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Dan M
United Kingdom
Worthing
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(This is a two part posting originally written for magazine publication on DBA’s 20th anniversary. It didn’t get published, so I’ve cunning updated it for the 21st anniversary … and posted a month late. Hey ho.)
Another of De Bellis Antiquitatis's firsts, for me at least, was that it really pushed the idea of fighting against your army's historical opponents. Before DBA, my impression of ancients gaming was of Early Imperial Romans facing off against Classical Greeks, and New Kingdom Egyptian chariots charging towards Hundred Years’ War longbowmen. A lot of gamers, me included, enjoy the historical aspect of gaming as much as the dice rolling, and I think that DBA’s drive towards historical match ups has helped to make and maintain its popularity. Although there's nothing to stop you lining up unhistorical opponents, the game's troop typology is grounded in history - so one period's defined troop types might be deemed too powerful compared to those of another period (for example, who would really win in a straight fight between Ancient British nobles and plate-armoured Agincourt men-at-arms, both of whom count as Blades in DBA?). In-keeping with historical balance, the booklet also contains a mini-campaign designed for up to six players, and lists suitable sets of armies which could be used in these campaigns. DBA is well suited to a campaign setting, as it is conceivable to fit an entire campaign (or tournament, should you be so inclined) into a single day's play at a push, or at least a weekend's gaming.
When first published, DBA was just so original, and that's easy to forget with twenty-one year's retrospective pondering. I'd never played a game before DBA that looked like it or had similar mechanics. Previous rules had mostly been those number-crunching 1980s pot-boilers that we thankfully see so little of these days. But once DBA became an established system, a wide variety of spin-offs and adaptations started to appear, covering many different periods of warfare and styles of game. This really demonstrates what a great set of mechanisms and abstractions lie behind Philip C. Barker's original idea, allowing a new setting to be bolted on to the basic game. Of the 'official' adaptations, there's one book that I consider to be an almost compulsory companion to DBA: Hordes of the Things. This game is a fantasy version of DBA, which is interesting in itself, but has marginally more streamlined rules and a crucial set of illustrations explaining how the more complex aspects of combat should be handled. Why these illustrations have never been included in the DBA booklet I can't understand. Alongside a fantasy world, Wargames Research Group also published a renaissance game (De Bellis Renationis) and a larger sized companion to DBA (De Bellis Multitudinis). Phil Barker has other sets based on the same core system available on his website: a horse and musket game, an ancient skirmish game, and a naval game. There's even a computer game, DBA Online, which works as a fine tutorial to the miniatures game. Through the 1990s, it seemed like hardly a month went by without one of the wargames magazines publishing a period-specific adaptation of the rules. Colonial, World War One, The Crimea, The American Civil War, and the English Civil War were all covered on a number of occasions. Online you'll find further adaptations, of which I've found the most useful to be the Humberside Extension of the core rules to fight battles up to AD 1900 (available at ermtony.pbworks.com). The influence of DBA can also be seen in many other sets of rules; elements started to appear elsewhere, as did simple command rolls, and long lists of morale and combat factors steadily declined for many years. A comment was once made about one of my own published games (Glutter of Ravens: Warfare in the Age of Arthur) stating that it was DBA-like; that surprised me as I'd not consciously thought of DBA as I developed my game, but looking back I can see that I genuinely was influenced by the streamlined system it created (sadly my rules never achieved the elegance or popularity that Phil's did). I wasn't alone either, as many games from the mid 1990s to early 2000s were influenced by this style of gaming.
Of course, DBA is not every gamer's cup of tea; any set of rules, especially one delivering an abstract overview of a battle, will never win everyone over. For all I know, you might be reading this article now thinking that the comments I make in favour of DBA make it sound exactly the sort of game you'd hate, and that's fine - we're a broad church in wargaming. Arguments against DBA mostly revolve around the small size of the game (especially if you're unfortunate enough to play against someone prepared to quibble over millimetres and small angles), the writing style, and the fact that you're not making blow-by-blow tactical decisions. I'd agree that the writing style could be easier, although with a bit of rereading you will get there, and I'm convinced that a juiced up version including better diagrams and colour photos would reinvigorate gaming in the same way that the original paper bag-like booklet did. Regarding tactical decisions, well, it's just not that level of game, so if you're looking to decide how many figures to put in the third rank of your shieldwall, the style of game that DBA throws up will likely never be your thing.
The one negative I feel about DBA is the number of editions of the game that have been published. On the face of it, two major versions and a handful of extra tweaks in twenty years isn't much to grumble about, but I've found that each new version of the booklet comes with an increasing number of additional rules and little nudges and tweaks to the troop types' combat effectiveness. These additional 'ifs and buts' get in the way for me, as I prefer the streamlined game offered by earlier imprints of the rules. Other additions over time have included the introduction of Built Up Areas (for me, a horrible bolt on never to be used under any circumstances), revised army lists (which sometimes make your older armies incompatible with the latest version of the rules), and an up-scaled version of the game called Big Battle DBA. My preferred version of DBA is version 1.1 which was published in 1995, so I've just plugged away with that; when new versions of the rules come out, I take a look to see what's changed, and use or ignore these amendments as required to give me an enjoyable game. So long as both myself and my opponent are using the same version of the rules, this really isn't a big issue. We've all had a few image makeovers since 1990 (where my floppy fringe and Pop Will Eat Itself t-shirts have gone, I don't know), so it would be silly of me to be put off by similar changes to DBA once every five years or so.
If you're after a bigger game, perhaps with a couple of hundred figures on a 6x4 table, DBA was followed by a big brother: DBM and more recently DBMM. I'm aware of quite a few DBA fans who dislike the expanded wargames based on DBA; I'd include myself in that category, as the mechanisms that work so well to make DBA accessible and fast playing really seem to bog down the larger sized games which have extra details bolted on. A better solution is Big Battle DBA, published in the current version of DBA, allowing you to fight bigger battles without any additional complicated rules. It delivers exactly the same sort of game as DBA does, but at three times the size.
So there we are: happy twenty-first birthday DBA. Back in 1990, I doubt many gamers would have expected to read that sentence about a still popular set of rules. Twenty one years, that’s right – DBA is more than old enough to drive a car, drink in a British pub, and bluff it’s way into a dodgy nightclub on 'over 25s' night.
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