BigBoard Gaming · Strategy Series
The Strategy
策 — xuan (選): Selection / Elite Forces
Whenever engaging in combat with an enemy, you must select courageous generals and fierce troops, forming them into an advance front. On the one hand this will strengthen their resolve; on the other it will suppress the enemy’s awesomeness. The Art of War states, “An army that lacks a properly selected vanguard is termed ‘routed.'”
The canonical illustration is the Battle of White Wolf Mountain (白狼山之戰), 207 CE. Cao Cao, marching north against the Wuhuan tribes sheltering his rivals Yuan Shang and Yuan Xi, encountered the enemy unexpectedly. Both sides were caught flat-footed — Cao Cao’s men were lightly armored and skittish; the Wuhuan were numerous but disordered, still shaking themselves into formation. Cao Cao climbed a rise, read the situation in seconds, and immediately unleashed his vanguard. General Zhang Liao punched straight into the gap in the Wuhuan line. Chieftain Tadun fell. The campaign was over before it properly started. The lesson: a pre-selected, committed advance force, comitted at the right moment, does not just win the engagement it forecloses the enemy’s options entirely.
Eastern Wisdom
Classical Chinese art — BigBoard Gaming Strategy Series
“With elite soldiers, do not attack them; with baited forces, do not devour them.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War: The Definitive Translation of the Linyi Text (trans. J.H. Huang, Harper Perennial), p. 76 — “Fundamentals in Using Forces”
Read that carefully. Sun Tzu isn’t just telling you to use elite troops, he’s telling you to respect them. Elite forces are a force multiplier, not cannon fodder. They’re the tip of the spear, not the shaft. Launch them poorly and you’ve wasted your best asset. Use precision, thrust correctly, at the moment of enemy disorder, when least expected, etc and the battle ends before the enemy knows it started.
A Western Mirror
The Battle of Cowpens, January 17, 1781. Brigadier General Daniel Morgan faced the same calculus as Cao Cao: he had elite troops (Continental regulars) and he had militia — unreliable under sustained fire but useful if deployed correctly. Tarleton came in hard, as Morgan knew he would. Morgan’s genius was in how he layered his forces. The militia went forward first — not as cannon fodder, but with explicit orders to fire two volleys and fall back in good order. When Tarleton’s infantry saw the militia withdraw, they assumed collapse and surged forward — breaking their own formation in the process. That’s when the Continentals, Morgan’s real elite vanguard, wheeled and hit them. The British force was destroyed in under an hour.
The Center for Army Lessons Learned’s analysis of Cowpens nails exactly why this worked: Morgan “understood his enemy” and designed his force deployment around that understanding (strategy-training.pdf, p. 19). The selection of who goes first, and under what orders, was the whole battle. Sound familiar?
The layering is worth seeing in detail, because it is the strategy entire. Morgan’s second line of 300 militia had explicit orders “to fire two aimed volleys, then move off quickly to the rear and reform,” with the veteran Continentals hidden on the military crest behind them; when the militia peeled away “in a river of men,” Tarleton “saw a retreat and charged just as BG Morgan had envisioned” (strategy-training.pdf, p. 20). The result was “a superbly executed double-envelopment” that left the British with 110 killed, 229 wounded and some 600 of 1,100 captured, against Morgan’s 12 killed and 61 wounded (Chronology of American Military History, p. 143). The elite vanguard didn’t just win — it annihilated, in under an hour.
On the table: look for games where unit quality tiers or stacking rules let you place an elite unit in the right place to take advantage of a breakthrough and follow through. Or games where the quality mismatch leads to significant advantage in the initial combat. – The GMT Games Next War series, does this with Efficiency Ratings, as does OCS [Smolensk, Reluctant Enemies, Case Blue ] with the concept of AR’s – ratings that represent the morale, discipline, equipment and elan of the counter. Seek to place an AR 5 elite German unit against an AR 2 rated unit, and watch the line crumble with surprise bonus’s. The is magnified also in Eastern Fron Series – Army Group Center & North, where overruns can be the manifestation of the same concept. Other games such as Liberty Road with Tactical Cards can produce a similar result. A quality lead element that soaks the first defensive fire, suppresses, and opens the gap for the main body. If your game has a “first fire” or “overrun” mechanic, you’ve got Strategy #4 baked right in. The hobby has gamed this exact lever: Command magazine’s Battle of Cowpens is built entirely on troop psychology — “units stand, flee or surrender based on whether they are surrounded, fired on, suffer casualties, have friendly units nearby, or see nearby friendly units retreating” (Command #30) — which is Morgan’s plan rendered as a rules set.
Sun Tzu vs Clausewitz
Notice what the selected vanguard is actually for. The text says it twice over: it “strengthens their resolve” and “suppresses the enemy’s awesomeness.” That is a moral effect before it is a physical one — the picked troops stiffen your own line and break the enemy’s nerve ahead of the real collision. Clausewitz would nod. The comparative study quotes him insisting that “nothing obliges us to limit [destroying the enemy’s forces] to physical forces: the moral element must also be considered” (artofWar_OnWar-compare.pdf, p. 33; On War, p. 97). For both men, the elite spearhead is a lever on will, not just a heavier hammer.
Where they split is courage versus calculation. The study notes that both want the commander to fuse daring with reflection, but that “Clausewitz appears to prefer boldness to calculation, while for Sun Tzu the converse holds true” (artofWar_OnWar-compare.pdf, p. 76) — Clausewitz so much so that he “prefers a noble failure to inaction” (p. 78). Strategy #4 selects courageous generals and fierce troops, but wields them as a calculated instrument: the vanguard is deliberately chosen and positioned to manufacture a specific effect at a specific point. It is bold men in a calculating hand — Sun Tzu’s prudent commander deploying boldness, not Clausewitz’s romance of boldness for its own sake. On the table, that is the elite stack that anchors your morale and shatters a wavering enemy — but only when you commit it at the right calculated moment, not the first one that arises.
Series Note
Post #4 of 100. Next: Strategy #5 — The Infantry — publishes August 2026.