), barely beating out Mark P's Polybian Romans (8 heavy foot, 2 psiloi). As someone said earlier, increasing the board size to 30" exposes the criticality of command radius, and unsupported flank marches end up pip-starved and killed or ignored as the enemy wishes.

[David Kuijt]

as the eldritch keeper of the Grand Compendium of DBA Results for the Northwest Ancients Gamers,


The Gatekeeper of the Database must ensure the purity of input data. [Deuteronomy, 13:3]


What I find really kind of surprising about all this is the way that increasing the board size actually HAS inspired a measure of consensus within a significant segment of the DBA community. Most suggestions for adopting variants in play are met with counter-proposals or even open hostility, so it seems remarkable that such a fundamental change in the mechanics of the game has been adopted by so many gamers.

It has taken many years; the initial response was much as you would expect. There were a lot of concerns that needed to be allayed. Would games take longer, causing more unfinished games? (no) Would this make heavy foot armies non-competitive? (no) Would this give an advantage to those who play on larger boards, as compared to those who play mostly on 24s? (not appreciably -- as Paul said earlier, the differences are not dramatic. Good players on 24 are good players on 30, and vice versa). What about the change to terrain density? (it is still possible to put out too much bad-going to get a result, so no).

I think the main thing is that this is a minor improvement. It doesn't change the world. The use of 30" boards has spread gradually, as people try it and find it (1) doesn't break anything, and (2) makes for a slightly better game. It isn't something like BUAs, where 12-18 months was sufficient to mobilize a lot of resistance, and another 6 months was sufficient to create majority rejection of the silly things.

[David Schlanger]

We used 30" boards at Fall In! 2003 for Chariot Armies of the Ancient Near East, and the Nubians won that event... with no mounted.

DS

[Nils Kullinger]

In Sweden we only use 24" boards so far (though we do not measure in inches, of course). Since the hobby is small but booming at the moment, there is no telling what will happen in the future. My personal experience is that the command radius makes the game work well on bigger boards, but small boards provide quick games, which is nice.

[Dauvitius]

Inspired by qamie's poll, I used the last two weeks’ holiday as an opportunity to experiment with board sizes. While normally playing on the 25mm equivalent of a 30” board, this is the result of historical accident, not planning. When the 25mm scale changed from 50mm to 100 paces to 40mm to 100paces, we just carried on playing on a 4' square board - producing the equivalent of 15mm 30" board. And the results of our playing…

The games were based around the Roman conquest of various Greek and Macedonian Successor states in the second century BC. This meant all the armies had a core of heavy, relatively slow moving foot. Our conclusions were that:
1) The official size is too small. The legions of Rome could form up in a shield wall extending pretty much all the way from one side of the known world to the other. The essence of the game came down to initial deployment - trying to match the opponent's elements - and too little else.
2) Using our preferred size opened up tactical possibilities. However, these possibilities did not take over the game as they were constrained by the 1200 pace command range limit and assorted intervening hills. This meant that while initial deployment could still prove crucial, the extra space gave increased importance to how terrain was handled (enough space to manouevre around it) and gave opportunities for the supporting light troops to prove their worth (easier for them to cause chaos on the flanks of the heavies).
3) Going wider didn’t add anything to our games. There weren’t enough troops to exploit the extra space, particularly given the double PIP movement constraint. We'll stick to double DBA or BBDBA if using a larger game board.

We also examined the deployment options. We normally use the house rule to permit 900 paces in from the base edge and this works fine for us. Reducing this to the official 600 paces slowed down the game as it took that much longer for the armies to come to grips with each other.

In conclusion, the exercise made for a few interesting games and shook us out of the doldrums; and now we shall go back to doing what we had been doing all along, but at least now we know why we're doing it. :)