Below you will find the first in a series of designer’s notes articles from The Last Hundred Yards series designer Mike Denson. In this segment he will introduce the article series and discuss the time lapse system in LHY. You can also find this article on his ConsimWorld Community page. Enjoy! -Rachel

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What Are We Doing Here?

Through the course of human history, a multitude of authors have penned their thoughts regarding warfare on everything from waxed tablets and scrolls to books and electronic media. Some of these documents emanated from the minds of generals, some from high political persons, and some from civilians. But others have written from personal experience. They are those who suffered through the utter horror, chaos, and unbridled cruelty of combat with men equally confused and terrified, but dead set on killing those who threatened their own survival.

It is the experience of these latter souls that The Last Hundred Yards (LHY) and other tactical level games seek to capture and render into a boardgame or computer game. More precisely, what we attempted to capture with LHY was best expressed by a writer recommended by a good friend. In writing about the nature of combat at the level of company commanders, platoon leaders, squad leaders, and their men, John Keegan wrote,

What battles have in common is human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile the instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honor, and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage, always of leadership, usually of obedience, always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation and catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension…above all, it is always a study of solidarity, and usually disintegration; for it is toward disintegration of human groups that battle is directed…

Keegan, J. (1976). The Face of Battle. Penguin Books.

I am sure others have captured the nature of close combat at least as well, but after reading this and many other accounts of combat, several things stuck with me. First and foremost: Battle is very confusing at the bloody point of contact with an enemy. By confusing, I mean wild-eyed, ear-ringing, teeth-rattling confusing. To the combat participants, time appears to warp. At the individual squad or platoon level, information is extremely limited. Unless an identified enemy group is in line of sight of a unit’s troops or firing or charging toward it, the soldiers under orders will simply perform whatever actions they were last told to do. Those troops will only slowly, if at all, deviate from their ordered mission. If they act in a way contrary to their mission orders, it is typically because of their commander perceiving a mission-threatening event and reacting to it. Amidst the confusion and horror of battle, soldiers who continue to function on both a personal and unit level display utmost courage.

At the tactical level, events on a battlefield are happening very quickly and they are often happening simultaneously. The smaller the level of battle, the faster things tend to happen. For instance, a pair of soldiers in a foxhole may be wide awake and prepared. But they may be looking at the motion caused by a bird in a thicket to their right when two enemy soldiers move quietly by from a set of trees thirty meters to their left. The entire sequence could have easily transpired in a matter of seconds. Similarly, a tank crewman may see the shadow of a superior tank through the trees to its front just in time to start and escape detection before the superior tank can engage. Again, the event, from spotting to escape, could take place in less than thirty seconds.

Both soldiers and units in combat, unlike a game player, do not possess the great “eye in the sky” knowledge of where things are or what is happening. This has always bothered me about tactical level games, and one of the goals of LHY is to at least give the “eye in the sky” cataracts.

Why we do what we do in The Last Hundred Yards. The following “why we do what we do” sections discuss the various systems and mechanics used in LHY.

Time Lapse System

Although technically LHY does not employ game turns, it uses a mechanic called Time Lapse. This mechanic specifies that at the end of each “game turn,” players make a die roll to determine how much time has passed. Depending on the die roll, Time Lapse may vary from two to five minutes. One might ask, “How can time vary, isn’t time constant?” It is my proposition that, although in truth time is constant, to a soldier during a firefight it is not. In one game turn, a squad may maneuver up to 150 meters (maneuver allowance of three Maneuver Points (MPs) at 50 yards per hex) in two minutes, yet in another turn it might take five minutes to maneuver the same distance. Why? Units maneuvering while under fire do so in fits and spurts—dashing from one position to the next, encountering numerous interruptions. For the soldier, time may seem to slow down or speed up depending on what’s happening. Also, the amount of time required to advance over a particular distance will vary depending on enemy resistance. As a result, time is a variable with which a leader must contend in combat.

The Time Lapse mechanic serves several functions in LHY. It is a factor in determining the level of victory and a measure of how well a player is doing at any given time. Time Lapse also becomes a factor in deciding how soon a replacement will take over for a platoon leader who becomes a casualty. A combat leader must deal with constant interruptions and delays caused by both friends and enemies while attempting to meet his objective. Communication interruptions, lost units, casualties, unexpected enemy fire, etc. may cause a leader to feel ahead or behind his mission schedule. Thus, once the firefight starts, time is an uncontrollable factor in a combat leader’s (and therefore a player’s) decisions. Players must consider not only the distance to be traversed, but also, the interruptions and delays that can occur during combat. Therefore, the higher the Time Lapse die roll, the more time passes, and the player feels more deeply that he is falling behind schedule. Players must continually measure their mission progress, deciding whether they are ahead of or behind where they need to be and how much risk to take to achieve their objectives.

In our next segment we will discuss the Initiative System and the Activation Cycle in LHY.

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