A guide to solo wargaming that offers tips and tricks to beginners and seasoned veterans.

This practitioner's guide to solo wargaming offers comprehensive coverage of the subject, showing how it can be a fascinating complement to social gaming or an entire hobby in its own right. This book integrates ideas from across the hobby to discuss various aspects of gaming alone across all manner of conflicts, whether land, sea or air and in any historical period or imagined setting.

 Starting with the fundamental question of why people play solo wargames, David Heading lays out the various advantages and disadvantages. He also considers such questions as whether to ‘play both sides’ or to command one army against an ‘automatic’ opponent, giving various ideas on how to control or program the responses of the opposing force with dice, cards or by other means. There is advice on how to construct challenging and interesting scenarios for one-off engagements, whether these are skirmishes or major battles, historical events or more generic ones, and how to combine these tactical actions into wider campaigns, involving grand strategy, logistics and other factors. Tips on sustaining interest through such activities as recording results, writing campaign diaries and online blogs will help you enrich your hobby. The author has been playing solo wargames for forty years and shares the secrets of happy solo gaming. Packed full of common-sense advice and inspiration, it offers plenty of value to the beginner and the seasoned veteran alike.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Why Solo Wargame
  • Why Wargame Alone?
  • The Advantages and Disadvantages of Solo Wargaming
  • Sources of Solo Inspiration
  • Wargaming as Narrative
  • Guidelines for Solo Wargaming
  • On Dice and Cards
  • The Rest of the Book
• Chapter 2 Battles
  • Setting up a Battle
  • Types of Battle
    • Historical Wargames
    • Semi-historical Wargames
    • Scenario-based Wargames
    • Fictitious Battles
  • Wargame Types
    • Role-playing Games
    • Skirmish Wargames
    • Small- and Medium-sized Wargames
    • Large Wargames
  • Determining Terrain
    • A Dice-driven Terrain-generating System
    • Card-driven Terrain-generating Systems
  • Choosing the Forces
  • Generalship
    • The Divided General
    • Automated General
      • Deployment
      • In Action
      • A Card Command Set
      • A Dice Command Process
  • Bias
• Chapter 3 Campaigns
  • Choosing Your Campaign
    • Historical
    • Semi-historical
    • Fictional
  • Choosing a Period
  • Campaign Scale
    • Role-playing Campaigns
    • Skirmish Campaigns
    • Small and Medium-scale Campaigns
    • Large-scale Campaigns
  • Setting Up a Campaign
    • Types of Narrative
    • Map-less Campaigns
    • Semi-mapped Campaigns
  • Campaigns in a Day
    • Example: The Great Northern War
  • Fully Mapped Campaigns
  • Imagi-nations
  • Map Moves
  • Hidden Movement
  • Reconnaissance
  • Information Flow and Communications
  • From Map to Tabletop and Back
    • Map to Tabletop
    • Tabletop to Map
      • Casualties
      • Map Moves
  • Journals and Campaign Diaries
  • Blogs and Newsletters
  • Mixing Scales and Sizes
• Chapter 4 Personalities, Logistics and Randomization
  • Personalities
    • Creation
      • An Attribute-driven Personality Creator
      • A Value-driven Personality Creator
      • Bringing the Systems Together
    • Use
      • Personality Interactions
    • Experience
  • Unit Histories
    • Creation
    • Use
  • Logistics
    • Logistics as Wargames
    • The Supply Train
    • Depots
    • Effects of Lack of Supply
  • Recruiting and Finance
    • Casualties and Prisoners
    • Recruitment
    • The Sinews of War
  • Diplomacy
  • Randomization
    • Weather
      • The Impact of Weather
    • Strategic Chance Cards
    • Tactical Chance Cards
• Chapter 5 Siege, Naval and Air Wargames
  • Siege Wargames
    • The Siege as Inconvenience
    • The Siege as a Wargame
  • Naval Wargames
    • Stand-alone Naval Wargames
    • Naval Wargame Campaigns
      • Role-playing and Skirmish-level Campaigns
      • Small and Medium-sized Campaigns
      • Large-scale Campaigns
      • Amphibious Operations
  • Air Wargames
    • Weather in Air Wargames
    • Stand-alone Air Wargames
    • Air Wargame Campaigns
      • Role-playing and Skirmish Campaigns
      • Larger Campaigns
        • Example: Malta 1940–42
  • Air, Land and Sea Operations
• Chapter 6 Advancing
  • Sources of Inspiration
    • Novels, Films, etc
    • Wargame Books, Blogs and Magazines
    • Reading Military History
  • Matters of Taste and Realism
    • Civilians
    • Desertion
    • Disease
  • Moving On
    • Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargaming
    • Computers and the Internet
  • And Finally...
• References