Battle of Tashihchiao: July, 1904 - A Remote Gaming Experiment - The Outcome

I hosted my first ever tabletop "remote" (or virtual) gaming event last night.  All in all, I thought it went very well.  Still there are aspects that can be improved.  The game itself was a battle from the Russo Japanese War and it ended in a Russian victory after a few rounds are very accurate artillery fire and then a spoiling attack which evaporated the Japanese left flank.  The game was closer than it looks.  Running a game as the host with 4 remote players was an all consuming task so I didn't take any pictures in game.  The three pictures show the Japanese left,

center, and

right flanks at the end of the game.

Historically,, aside from the counter attack the game played out to the same outcome - the Japanese attacks on July 24th were rebuffed with heavy losses.  The Russians were later dislodged via a night attack on the early morning hours of the 25th.

The casualty for both sides (Russians on the left and Japanese on the right).  Most of the Japanese casualties came in the last 2 turns.

I'm going to separate my comments into 3 sections 1) technology, 2) gameplay and 3) things to improve

Technology:
We used the video conferencing service ZOOM as the platform and, overall it worked very well.  There are other platforms available that may be better but I've learned how to use ZOOM over the past few weeks so went with what I was comfortable with.   Video of the game table was provided by two cameras set up at each far end of the table.  One camera was linked to my laptop which I used to dial into the Zoom service on my account which allowed me to control the meeting.  The second camera was just my i-Phone which I mounted on a tripod and dialed in as a general user for the call (not using my zoom account).  The cameras didn't have the best resolution but worked "good enough".  Several times I had to take one of the cameras in hand and zoom into a spot so a player could give me some specific movement instructions.   The zoom service worked great for player communication and chit chat.  I set up different message streams in Facebook messenger for each side to communicate amongst themselves or to send me order changes.  That worked "OK" (see the areas for improvement below).  I tried color coding the unit labels to make them easier to pick out.  That didn't work as the labels were too small to see

Gameplay: The rules we used were Great War Spearhead II, which have a fairly rigid order structure and order of shooting (closest first) and those aspects made them suitable for remote gaming as there isn't a lot of nuanced movement or figure placing and formations need to act as a cohesive group.  GWS2 is a ruleset that favors defense (the author indicates attackers should have 3:1 local force superiority).  It's been the club experience that defenders almost always win and that's how last night played out.  I hindsight, the attacking Japanese probably should have used some form of pre attack bombardment rather than just jumping off in the first turn.  I also used the suggested stats for the Russo-Japanese war  from GWS2 but in hindsight may have made the Russians a bit too strong/flexible.    There will need to be some tweaking but hopefully not so much nerfing as it makes the Russians no fun to play.  I'm not ready to give up on GWS2 but need to really think about some revisions before running it again.  If any reader has some thoughts about a grand tactical set of WW1 rules, I'm all ears.

Things to Improve
1) Better Cameras - the visual aspect of gaming is probably the most important one people enjoy and seeing it over the internet degrades that experience.  Internet video cameras are fairly cheap so investing in a couple better ones is well worth the effort.

2) Syncing pregaming prep materials with the camera angles used to broadcast.  In my pregame prep materials, I took pictures for each side from different angles than the ones broadcasting cameras displayed.  That proved very confusing to some players.  In a "real" game it'san easy to fix as one can walk around the table to reorient oneself but in a remote game thats not possible.  Making sure there are some pictures that match the broadcast camera angles in the prep materials will greatly improve player comprehension,

3) Overhead camera - finding a way to have a came directly overhead would be very useful and might eliminate the need for multiple camera angles.  To be honest, I think a single camera isn't the best as I do like trying to simulate the players view from the side of the table they are on.  Player perspective is an important aspect in tabletop gaming

4) Unit Labeling - my labels would have worked great for an in person game but were just too small to be useful on a video stream.  The unit bases were 40 x 40mm with the labels being roughly 5x40mm along the rear.  Next game I'll make the labels 20x40mm and the colors more vibrant.

5) Player GM "Secret" Communication:  Our club does most of its internal communications on Facebook and the its messenger app for projects and gaming planning  It works fine for what we need and has the benefit that the interface is easy to use and its free (well, free except for the cost of our privacy....).  Using different platforms (Zoom and messenger) during a remote gaming session proved to be hard on the poor GM and I often ignored the messenger channel as I was running around moving units and rolling dice.  I'm sure there is a better way to do this and need to think about it.

While there was a lot that can be improved on, I was still very pleased with how the gaming session went and am looking forward to staging another game in a few weeks.  I am also very grateful to all the players and video participants who agreed to be my test subjects.

It felt great to get a little of our Monday night club meetings back.