I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?

A quote often attributed to Napoleon (but he never said it ...) is "I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?" It is often assumed to mean that skills and training only take you so far - in the end, you need luck at critical moments or decisions.

But anyway, whether Napoleon actually said these words is not really important here. What's important is whether we as wargaming generals are lucky during critical moments in our game.

A very fun and useful mechanic to "force" some luck now and then is a mechanic I would call "The Lucky General". It's a meta-mechanic, in the sense that you can employ it on top of most rulesets. I got the initial idea from a short description in "Solo Secrets of Wargame Design", one of the excellent booklets collecting Wally Simon's articles and edited by Russ Lockwood.

One player starts the game as The Lucky General. This can be represented by a token, or better, some sort of object that adds to the period flavour of the wargame. A few suitable objects decorating my own wargaming room are shown below.

Whenever the player who is the lucky general wants to reroll a die result, he can do so (he's lucky!), but he then hands the token to the opposing player. That player now becomes the lucky general, and he can do the same. The idea is that the "luck" in the battle changes sides once it is used. As a player, you can decide whether and when you want to reroll a die. Such a mechanic can add some psychology during the game. If you hold the token, you are assured of some safety net (a free reroll!) when a die goes horribly wrong at a critical moment. But, you also know that once you use it, you have used up your luck and it might be some time before you get the token back.

In principle, the token can be anything. You could even simply remember it without using a physical device. But it's much more fun if the token is some sort of object with some literal weight, such that it means something when you hand it over. A piece of paper doesn't carry importance. A small heavy object does. You should feel despair when you hand it over, and you should feel the smell of victory when you receive it.

Wally Simon apparently used a wooden block with small plastic golden cup on top. But of course, you can use anything, as I show here:

A metal Napoleon statuette, bought at the gift shop of the Waterloo battlefield. The lucky general himself!

Classic 54mm toy soldiers all make good "lucky generals"

A resin statuette of Hakon den Gode, my wife brought from Norway. And a "Voie de la Liberté" road mark bought at the Utah Beach museum in Normandy also make good lucky general tokens.

One more thing: you need to agree what constitutes a "reroll". If you have to roll a single die, that die is trivially rerolled. But what about buckets of dice? Rerolling a single die doesn't mean much in this context, so I say you can reroll all dice in the bucket. A guideline could be how many of such die rolls you make over the course of a game, but as long as the  roll - no matter how many actual dice it has - is part of a single coherent procedure, it can be rerolled.

That's it! A nice little mechanic that can be used in any game, but can add quite some tension to the table.