The Solitaire War Game: Wolf Pack

War Games:

Wolf Pack: The German Submarine War in the North Atlantic, 1939 - 1944; a game designed to be played solitaire

Published by Simulations Publications (SPI), 1974, with Strategy & Tactics Magazine no. 47

Blog Post Dated, December 2021

Type VII U-Boat, the most common German type

In my experience of playing board war-games, which dates from 1973 (about the time when this form of war gaming achieved a “mass” following), only 5 games of which I am aware have been designed specifically for “solitaire” play.

Solitary and Solitaire

We need to be careful with the term solitaire. Almost all board war-games, when they are played, are actually played solitaire. Although the overwhelming majority of war-games are designed to be played by two active opponents (occasionally multiple opponents), in reality, it is one player who pores over the map and rules and seeks to split his consciousness in two by playing both opponents, at the same time, as equitably as possible.

This is not as laughable as it sounds. Many war gamers are military historians and arrived at the game in the first place from at least partially an academic perspective. He wants to play it out, discover optimal strategies, and get a tactile feel for the ebb and flow of the battle or campaign. Most wargaming maps convey an excellent sense of the combat terrain (if they don’t they have failed as a viable game) and communicate the environment facing the opposing commanders certainly better than a map in a book.

Then, of course, there is always the die. The rolling of dice to introduce an element of luck and randomness is fundamental to all war games. Without the dice, there is no “fog of war”, and thus there is effectively no game.

However, beyond the die, there will always be the question of complete knowledge. As in chess, the players see everything, and can take time to think about what to do, and how to calculate the best possible outcomes. No matter how many live players are competing, war games inevitably possess a predictable edge, given the historical balance of forces (unlike chess). Try playing a game based on the battle of Antietam - no Union player is going to let Burnside dither at his bridge unless the rules force him to do so!

So why are we faced with the reality that, in spite of the vast majority of games being designed as two-player contests, almost all of them are played by their owner on his own? Simple! Board war gaming is a micro-minority pastime.

Assumed Demand

I commented in my first paragraph on the hobby reaching a “mass’ following by about 1974. This is a somewhat relativistic statement. Compared to the hobby of collecting brass buttons from the uniforms of British troops who fought in the Crimean War, the concept of mass is appropriate. Compared to the British hobby of bird watching, well, the number of visitors to the Minsmere RSPB Nature Reserve in Suffolk on a sunny Bank Holiday weekend in early summer would far exceed the total number of board war gamers, world wide.

It is difficult to come up with a well documented number of board war-game hobbyists. Strategy & Tactics magazine (the non plus ultra of magazines with games enclosed, originally published by SPI) lists its circulation as being 28,100 at the end of 1974. In the same magazine, SPI claims to have sold 295,000 units during the year - this number will include the games in the magazine - 6 issues per year, thus accounting for 168,600 of those units. The other big publisher, Avalon Hill, sold 195,000 (boxed game) units in the same year, and the rest of the hobby publishers sold 22,850 in total.

By 1978 (issue 67), S&T circulation had gone up to 36,000, and never rose above that. Assuming the average S&T subscriber bought 4 additional non-magazine games per year (based on my own purchasing patterns), and that purchases of boxed games rose at the same rate as magazine subscriptions, some simple arithmetic makes it hard not to conclude that at its height the number of active players was probably in the region of between 75,000 and 85,000 in any given year - I would guess the peak year would in fact have been 1978.

We also have to account for geographic distribution. These players were concentrated in the USA, Canada and Britain, with sizeable clusters in Australia and (surprisingly) Japan. There were minuscule concentrations on Continental Europe - mainly in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden.

Given numbers of this magnitude, its not difficult to see why James F. Dunnigan, the driving force behind Strategy & Tactics (as well as the designer of 2 of the original solitaire designed games) would have concluded that there would be a substantial market for truly solitaire playing games. In addition to the small and scattered nature of the war gaming community, awareness of computers and their potential was rudimentary - there was absolutely no hint of the revolution to come. The small numbers in operation were secretively held by governments, major corporations and big universities, and those that did exist had capability closely akin to Alan Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine of the late 1940s. Screen graphics were in pre-infancy stage. (An excellent account of the computing environment of that time is Jill LePore’s “IF THEN,” John Murray, 2020.) Of course, such is the capacity of technology to surprise, that by the peak year for cardboard counter, physical map based war games - 1978 - gamers would have access the Commodore, Atari and Clive Sinclair’s various home computer offerings.

At that time in 1974, however, it was quite reasonable to plan on the basis of a steady future demand for map based games, a percentage of which would be solitaire and cater to the atomised community.

So, in the summer of 1974 S&T published Jim Dunnigan’s first dedicated solitaire “Operation Olympus”. This game (a hypothetical simulation) dealt with the proposed American invasion the Japanese home island of Kyushu, an invasion scheduled for November 1945. This was to be a prelude to Operation Coronet, the invasion of the main Japanese home island of Honshu, scheduled for March 1946. Research for the Operation Olympus game itself was based on the very detailed operational planning that had been prepared for the November invasion. (I may review the game at some point in the future).

Then at the end of 1974 came the publication of Dunnigan’s second solitaire, “Wolf Pack”. (In fact, there had been an earlier solitaire game published - “The Fall of Rome - The Barbarian Invasions 100 AD to 500 AD,” in issue 39, summer 1973. But not by Jim Dunnigan, the designer was John Michael Young).

In addition, I am aware of at least two other solitaires having been published in the S&T magazine since the early 70’s (which over time has passed through the ownership of a number of different publishers).

Of these two, the first was “Iwo Jima - Valor of Arms,” which appeared in S&T issue 92, October 1983. The game models the invasion of the island by the US Marine Corps, the player of the American forces is required to capture the island within a set time, or is deemed to have lost the game.

The second was “Armies of the White Sun,” which appeared in S&T issue 305, Summer 2017. This game covers the Sino-Japanese War, 1937 - 1945. The active player controls the Japanese forces, and is required to occupy a range of Chinese cities, and other geographical features in order to win.

I do not have access to either of them.

The Central Dynamics of a Solitaire game.

Firstly, in selecting a subject for a solitaire game, and designing the game play, there is one fundamental consideration. This is the view that one side has such limited options that what decisions have to be made can be encased within what amounts to a simple rules-based algorithm.

Secondly, there appears to be a small number of inputs into the simulation which are both critical to the outcome of the struggle and subject to a sensible degree of randomness. In the case of “Wolf Pack” the central such input is the weather in the North Atlantic.

Heavy storms, fog, rain, low cloud - all reduced the likelihood of the convoy actually being spotted from the conning tower of a submarine, even if radio location gave an accurate coordinate fix. In the game weather conditions represent a real opponent, without randomised weather it would be too easy for the active player to attack convoys.

To appreciate the centrality of this, compare the arrival of winter conditions in late 1941 in the vicinity of Moscow, as relevant to the rules for a game set during Operation Barbarossa. Then (and now) everyone knew that Russian winters would effect combat effectiveness - and that winter was certain to arrive. The fact that Winter 1941 was exceptionally harsh was a chance event, but not a random event as storms are used in “Wolf Pack”

Thirdly, features 1 and 2 listed above must be such that they are able to be realistically structured as independent decision inputss through the use of probability tables, resolved by the throw of a dice.

As we shall conclude, only a small number of historic military encounters are really suitable for solitaire design. Failure or success as a game depends on the combination of the algorithm, the number of decisions which depend on how the rules work, and the amount of dice rolling necessary to make the game “move”. If the design fails as a game, it will be because the decisions that come out of the system don’t make sense, that they take too long to reach during play, or that the design mechanism generates too great a feeling that “this is all to much of a pain in the arse.”

Is one of the pivotal campaigns of the Second World War - a campaign of which Churchill commented in his memoirs “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril” - really workable as a viable solitaire game, or did the commanders of the convoy effort have more subtle decisions to make that to pray for a good die roll on the weather chart? I shall play through the game with all these questions in mind.

Background to the Design of the WolfPack Game

It is taken as incontrovertible (by the designer) that the Allied convoy system functioned essentially as a defensive operation against the overwhelmingly offensive U Boats. So this is a solitaire game in which the player controls both of the opposing forces. The nature of the convoy system means that an heuristic is feasible by which the player of the Allied forces operates them in a very structured manner. The same player controls the German forces with complete decision making flexibility.

Weather, air groups and search patterns exist as extraneous factors which are able to introduce randomness in addition to the usual use of the die in determining outcomes such as combat.

Sequence of Play.

To Be Continued