Emeritus Professor Philip Sabin's Wargame Designs

Philip Sabin is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at King's College London, where he taught from 1985 until 2019.  He specialised increasingly on conflict simulation, and co-organised the annual Connections UK professional wargaming conference from 2013.  In addition to scores of conventional academic publications as detailed here, Phil has designed many wargames on a wide variety of historical topics.  Foremost among these are those contained in his books Lost Battles and Simulating War, both available from Bloomsbury.  Lost Battles allows players to refight 35 famous ancient land battles using a common rules system, and it provides extensive source discussions and historical commentary including on how wargame modelling may help resolve some of the chronic uncertainties about these ill-documented battles.  Simulating War offers extensive advice on how to design board wargames on conflicts from any period, and was the course textbook during Professor Sabin’s long-running MA option module at King’s College London on conflict simulation.  It includes 8 simple wargames which Phil used in his military and civilian teaching over the years – Roma Invicta? (Hannibal’s early campaigns in Italy), Second Punic War (multiplayer diplomacy in the entire conflict), Kartenspiel (a card game of Napoleonic battle), Fire & Movement (a WW2 battalion attack), Block Busting (WW2 urban combat), Hell’s Gate (the Korsun pocket, 1944), Big Week (US bombing raids in 1944) and Angels One Five (grand tactical WW2 air combat).  Lost Battles, Hell’s Gate and Angels One Five were published separately as complete board wargames by Fifth Column Games and Victory Point Games.  They are now out of print, but Jonathan McCarthy has created an excellent freeware computer version of Hell’s Gate, and Phil has posted an update with the few changes needed to play the latest boardgame version of Lost Battles using the rules from the original book.  He has also posted a free Full Circle expansion for Angels One Five, modelling a much more wide-ranging combat during the Battle of Britain.  Cyberboard and graphics files to play all of the games from both Phil’s books are now posted in the files sections of the io groups for each book, along with complete free copies of his simple teaching games on the Eastern Front and the Second World War.  Over 100 designs which his MA students agreed to post online after completing their projects may still be accessed through the Internet Archive. 

Phil has lectured on wargaming and other defence topics in over 20 countries ranging from Japan to Chile.  He discusses many issues arising from his academic focus on wargames in his 2019 farewell lecture at King's College, as well as in wide-ranging video interviews in 2021 and 2023 and in his September 2024 keynote addresses at the Bundeswehr and NATO Wargaming Conference and at Connections UK.  Almost all of Phil's designs use simple if unfashionable 'Igo-Ugo' mechanisms, and in this paper and this 2021 MORS talk he champions the simulation value of such systems compared to more involved play sequences with their own inherent artificialities.  In this 2015 talk at the Bundeswehr University, he explains why manual conflict simulations remain useful despite pervasive computerisation.

Phil has designed several simple games for use by non-gamers in a professional context, and has often run them in large groups of up to 100 military officers and others divided into multiple competing pairs.  His ultra-simple platoon attack game Take That Hill as well as full and slimmed down versions of his kriegsspiel on the 1914 French campaign are available from the Connections UK website.  The full kriegsspiel with German and allied teams in separate rooms has been run several times since its debut at a centenary academic conference at Windsor Castle in 2014, while its slimmed down Schlieffen variant has been played by military officers in several countries as shown above.  A deluxe boxed edition of Take That Hill has been developed and published by the British Army as a training aid and introduction to wargaming, and the design and conversion process were discussed in detail at the Connections Online Showcase event in October 2022.  Phil's new air-focused introductory game Counter-Air is discussed below.  In Combined Arms, he turns his earlier Fire & Movement design into a complete free solitaire or team game of WW2 battalion attacks in randomly generated farmland, now including armour and anti-tank guns as well as infantry, artillery, mortars and machine guns.  The number and location of defending positions are unknown until they open fire, and full colour graphics and Cyberboard files are provided, now with several styles of map.  Phil has created a large 3D playset for Combined Arms using painted plastic figures and models, as shown in his new YouTube video of a complete game and in his report of a later game using an even bigger mat.  This fits with his general approach of combining the speed and simplicity of microgames with the physical scale and visual impact of full size games to attain the best of both worlds.

Still available for purchase from the Society of Ancients (of which Phil is a Life Vice-President) are some of his other ancient warfare games – Legion and Strategos II (earlier designs on land battles), Empire (grand strategic campaigns) and a separate edition of Roma Invicta?.  He has recently designed a simple free Legion II expansion which allows revised versions of all 35 engagements from his Lost Battles book to be refought using similar rules to those in the single scenario fast play version of the original Legion.  Legion II's simplicity, high resolution hexgrid and focus on free deployment neatly complement the broader brush approach adopted in the Lost Battles system itself, and are showcased in a detailed YouTube video of a complete figure game and in a 2023 video interview and a 2025 online game.  Edwin Shaw has created a Vassal module covering both versions of Legion, using the full colour graphics from Justin Swanton's 2015 edition of the game, and Phil has recently made a simple large playing mat which avoids the need to draw hexes for games with miniature figures.  The Society of Ancients’ Slingshot archive available digitally on a USB stick contains other material by Phil including his even simpler battle games Phalanx and Shield Wall (in issues 165-182).  In 2025 he published a free updated design Shield Wall II, incorporating ideas from Legion II.  This allows simple refights of 6 battles between Vikings, Saxons and Celts from Ashdown to Stamford Bridge, with a complete refight of Maldon using 28mm figures shown in a YouTube video which also includes a declamation of Phil's 1983 translation of the famous Anglo-Saxon poem about the battle.

To avoid adding further to the glut of new board wargames, Phil has focused recently on designing free ‘total conversions’ which build on the components and data from existing simulations to give owners of those games a different dimension to explore.  His first such project in 2011 was Nightfighter Solitaire, a sophisticated and popular add-on which allows Lee Brimmicombe-Wood's game Nightfighter to be played solo without the need for an umpire.  He has since progressed to daylight air combat via successive editions of his Canvas Aces, Dogfight and Fighter Duel conversions, culminating in highly refined and expanded Deluxe editions in 2021.  These are separate game systems using the components from Carlo Amaddeo’s WW1 air game Winged Victory or Lee Brimmicombe-Wood’s grand tactical Wing Leader series on WW2 air battles.  Canvas Aces Deluxe now includes both tactical and grand tactical variants, a solitaire duel with a manoeuvring recon plane, and a new solo career mode.  All these variants are covered by an expanded random scenario generator, and all are played on Phil's unique board which reintroduces a third dimension to the parent games' side-scrolling perspective.  Dogfight Deluxe uses the same board for a more focused grand tactical model than in  Wing Leader of the fighting between interceptors and escorts in the immediate vicinity of WW2 bombers.  Flights chase one another's tails explicitly rather than just abstractly, and more agile fighters can escape or engage clumsier adversaries using an ingenious new tight turn system.  Canvas Aces and Dogfight may be played in true 3D, with model planes or from a top-down perspective if desired, using easily fabricated perspex stands and a simpler rectangular grid.  Fighter Duel Deluxe uses the Wing Leader counters and data cards for a much more tactical top-down portrayal of combat between 2-4 individual fighters per side, and it may also be played with model planes or expanded counters on articulated 3D stands if desired.  The game's unique solitaire system allows any or all pilots to be placed under AI control, allowing players to use proper formation tactics to defeat AI opponents in perhaps the only dedicated solitaire or co-operative boardgame simulation of manoeuvring fighter combat.  A solo mini game models interceptions of V-1s in summer 1944.  

All of these total conversions contain extensive design notes and complete illustrated sample games, and Phil has posted YouTube videos showing further complete games of all three of them.  The Wing Leader variants were updated in July 2023 to incorporate minor rules tweaks, and Al Cannamore has created elegant Vassal modules for them as he did for Nightfighter Solitaire.  All the conversions are available for free download, and a hard copy of Canvas Aces Deluxe was produced by WBS games and included within the Kickstarter version of the Deluxe 2nd edition of Winged Victory. The double-sided maps and other components in this add-on may also be used to play both of Phil's Wing Leader conversions, thereby giving three for the price of one. 

In July 2023, Phil posted a second trilogy of free spin-off air combat designs.  Dogfight Full Circle uses two matching counters per flight to allow a 360 degree top-down perspective in true 3D, while doing without the tracking dice needed in the other conversions.  Its turns are only half the length of those in Dogfight Deluxe, giving a more detailed model of the combat between interceptors and escorts.  Fighter Duel Lite boils the basics of Fighter Duel down to just 2 pages including rules, examples and design notes, giving a quick and simple contest ideal for club or show play.  It does not model technical differences between fighters as the main game does, but it lets skilled pilots manoeuvre more flexibly than unskilled ones.  The most distinctive feature of the design is that there is no luck except during randomised initial deployment, so the game is a chess-like contest in which only player skill in gaining positional and energy superiority and applying real formation tactics determines the victor.  Phil now uses model planes on the same big dotted play mat used for his Legion II games, but Fighter Duel Lite  may also be played with counters or with Justin Swanton's elegant new Vassal module.  Jet Duel applies mechanisms developed from Fighter Duel to jet combat between 1950 and 1991, drawing on the data and components from Gary Morgan’s classic 1986 game Flight Leader.  (You may easily obtain a digital copy if you do not own the original Avalon Hill game.)  Any jets may be flown by the AI system as in Fighter Duel,  and the game allows bespoke scenarios and includes rules for the many mock combats in this era, using accumulated hit points rather than the sudden death die rolls in the main game.    Like Fighter Duel, the game may be played using 3D stands on a large map if desired.  In March 2024, Phil released yet another new air game - the simple chess-like Counter-Air, which covers modern airbase attacks and gives air force personnel an introductory wargame similar to Take That Hill.  Both of these introductory games are freely available from the military wargaming group Fight Club International, and may be played on Tabletop Simulator or on a simple Powerpoint slide.  Phil has posted new YouTube videos illustrating the rules of Counter-Air and showing complete games of Dogfight Full Circle, Fighter Duel Lite and Jet Duel.  He has recently posted suggested amendments to make Joe Carter's game on The Blitz, 1940-1941 a more faithful simulation of the Luftwaffe aircrew experience.

Phil has also designed Horse & Foot and Battle Sail – simpler rule sets using the components and data from the Horse & Musket series by Sean Chick and Johan Brattström (digital editions of which are available on Wargame Vault) and the Admiral’s Order series by Mario Jugel.  Phil is progressively complementing Horse & Foot with suggested scenario amendments which give a less abstract representation of the scores of battles covered by the series, and as with his pre-gunpowder games he has created a complete figure playset allowing all of the engagements to be refought in 3D.  He has also suggested a simple tweak to remove the ahistorical effectiveness of the 'alternate hex defence' tactic in classic SPI 'quad' games.  This forms part of the much improved 2nd edition of his full package of tweaks to improve the historicity of Jim Dunnigan's classic game Napoleon at Waterloo without amending or adding to the original map and counters.  He has posted a video showing a complete refight of the battle using his new bespoke 3D playset with 450 Airfix figures as shown below, and Alex Peters has made a Vassal module for this latest edition.  Phil's similar Barbarossa variant creates a shorter version of Holdfast Russia by Worthington Games, with a new more accurate map and judicious rules tweaks to allow more effective simulation of this classic campaign, and with Cyberboard files to allow on screen play.