August 216 BC. A Roman army of 86,000 men - the largest the Republic had ever put into the field - marches onto the plain of Cannae, confident in its numbers, certain of its discipline, and about to suffer one of the most complete military catastrophes in human history. By the end of that afternoon, somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 Romans lie dead. Not because the legions were cowardly or their commanders incompetent, but because they walked into a trap built around a single, devastating insight: no army, no matter how large or how disciplined, can fight effectively in two directions at once.
That insight belongs to Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general who designed the battle of Cannae with the precision of a mechanism. But the principle behind it is older than Hannibal, and it has outlasted him by more than two thousand years. Every great commander who followed - Marlborough on the Danube, Wellington in the hills of Portugal, Rommel in the Libyan desert, Schwarzkopf in the sands of Iraq - has returned to the same lesson, finding new ways to express the same truth: whoever threatens the flank, controls the battle.
This article traces three expressions of that principle across nineteen centuries. Each one solved the flanking problem differently. Hannibal manufactured an encirclement from the centre outward, turning Roman mass into a liability. Marlborough marched 250 miles to steal an open flank before the enemy realised it was exposed. Napoleon cut behind enemy positions entirely, threatening supply lines and retreat routes until armies surrendered positions they could not otherwise have been forced from. Three tactics, three eras, one idea.
All three can be recreated on a tabletop today with WoFun Games pre-printed miniatures in 18mm and 28mm scale - historically illustrated by Peter Dennis, ready to play straight from the sprue, no painting required. What follows is their history, and the collections that bring each era within reach.
The Killing Pocket: Hannibal's Double Envelopment at Cannae, 216 BC
The genius of Cannae was not that it was clever. It was that it looked, from the Roman side, like a battle they were winning, right up until the moment it became one they could not survive.
Hannibal deployed his army in a convex arc, with his weakest troops - Gallic and Iberian infantry - pushed forward at the centre, and his African veterans held back on each wing. His Numidian cavalry screened the right flank; his heavier Spanish and Gallic cavalry took the left. When the Roman legions advanced and struck the centre, the Gauls and Iberians did exactly what Hannibal expected them to do: they bent. They gave ground, slowly, drawing the Roman mass forward and inward, compressing it. The Romans interpreted this as progress. They pushed harder.
While the centre absorbed the Roman push, Hannibal's African veterans on the two wings held firm, then began to wheel inward, closing around the flanks of a Roman army that was already too tightly packed to manoeuvre. The Carthaginian heavy cavalry on the left, after routing the Romans facing them, rode around the entire battlefield and struck the Roman cavalry on the opposite wing from behind. By the time the encirclement was complete, 86,000 men were compressed into a mass so dense that soldiers could barely raise their arms to strike. They died, in their tens of thousands, pressed together, suffocating before they were cut down.
This is the double envelopment in its purest form: not an attack on the flank, but the deliberate manufacturing of conditions in which the enemy's own strength becomes a trap.
The Punic Wars collection by Peter Dennis puts exactly this confrontation on the table. The 18mm Full Pack contains 882 figurines across 15 Plexiglass sprues, with 151 MDF bases at 30x20mm - enough for both armies in depth. On the Carthaginian side, Gallic Mercenary Cavalry, Libyo-Phoenician Heavy Cavalry, African Veterans, and Elephant units with their towers and priests stand ready to recreate Hannibal's asymmetric deployment. On the Roman side, the Hastati, Principes, and Triarii of the triplex acies - the three-line system that made Rome's infantry resilient on the frontal attack but vulnerable to simultaneous pressure from multiple directions - form up exactly as they did at Cannae. Andy Callan's rules, freely available for download, capture the mechanical reality of why the double envelopment worked: units attacked in the flank or rear count only one company in a fight regardless of their actual strength, and when a unit loses a round of fighting it triggers a Panic test that can cascade through the units beside it. On an 18mm table, the whole arc of Cannae fits into an evening.
Why No Army Has Ever Solved It
Cannae became the most studied battle in military history not because it was won brilliantly, but because it exposed a structural problem with linear warfare that no army has ever fully solved.
The Roman response, after Cannae, was to never again allow their flanks to be turned simultaneously. At Zama in 202 BC, Scipio Africanus removed Hannibal's cavalry advantage by enlisting Numidian allies and opened lanes in his infantry lines to let the Carthaginian war elephants pass through harmlessly. He then enveloped Hannibal's flanks from the outside. He used Cannae's lesson to beat its inventor. But he could not abolish the vulnerability, only manage it for a single afternoon.
Every army in the eighteen centuries that followed fought the same problem in different dress. The solutions changed: the phalanx gave way to the legion, the legion to the pike square, the pike square to the musket battalion. The problem never did. When Marlborough rode to the Danube in the summer of 1704, he was solving a version of the same tactical equation Hannibal had posed at Cannae - except that he solved it with a march, not a formation.
Marlborough's Stolen Flank: The Race to Blenheim, 1704
The War of the Spanish Succession was, in most of its campaigns, a war of sieges - slow, methodical, enormously expensive in time and men. Marlborough found it suffocating. The French strategy depended on the Allies never being able to concentrate enough force in the right place to threaten something the French genuinely could not afford to lose. In the summer of 1704, they were wrong about where that place was.
The Franco-Bavarian army that summer was positioned on the Danube, threatening Vienna. Marlborough marched a combined Anglo-Dutch-German force 250 miles south from the Netherlands - a movement screened so well that French commanders believed he was heading for the Moselle. By the time the real destination was clear, it was too late to interpose. At Blenheim on August 13th, the French right flank was anchored on the Danube, believed secure. Their elite infantry was packed into the village of Blenheim itself, 27 battalions holding a position they thought untouchable. Marlborough left them there.
He drove his cavalry into the gap between Blenheim village and the nearby village of Oberglau - the very place the French assumed would be covered by mutual support between their strong points. It was not. Once the gap was broken, the two halves of the French line could not support each other. The 27 battalions in Blenheim, the strongest point in the French position, were now irrelevant: contained by a smaller Allied force while the battle was decided elsewhere, they eventually surrendered intact without having fired a significant shot. The strongest point in the line was worth nothing once the adjacent ground was lost.
This is the flank march at its most economical: not a frontal assault, not even a direct attack on the flank, but a strategic manoeuvre that made the enemy's strongest position a prison for his best troops.
The War of the Spanish Succession collection gives you both sides of this contest in two scales. The 18mm Starter Pack provides complete armies for both the Allied and French-Bavarian forces, mounted on 54 standard 30x20mm MDF bases, with Andy Callan's rules included - the fastest entry point into this era for a newcomer. For those ready to build the full scope of the period, the 28mm Full Pack is among the most comprehensive sets in the WoFun range: 2,270 figurines across 61 Plexiglass sprues, with 269 standard bases and 167 single bases, fielding named regiments including the British Grenadiers, Cadogan's Regiment, British Horse, Dutch/Prussian Artillery, and the French Line Infantry in their white Lorraine coats, alongside Flag Bearer sprues for both the Allied and French-Bavarian armies.
Andy Callan's rules for the collection capture Blenheim's doctrinal asymmetry with precision. British and Dutch cavalry get a charge bonus - hitting on 3, 4, 5, or 6 in their first round of combat - because their commanders trained them to rely on cold steel rather than the pistol volley that French doctrine preferred. French cavalry fire pistols just before contact instead, reducing their own momentum, hitting only for 6s in that first crucial round. The rules also model the oblique cavalry attack, where a squadron driving into one end of an infantry line generates far more overlaps - and far more combat power - against the compressed end than a frontal charge would allow. The mechanics are doing history.
Cutting the Thread: Napoleon's Turning Movement in the Peninsular War
The turning movement is the most sophisticated expression of the flanking principle, and in many ways the least understood, because it often produces results without a battle at all. Where Hannibal surrounded the Roman army and where Marlborough split the French line, Napoleon's manoeuvre sur les derrières did something more elegant: it threatened the enemy's line of supply and retreat until staying in position became more dangerous than retreating from it. The enemy was not defeated. He was made to defeat himself by leaving.
In Spain between 1808 and 1814, this logic played out across six years of grinding campaigning across country that punished every conventional military instinct. Roads were poor, supplies scarce, and every position the French occupied could be threatened from multiple directions by a combination of Wellington's regular army and the guerrilla bands that harassed French communications relentlessly. The guerrillas did not win battles. They made it impossible for French armies to know where Wellington was, to supply garrisons at full strength, or to concentrate without leaving something vital exposed. Every French general in Spain was operating with imperfect information about where the true threat would materialise.
At Vittoria in June 1813, Wellington made that threat explicit. He drove four columns against the French position simultaneously, one of them - under Thomas Graham - cutting directly for the road east behind the French line. Joseph Bonaparte's army was not encircled. But the threat to their only route of retreat was enough. The French abandoned their positions, their artillery, their treasury, and most of their baggage in a disorderly flight. The turning movement had done what it always does when it works: it made holding the position more expensive than giving it up.
The Peninsular War 28mm Starter Pack is the most complete entry point into this conflict that WoFun offers, putting 387 pre-printed figurines across 10 Plexiglass sprues immediately onto the table. The pack fields British line infantry and Portuguese battalions against French regiments, with a detachment of British Riflemen - the famous Greenjackets of the 95th - and Light Infantry skirmishers included to represent the screening and reconnaissance forces that made Wellington's operational style possible. The Andy Callan rules PDF is included with the pack and captures the period's tactical texture with uncommon accuracy: infantry that attempt manoeuvre under fire must roll to avoid disorder, battalions threatened by cavalry on their exposed flank must spend a full turn attempting to form square - and a square, once formed, becomes an easy target for any infantry shooting at it. The mechanical logic is Wellington's logic: threaten the flank, force the square, bring up the line infantry. The same sequence of decisions that played out across a hundred engagements in Portugal and Spain now plays out in an hour on a tabletop.
The Tactic That Never Goes Out of Fashion
In February 1991, General Norman Schwarzkopf moved two armoured corps 200 miles to the west of the Saudi-Iraqi border and swept them north and east through open desert, cutting behind the Republican Guard's entrenched positions in Kuwait. The manoeuvre was called the Left Hook. Military historians immediately recognised it. It was Cannae. It was Blenheim. It was the turning movement Napoleon had refined over a hundred campaigns - executed now with tanks and helicopters instead of cavalry and artillery, but following the same tactical logic that Hannibal had used against Rome 2,200 years earlier.
The flanking maneuver endures because the vulnerability it exploits is architectural. Any army that presents a continuous front to the enemy has flanks. Any army with flanks can be turned, enveloped, or cut off. The weapons change. The scale changes. The armies change. The problem does not.
Three WoFunGames collections, three different answers to the same problem. Hannibal's double envelopment, Marlborough's stolen flank, Napoleon's threat to the line of retreat - each one is a game you can play this evening with no painting, no preparation, and no prior wargaming experience. Press the figurines from the sprue, slot them into their bases, and find out which answer is closest to right.
Your Battlefield Awaits
History's greatest commanders spent their careers searching for the open flank. WoFun puts that search on your table - with pre-printed, ready-to-play miniatures illustrated by Peter Dennis, free downloadable rules by Andy Callan, and three collections spanning two thousand years of military thought.
Whether you start with 882 Punic Wars figurines and Hannibal's genius for encirclement, with 2,270 pieces of the War of the Spanish Succession and the cold-steel charge of Marlborough's cavalry, or with 387 Peninsular War miniatures and Wellington's art of making the enemy surrender ground he could not afford to keep - the table is set. The only question is which side you command.