Jack Scruby

From the Godfather of wargaming, Jack Scruby, comes the Unbalanced Equality wargame. It first appeared in the November 1965 TableTop Talk magazine. Scruby writes:

An “unbalanced equality” war game is one in which the opposing forces are unequal in numbers and types of troops, but are equal in “combat ability”. In the 25mm Colonial armies we use for example (which is basically Natives versus trained regulars), we spent many hours work�ing up the “equality” of combat values, which had to be based not only on manpower, but on rifle-fire, melee and morale values, and artillery fire power. In the end, we arrived at a British force valued at 2900 points and a Native force (with a sprinkling of native regular infantry as the hard core) valued at 4400 points. Normally this would seem to give the Natives overwhelming strength, but in actuality considering the range of rifle fire and the firepower of the British infantry, it worked out very evenly.

The interesting part of the “unbalanced equality” war game is that each “general” in command must use different tactics for his force. The tac�tics used by the British commander cannot be used by the Native comman�der, and vise-versa. And if these tactics become too well known by each commander over a series of war games, one can always trade sides, or split up the forces to a half native-half regular army for each player for a few games.