The original Avalon Hill commercial wargames such as Tactics II, Afrika Corps, and Stalingrad provided complete information about the opponent's strength and location. Risk and Diplomacy, dating from the same period, similarly provide complete information, except that in Diplomacy the movement is simultaneous, introducing a considerable element of uncertainty.

Nowadays in computer games we have a variety of "fog of war" levels, but in general the nature of a computer game makes uncertainty the norm. Even if the manual tells you how combat is conducted, it may not be entirely clear what makes for success and failure. You rarely see the opponent's moves, unless the units are near your own. And you may not even know what the opponent's objective is. Unfortunately, this level of uncertainty is not easy to reproduce in boardgames, and some would argue that it isn't necessarily desirable.

Diplomacy uses simo movement, with consequent uncertainty, but the major source of uncertainty in ANY multi-player game is the intentions of the players themselves. Unfortunately, simultaneous movement in boardgames is difficult to implement, unless there are very few pieces. Diplomacy (7 players) has a maximum of 34, and when you have 18 you usually have won.

"Block games", in which an opponent can see the blank side of a small block indicating that a unit is present, but in which he cannot know the type or strength of the unit until a battle occurs, are very popular in the hobby nowadays. They are, practically speaking, a development of Stratego--my original Stratego even used wooden blocks, though now I think it probably uses cardboard in plastic stands. While in this country we knew only Stratego until recently, in Britain there were several games using this principle (I suspect one is the game from which Stratego is derived). These games were quite old in origin, perhaps even pre-WWII. The titles included L'Attaque, DOver Patrol, and Tri-tactics, and the publisher was H. P. Gibsons, as I recall. My own game Swords & Wizardry, also published by Gibsons, used the same method, but was more complex than Stratego and introduced a die roll into combat to increase uncertainty.

R. Knizia, the famous "Euro" game designer, produced a Lord of the Rings game that resembles Stratego in some respects. The German title is "Der Herr

der Ringe - Die Entscheidung".

Unfortunately, the nature of any block game is that you can have only two sides. It's very difficult to have three sets of blocks that hide two sets from each opponent.

I designed a multi-player space wargame many years ago that used upside down pieces to conceal strength (and sometimes existence) of units from the other players. (While I regarded the game as quite as good as Britannia, I did not find a publisher for it.) Black games use the four sides of the block (other than the front and back) to enable an individual unit to have varying strength. This is not possible in games that use upside down units; on the other hand, a piece in an upside down game can represent no force at all, or can represent a VERY powerful force. It is particularly good for representing ships (naval or space). While an individual ship is either at full strength of destroyed, a group can vary in strength, from one "cruiser" to four (or more) "dreadnoughts" in one piece.

Hidden units, of course, had been used in other wargames long before I tried it. Sometimes it is implemented simply as "you can't look inside a stack of opposing pieces", sometimes as actually placing the pieces upside down (which requires the additional cost of coloring the backside of each piece). Another method is to use numbered counters, keeping hidden the units represented by each counter.

What can the enemy do? In some games this involves more than just unit locations and strengths. I suspect one of the attractions of "card-driven" wargames is uncertainty about the opponent's capabilities, because you don't know what cards he has drawn. "Hammer of the Scots", a popular new block game, uses cards as well as blocks.

Dice are the traditional method of introducing uncertainty into combat. Avalon Hill used the old D6 combat table. Other games such as Risk (and Britannia) use a dice roll for some or all units involved in combat.

In some games the cards govern what a player can do, but in others they affect combat. My Germania uses "Battle Cards" instead of dice to introduce uncertainty in combat, but players have more control over what card they play, than they do over dice rolls.

Some games such as Stratego or Diplomacy have no overt chance mechanism in combat, but guessing still comes into play at times owing to other elements of uncertainty.

Finally we come to uncertainty of objective. In war, you generally know the overall objective of your enemies, so the uncertainty is in how they're going to achieve it. But at times, especially in tactical as opposed to strategic situations, you may not even be sure of the objective.

I don't recall seeing this much in wargames. The obvious method to produce it is an "objective card" selected by each player (perhaps at random) at the start of the game. I once wrote a D&Dish tavern scenario in which each character, played by a player, chose a random objectived. This was published somewhere (White Dwarf?) and I noticed recently that some folks at a convention are still playing it. I suspect uncertainly of objective appears more often in Euro games than in wargames, often reflected through several ways to win the game. Opponents know what those ways are, but cannot know which way an individual player may be pursuing.

Peter Riedlberger points out that versions of standard Risk for the past 20-some years have included "order" (objective) cards, something I've not seen as my Risk-playing days go back to the late 60s. Unfortunately, he says, the objectives are not equally difficult to achieve. Torben Mogesen says that this imblance relates to the number of players, as some objectives may be easier or harder to achieve depending on the number of participants Too bad the developers didn't have multiple objectives on the cards, one for each possible number of players, so that they could be properly balanced.

Torben also points out that the family game "Careers" let players secretly choose amongst three goals (fame, happiness, and riches). I had forgotten all about this game (which originally appeared in the 1950s), one of the better family games I can recall, perhaps in considerable part because of the hidden objectives.

There certainly have been wargames that used uncertainty of objective. Peter Coles says this "was used brilliantly by WRG in a 1970s Naval wargame called 'Sea Strike'. Each side drew an envelope containing a card detailing force size (in points) and objective." And Nathan Kilgore pointed me toward his game 'Iron Tide:Panzers in the Ardennes'. It "has a built in semi-fog of war system using random chits for the combat strength. The Fog of war aspect is strengthened by the inability of your opponant to inspect stacks and the hidden chits. Also, because of the complete random chits, the owning players don't even know the exact strengths of their own units until the first time they engage in combat." I'm sure there are others.

Is uncertainty a good thing? As a lead-in to another article I am writing, I'll assert that "Classical" game players prefer as little uncertainty as possible in their games (chess is an example), while "Romantic" players like a considerable level of uncertainty as it helps them pursue the "Great Play". And Peter Riedlberger comments that "you can have an undesirably dense 'fog', to keep the metaphore. All Stratego-likes I know are

mostly about bluffing. This can be fun, but is quite different to other, more tactical games." I wonder how much good generalship in the real world is about bluffing; look what the Allies did in 1944, convincing the German high command that the invasion would be at a location other than Normandy...

And as a lead-in to another article, I'll wonder whether uncertainty is seen more in simulations, and less in representations and possibly yet less in "appearance" wargames.

"A teacher is never a giver of truth - he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst." (Martial Arts quote)