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Greetings Designers,

I recently reviewed Osprey's Black Ops and that made me think about the best ways to do hidden movement and stealth in the game. Black Ops uses a combination of blinds, observation rolls, and Noise counters to create the on-table tools to represent stealth operations. In other games I have seen similar techniques.

So, for this discussion let's talk about other games that make good use of hidden movement, how they have achieved it, and any other alternative thoughts you have on the subject.

I look forward to learning more.

The rules vary by conditions, with and without umpire has a huge impact so does the assumed technology level.

Ooo! Ooo! This is a very roundabout way of doing 'stealth' on a tabletop war game, but I always thought the concept was interesting:

Back in ye olden days of Dark Eldar, when the models were naff and the army was nearly unplayable, we had Mandrakes with a rather unique 'infiltration' rule. Instead of deploying them on the board after all other units, for each unit of Mandrakes you placed down three tokens, representing possible locations for them.

These tokens did not interact with anything, but could be moved up to 6" during the movement phase. At any point before turn 3 (or was it by the END of turn 3?), the controlling playing could declare which token the Mandrakes would appear from, placing them and removing all the tokens.

It was kind of a neat thing where a unit could creep across the field and pop up in one of multiple locations. While you're opponent knew all the possibilities, the theory was that they could not cover every location at once. It's a shame Mandrakes were such rubbish back then.

Maybe something like this could be worked in? A unit in 'stealth' mode gets turned into multiple markers that denote a possible location for them, eliminating the need for an umpire?

A stealthy unit could be represented by a varying number of blank markers that are clustered within a certain distance of each other.

The number of markers could be reduced as the cluster gets closer to the enemy. This represents the enemy becoming more likely to notice the stealthy unit as it gets closer.

The enemy could also remove markers by hunting and sighting them.

It would be interesting to allow the stealthy unit to shoot from any marker regardless of its true position, and/or to deploy itself from any marker.

AQMF has something similar, for each unit with Stealth, you deploy two markers. 1 is real and the other is a "blip". They are revealed when they move or shoot, or when you get close/shoot at them.

I was playing around with some of these concepts, and ended up not doing them because the rules to create hidden information and misdirection were getting awfully cumbersome.

OTOH, if playing double-blind refereed...

It gets even more cumbersome needs two tables with exactly the same terrain and on top of that a referee.

Good for one off games were everybody involved is cool with the idea, will not fly as a commercial idea, in my opinion at least.

I agree with that.

Double-blind games are an excellent occasional club project.

Kriegsspiel is the only commercial product I have heard of, and that is a historical game (German staff training game from the mid 1800s.)

A lot of standard rule sets can easily be adapted for umpired games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_wargame

I kind of like the counters ability, but with the player having to somehow designate the "real" one. Otherwise, it just becomes the last one revealed, which seems odd. Maybe "super stealth" would do that.

A lot boils down to whether stealth is something certain specialty units get, or the whole point of the game.

IMO, Stealth kind of needs to be built into the game for an ongoing mechanic, and that results in a very particular game. The question is whether you want to play "Concentration, the Wargame".

OTOH, if it's simply a question of saying that Stealth deploys last, that's pretty painless.

In Blucher (A Nappies Game), all units use a card that is roughly the same size. The card is moved around as normal, but the enemy can not see what it is.

When an enemy moves a certain distance from it, it shoots, or is shot, then the card is flipped over and the unit revealed. However, until revealed all units look the same so you are unsure if it is cavalry, artillery, infantry etc. This type of mechanic could work good for naval, space, or some mecha games.

Black Ops from osprey also uses a "blind" system where the card is a playing card. Once detected (using detection rules in the game) the card is placed int eh activation deck and the models that correspond to it on the table.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
IMO, Stealth kind of needs to be built into the game for an ongoing mechanic, and that results in a very particular game. The question is whether you want to play "Concentration, the Wargame".

That is indeed the case, but how one modernises the stealth mechanics?

I'm not even sure it's really properly doable on the tabletop, simply because the opponent can see the board.

Sure, you can use dummies to mask things, but then you're moving 2x or 3x as much stuff each turn, which slows the game down. Or it becomes very imprecise.

I keep thinking about submarine warfare and why it generally doesn't figure in gaming. People want to play broadsides. Or Midway. Not Nazi wolfpack slaughters 90% of US Lend-Lease convoy.

I have often played submarine warfare, as I am a naval buff. Of course it isn't a popular type of game, partly because it is essentially paper based. You don't really need any models at all.

You do it by plotting movement on charts separately for the submarine player, the escort player and the umpire. In cases of discrepancy, the umpire's chart is correct and any errors in the players' charts are due to operational problems.

Interestingly, WW2 carrier battles are rather similar, because a lot of the time you don't know where to find the enemy. Many naval games have a strong chart component, actually, at least at the campaign level.

The only "good" sub games I'm aware of are solitaire campaigns, not tactical wargames. And the genre itself seems to be mired in the 70s.

Is there a head-to-head submarine warfare game?

I know there's a pretty good carrier battle game. But that's BFG, OOTB, unrestricted Chaos carriers, then upgraded to torpedo bombers... And totally not the original intent of the game.

Back in the day, Nids would have an interesting feature with Lictors infiltration, where the player would write down where the Lictor would be (some piece of terrain), and then when the time came, would show the opponent the paper he wrote it down on. It was a neat thing, as the opponent would know it was lurking in some terrain, but never knew which one it would be until it was too late.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
The only "good" sub games I'm aware of are solitaire campaigns, not tactical wargames. And the genre itself seems to be mired in the 70s.

Is there a head-to-head submarine warfare game?

I know there's a pretty good carrier battle game. But that's BFG, OOTB, unrestricted Chaos carriers, then upgraded to torpedo bombers... And totally not the original intent of the game.

Harpoon used to be my go-to but I gave it up when the Cold War ended and it seemed to become obsolete.

General Quarters 3 does WW2 carrier battles. I don't recall the submarine rules in any detail as I never used them.

If the two canonical "stealth" and "hidden movement" concepts of submarines and carriers haven't been sorted out by in the past 60+ years, I'm thinking it's a far stretch to simply graft it on.

It's been sorted out in the sense that by using the chart system the players can create a simplified version of the type of command and control setup that actually existed in real life.

Reports come in from visual sightings, sonar, radar and radio direction finding. The officers must plot these on some kind of display. During WW1 this was a chart table. During WW2 it was a glass wall with people marking up information in backwards writing. In modern times it is the computer screen.

This gives the commander a representation of the positions of all the units to the limit of accuracy of observation and time. The player must combine this information with his knowledge or assumptions about enemy capabilities and intentions.

The umpire is needed to maintain a master plot of all the units and to report to both sides the "realistic" (in other words, often incorrect) sightings and detections that come from their various observation systems, so that their plots are estimates that they don't know the accuracy of.

This seemingly clunky set of procedures actually is a key part of the game. The other way of doing it would be with a computer system. However, the umpire system can be done with just some sheets of graph paper, and being an umpire in such games is rather good fun.

Avalon Hill did a submarine warfare game using a card system somewhat like Up Front. I had a copy but sold it years ago. It wouldn't really convert to miniature warfare, though.

Sure, but that's not head-to-head tabletop wargaming. For all intents and purposes, that's refereed double-blind wargaming.

Hence, my observation that this entire thread is likely a fool's errand.

That is, there is probably no elegant way to have ongoing steath with hidden movement within a head-to-head tabletop wargaming context.

I believe no there is no elegant way, at least not one that does not involve an app and smartphones with camera.

Even then I am not sure.

Requiring an overhead camera and smartphones is simply grafting on a digitally-refereed double-blind system.

At that point, I'd rather simply play Warcraft / Starcraft / Dark Reign.

And I agree.

There's an old war game, "Attack Sub", that did submarine duels pretty well (and also included surface ships and helicopters on both sides, if you wanted. It didn't use a map or miniatures, so was somewhat abstracted. Each sub had a range and stealth track on its stat card, and you put a marker for each enemy sub on them. You used cards to control actions - moving closer or further away, or to escape the attention of other boats (ducking under thermoclines, running silent - or to attack or whatever.

Yes, that is the Avalon Hill game I mentioned earlier, but I could not remember its name at the time.

The objection will be raised that it's a card game, not a miniatures game. This essentially is correct, and it's the basis of JohnHwangDD's comment that there isn't an elegant, simple method of doing stealth/hidden movement in a pure figure game.

I think there are various ways of doing it, but they all involve some kind of compromise with the pure figures aesthetic. For my money, it's a question of how much you are prepared to compromise to achieve a satisfactory stealth result.

As is clear from my previous comments, I am prepared to go a long way to achieve a really good stealth game, even to the point of abandoning the figures. By this point we are no longer playing a figures game, of course.

There is no doubt that a card game is an excellent way to play stealth, being inherently hidden information and rangeless. Plus bluffing and misdirection. But that's why it's a card game.

But it has absolutely nothing to do with the core concept of "hidden movement" discussed in the subject of this thread. Quite frankly, if you're using a card game to show that stealth works, then you have absolutely failed to show that stealth and hidden movement works in any usable way whatsoever in a tabletop wargaming context. Because there is NO movement and NO tabletop.

You're actually proving that the only functional way to do stealth and hidden movement on the tabletop is via refereed double-blind play. Or via a computer, which automates the referee's role.

And that's fine. It just demonstrates that the concept of precise hidden information doesn't work in the context of a total information tabletop wargame.

Surely the concept of having total information is mutually exclusive with the idea of hidden movement.

What if you go the route that GW did with Dark Eldar Mandrakes in 3rd edition, where you have multiple markers representing potential positions for the unit/ship?

Block games give players nigh-complete information.

In the era before gunpowder, a well-placed commander could survey the whole battlefield pretty easily, except if there was adverse weather. Most ancient/mediaeval battlefields were at most a mile across.

Surprise tactics were relatively unusual, but were known, such as flank marches and hidden ambush units. These are catered for in most rules by written orders.