--- title: Battlefield size in wargames subtitle: "Board to scope ratio" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-05-28 08:00 date: 2025-05-28 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: warhammer-mini-space-marines-objective-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, meta, wargame ] --- When you hear the term "wargame", you probably think "big" because a war is big. It's not a skirmish, it's not a battle, it's not an operation or a sting or astrike, it's a _war_. Because a war is big, there's a general admiration and excitement in the wargaming community for an expansive game board. The more land you have, the more troops you can fit onto it, and the more troops you have, the bigger the war. The bigger the war, the bigger the wargame. But is can a board be too big for your game? In practice, once you start playing on a big board, you're likely to notice that all the space between your front line and the enemy's front line is, both literally and figuratively, empty. You could put 8 centimeters (3") or 8 meters (24') between your armies, and it's still empty space. It's not being used in the game. All it does is force you to hurry through rounds of your toy soldiers traversing the board with their tiny little 25 millimeter stride. ## Ranged weapons A good ranged attack is meant to solve the problem of distance. However, due to the physics a wargame is seeking to emulate, even ranged attacks have limits. Even in a very modern or scifi game, the farther away a target gets from your long-range weapon, the worse your accuracy and element of surprise becomes. When determining a reasonable size for a game board, though, ranged weapons can serve as a primary indicator of how big the battlefield ought to be. I like to define the limits: * **Microscopic board**: A purely theoretical worst-case scenario board, just to acknowledge that a board can indeed be too small. * **Small board**: No limit to a long-range attacks. Anything on the board is necessarily in range. For short-range attacks (like a pistol or a slingshot), the range is half the board size, with penalties applied to targets beyond that. This makes it extremely advantageous to win initiative and take the first turn, because you can attempt to eliminate your enemy's long-range weapons before they can be used against you. * **Big board**: Due to range limitations, there are no (or very few) valid targets in an opposing deployment zone at the start of round 1. Anything that moves out of deployment becomes a valid target for a long-range attack. In this case, there's an advantage to failing initiative and going second, because your enemy must make the first move. * **Huge board**: With lots of empty space between deployment zones, there are no valid targets within range. It's difficult to predict which army will introduce valid targets first without assuming that each army foolishly takes the shortest route toward its enemy. This seems like an intresting challenge until you realise that wargamers are playing the game for war. All a huge board proves is that you can forestall a war by not advancing. It doesn't actually make for interesting game play, and inevitably players end up fast-forwarding to positions that could have fit on a big board instead. * **Galactic board**: For space battles, it's often assumed that you have a board the size of a solar system. Ships are a long way away from each other on both the horizontal and vertical axis. Even laser weapors may take time to reach a target, and it's assumed that onboard sensors would adjust position by the time the laser has arrived. As with a huge board, eventually gamers "zoom in" on the moment that ships are close enough to pose actual threats to one another, and so functionally the game occurs on a big board. From this thought exercise, you can see that there are actually only two sizes of boards. There's the size where you can shoot at anything on the board with your long-range weapon, and there's a size where you have to be within a proscribed measurement. There's nothing smaller, and anything bigger ends up getting ignored after troops have advanced close enough to target each other. There are "vanity" boards and edge cases, but there's often more to those boards than first meets the eye. When someone creates a monumental board that shows the full scope of a city centre or a fortress, it's often actually used as if it were several boards stuck together. You play out the battle happening on the east side of the fortress, and then later you play the battle happening on the west side of the fortress, and so on. You don't play the entire board at once. Or if you do, it's not just you playing, but a bunch of people playing separate games at once on a vast landscape. ## Mitigating advantage of the opening round Finding physical space in the real world to setup notwithstanding, determining the perfect size for your battlefield isn't easy. Whatever board size you choose, you must contend with initiative. You don't want the outcome of a game to be predetermined by winning or losing the initiative roll. You probably also don't want to reduce options for deployment to the lowest common denominator. However strategically sound it may be, it always feels sad to me when a big scary army starts a game by cowering behind every building, rock, and tree it can find, in hopes of winning the initiative roll. Here are a few approaches to solving this problem: * **Delayed resolution**: On round 1, units that would be killed after the first turn remain on the battlefield until the end of the round. In other words, you might kill my tank on round 1 but not before it kills that squad of scouts. Losing initiative in this case only influences movement, because both sides have equal opportunity to take the first shot. This usually can be safely added to any rule set without entirely changing the game. * **Test to maintain initiative**: One of your units takes a turn, and then you roll to test whether another unit can activate. If you fail the roll, then I activate one of my units. Somebody still gets to go first, but never with the full force of an army. This may not work with all rulesets. * **Randomised initiative**: Shuffle some cards together. One player is red and the other is black. Draw a card and activate 1 corresponding unit. Repeat until all units have activated. This is a variation on testing to maintain initiative, but with less perceived player "control" (both players can take turns shuffling the cards, until both agree that entropy has taken control). This may not work with all rulesets. * **Arms race**: Don't deploy your whole army before the start of the game. Instead, deploy a unit on your turn until all units have been deployed. If you deploy your big gun early, you can shoot lots of enemies, but once you've deployed your big gun, your enemy is likely to deploy a big gun. And eventually, you're going to run out of big guns to deploy. But then again, if you don't use your big gun, you'll lose it in the end. This can sometimes be added to a game without totally changing its rules, but it depends on the ruleset. * **Build a strong army**: Sometimes the solution is to adapt. Deploy units behind cover, and send the units that can withstand the opening onslaught first. ## The battlefield is the third player The fact is that in a wargame, the battlefield is an invisible player. It usually doesn't win or lose, but it introduces challenges. Personally, I don't like to set up battefields that control the game but I love one that influences it. The components you use to setup a game are interconnected, so turn one knob and see how it effects everything else. Make your battlefield smaller or make it bigger, or add terrain features or take terrain away, or change how you handle initiative. It's a balancing act, so if a game isn't working the way you want it to work, try changing it up.