BigBoard Gaming · monthly series · publishes November 2026

1. The Strategy

The eighth of the Hundred Unorthodox Strategies is about chariots, and almost none of it is about charging like in the movies! Sawyer’s translation sets the scene on “broad plains or expansive wastes” against cavalry or infantry, and the prescription is to form “rectangular, enclosed chariots and deer-horn chariots” into square formations. The text gives three reasons. The square furnishes “the means to control the expenditure of energy”; it provides “a defense to the fore”; and it will “organize and constrain the regiments and squads of five.” One fair reading of the first is endurance: the army inside rests while the army outside spends itself. The second is a wall. The third is the one a wargamer should underline. The chariots don’t just shelter the troops, they hold them in their units. The closing principle comes from the Questions and Replies between Tang Taizong and Li Weigong: “On expansive terrain employ chariot formations.”

Sawyer’s notes flag what matters for reading this concept. The classic war chariot carried three, a driver, an archer and a halberdier, but by the Han, Sawyer says, it served mainly as a command post, though heavy-armoured types still fought. The illustration comes later still. In 279 CE Ma Long, serving Sima Yan, the first Jin emperor, put down a rising by the Jiang and Rong tribes with chariots built for the job. “Where the terrain was expansive, he employed deer-horn chariots; where the road was narrow he added protective wooden structures on top of the chariots.” The result, quoted here: “Fighting running battles for a thousand miles, the dead and wounded were counted by the thousands.” That is not a chariot charge. It is a fort that moved, re-roofed itself for the narrow places, and fought its way across a thousand miles of hostile country. Sounds a bit mythical to me.

2. Eastern Wisdom

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Sun Bin gives the terrain rule plainly in his chapter on the eightfold division of formations: “On flat and easy ground, make greater use of the war chariots; on rugged terrain use more cavalry; on terrain that is sheer and closes in on both sides, use more crossbowmen” (Sun Bin, The Art of Warfare, p.115).

Elsewhere he describes the wall itself, in layers. Asked what a small force should do when the enemy has driven it into narrow defiles, he answers with the deployment he used to beat Pang Juan: “Bramble barricades served as a defensive moat; chariots and wagons served as a rampart; . . . a row of shields served as archer crenels.” Behind the rampart stood the long-handled weapons, to reinforce the line “where it was not holding”; spearmen behind them; short weapons behind those, to waylay the enemy as he fell back; and at the rear, “our crossbowmen served as catapults” (p.107). Read that next to Ma Long and, in this strategy at least, the chariot stops being a strike weapon and becomes a wall on wheels. This kind of blew my mind. I don’t think the Mid Eastern nations had this doctrine?

Short answer: no. And for most of its life the Chinese chariot didn’t fight this way either. The wall turns out to be a late use. Scott Forbes Crawford’s survey in Ancient Warfare XIII-4 traces a vehicle whose role kept changing. Under the Shang and Zhou it was a prestige vehicle and probably an archery perch, kept close to its supporting infantry because even undrilled foot could swarm a chariot once it stopped (pp.39–40). In the Spring and Autumn era it was the strike arm.

At Chengpu in 632 BC the Jin chariots feigned a retreat into a dust cloud of their own making, then “smashed through the Chu left flank” (p.41), and the Six Secret Teachings calls chariots “the feathers and wings of the army, the way to penetrate strong formations” (p.42). Only after crossbows, drilled infantry and steppe cavalry had taken that role away does the more defensive box show up. Ambushed by Xiongnu horse archers at Mo Bei in 119 BC, Wei Qing ringed his chariots into static positions: “The chariots shielded the soldiers, who answered the charging Xiongnu with crossbow volleys” (pp.38, 43). Ma Long, four centuries on, is a late echo of that, so not the typical case.

The Near East doesn’t get there at all in the sources I could find. Murray Dahm’s survey of the chariot debate in Ancient Warfare V-1 lays out the schools. The dominant one, argued by Drews and Cotterell, holds that the chariot was a mobile archery platform, “never used to charge into dense infantry formations.” The rival “battering ram” school leans mostly on the Hittite strike into the Egyptian P’Re division at Kadesh in 1274 BC, and Dahm notes that both camps “are arguing from the same set of evidence” (p.49). The Persian scythed chariot was a terror weapon, and a failed one: the Greeks at Cunaxa and Alexander at Gaugamela handled it easily (p.50). Shooting platform, shock weapon, terror weapon. Nobody in those pages parks the chariots in a square and fights from behind them.

The Britons went another way again. Dahm points out that they used the chariot much as Homer’s heroes did, a thousand years after Homer and with no borrowed tradition (p.51). Caesar describes them driving about hurling javelins and counting on the noise of horses and wheels to break ranks, then dismounting to fight on foot while the drivers waited close by for a quick getaway (Gallic War 4.33). By Mons Graupius in AD 82 the chariots “manoeuvred noisily but were ineffective” (Dahm, p.52). The Britons did bring wagons to battle, and Boudicca’s last fight in AD 61 shows what happens when they sit in the wrong place. Parked at the rear of the plain as viewing stands, they blocked the retreat once the Roman wedges broke the British charge, and the slaughter followed (Ross Cowan, Ancient Warfare XVI-5, pp.33–35). They were the same kind of carts as a Wagenburg, but behind the army instead of around it. So, on this reading, the wall on wheels looks distinctly Chinese, and late. When the West built one, it used carts. Kind of like Navy is to Marines. A Taxi service! 😊

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3. A Western Mirror

The West did build a wall on wheels, but out of carts rather than chariots, and much later, in fifteenth-century Bohemia. Jan Žižka’s Hussites had much the problem this strategy describes: a peasant army facing the heavy cavalry of half of central Europe on open ground. James Bloom’s survey in Command #35 is blunt about it. The Hussites’ “rustic infantry lacked the cohesion of English bowmen or Swiss pikemen,” and in the open field heavy cavalry “would simply mow down the infantry by weight of horse flesh and metal.” So Žižka turned the farm cart to war, “and the wagon-fort (Wagenburg) tactical system was born.” An army of 6,000 marched with about 300 wagons in four columns and could convert into a rectangular fortress in an hour or two (Command #35, p.40). Each wagon had a crew of about sixteen, half with close-quarter weapons and half with crossbows or handguns (p.41). The wagon was the squad. That is Sawyer’s third reason, organizing and constraining the squads of five, built out of wood and chain.

The S&T #137 sidebar on the Hussites fills in the rest of the system. The wagons were chained together with a ditch dug in front, bombards sat on earthen mounds in the gaps, and pikemen were held back to stop anyone cutting the chains. Once the attack broke, pikemen and light cavalry went out and cut the enemy to pieces. The sidebar also names the limit in one sentence: the guns were emplaced on ground Žižka selected, and “when the enemy declined to attack the guns were useless” (S&T #137, p.20). Žižka’s answer was strategic: march deep into enemy country, laager, and raid from the wagon fort until the enemy had to come to him (p.20). Bloom records where that ran out. A 1423 expedition into Hungary came home quickly once “the limitations of the wagon-fort system for the offensive manifested themselves,” and at Lipany in 1434 Žižka’s successors were lured out of their wagon fort by a feigned withdrawal (Command #35, p.38). The box never needed to fail. The men only had to leave it.

On the table: Victory Point Games’ Ancient Battles Deluxe (Mike Nagel, 2008) draws a line worth noticing. Its Chariots are “light, two-wheeled wagons carrying two or three warriors and bowmen,” and its Battle Chariots are “geared toward a powerful initial shock.” The counter that matches this strategy is neither. It is the War Wagon, “a mobile camp.” War Wagons have a Movement Allowance of three, count all six adjacent hexes as their front, may never initiate melee, and are immune to ranged combat results. A unit that eliminates one is itself eliminated looting it (§13.1.1–13.1.4). That is the deer-horn chariot and the Wagenburg in four rules: no flank, no charge, no way to shoot it down. And, just as S&T says of Žižka’s guns, it does nothing if the other player won’t come to it.

4. Sun Tzu vs Clausewitz

On the basic bet, the two agree. Michael Handel’s comparison puts it flatly: “Sun Tzu and Clausewitz agree that the defense is the stronger form of war that can be successfully waged with fewer troops” (Handel, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz: The Art of War and On War Compared, p.44). The chariot square is that idea made portable. Ma Long and Žižka both carried the stronger form of war out into open country, where the enemy’s numbers and horses should have decided it.

Where they part is the third reason, holding the squads together. Handel quotes Sun Tzu: “to control many is the same as to control few. This is a matter of formations and signals.” He calls that belief “diametrically opposed to that of Clausewitz,” who saw the battlefield as “an uncontrolled and uncontrollable environment,” and he quotes On War: “The very nature of interactions is bound to make it unpredictable” (Handel, pp.59–60). The chariot square is Sun Tzu’s answer taken literally. If formation is control, build the formation out of wood and chain so it cannot come apart. Lipany reads like Clausewitz’s reply. The wall held. The men inside misread the chaos, took a feigned retreat for a real one, and walked out.

5. On the Table

In looking at how this applies to our wargame table, I got my research assistance to pull as many chariot orientated rules out to see what was useful if at all. So some conclusions for us and rules references where I have ‘em

1. A chariot rule is the designer taking a side in a historical argument.

What this means for wargame theory, Berg like many others decided that Chariots were missile platforms and built battles where they occurred around the notion, the combat table is the designer’s thesis. The bigger picture plays out in Terrain and Tactics but also Command.

1.1. Terrain decides which arm you use.

So a faster , fragile less robust morale based mobile shooting platform like cavalry but less useful.

1.2. Command is what makes the chariot work. Chariots of Fire builds this in directly:

More importantly Leaders ride chariots, with 9 movement points against 5 on foot (§10.13). Plus I think this gives them a better view of the field and an ability to be where they are needed. Which also lines up with:

2 A unit’s value depends on what it faces.

5. Combined arms.

6. A terror weapon is not a killing weapon.

7. The chariot wall (strategy #8 itself) has no rule in Chariots of Fire.

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Series Note

Post #8 of 100. Next: Strategy #9 — Trust (信) — publishes December 2026.