Harpoon4 -- review

There's usually a tension in wargames between the demands of a successful "game" (an entertaining and competitive contest) and a "simulation" (an authentic reflection of real life). The art of wargames design largely revolves around striking a balance between these demands.

Every so often, however, a designer boldly abandons any pretense of striking such a balance and pushes his design to the edges of the possible. Commonly the decision lands on the "game" side, and there's no shortage of war-themed games that pay little attention to real-life constraints. Harpoon4 is the rare design that goes the other way, unabashedly seeking to be the most realistic possible treatment of a very complex subject, modern naval warfare. What concessions it makes to playability are almost always framed in the practical limitations of manual procedures, not in any notions of fairness or competitiveness.

The games has been this way since its very first edition back in 1981 and has remained true to that mission consistently, even has the design has been refined over the years based on more research, years of playing experience and the growing experience of the design team.

Abstractions are kept to a minimum. With the exception of damage points, which are computed by a formula to come up with a game-specific value, nearly every other measurement and number is based on a real unit of measure such as kilometers or nautical miles, minutes and hours, knots and rates of fire, and percent-based chances of occurrence. Players can -- and are encouraged to -- do their own research to plug in the numbers needed to create a scenario, very much in the tradition of naval miniatures games since their origins with Fletcher Pratt's rules in the 1930s.

Because it's in the naval miniatures wargame tradition, Harpoon 4 is less of a board game than a system for modeling battles. While it's possible to play it solitaire or two-player in very limited ways, enjoying the full panoply of possibilities presented by the rules requires one of the players to act as the game organizer or referee. That player creates the scenario and the success of the game depends in large measure on how much work and care the referee puts into it. The more prep work the better the game experience. Indeed, the referee is really the only person who needs to know the rules.

The key thing in modern naval warfare is the detection of the opposing force and the importance of getting in the first effective blow. Unlike early 20th-century battleships, modern warships have little ability to accept damage and keep fighting and modern weapons are far more powerful than earlier weapons.

After the referee has set the initial situation it's up the opposing players to organize their forces, plan strategy, give them standing orders and their courses. Often these decisions, made before the battle begins, will determine how it turns out.

Once the game starts the referee will generally track the movements and activities of all the moving parts until one side or the other detects something. Unlike traditional wargames, which usually have turns of set length, the referee will usually "telescope" the time in order to speed play. Many hours of game time may be resolved in a few minutes of real time if little is happening or the opposing forces are out of range. By the same token, the high-speed action of actual combat, broken down into 30-second increments, may take considerably more time than that to actually play out.

There's hardly any real-life situation that the rules don't handle, although some types of operations such as amphibious landings, underway replenishment, land combat or mine warfare are usually handled "off-map" by the ref. In fact, there are often far more elements in the game being handled by the ref than the players such as neutral shipping, other services and perhaps other task forces. For example, in a scenario where the players are controlling surface ships it may be better to let the ref handle any subs present because the poor sub player will otherwise never have anyone to talk to (if you're being realistic).

While Harpoon4 has structure and plenty of rules, most of that structure can be and should be invisible to the players. Ideally the player feels like he's truly in command of his ship, getting the sort of information from sensors and intel that his real counterpart would get and issuing the kinds of orders the actual commander would without the distraction of dealing with artificiality's of "factors" "phases" or "CRTs".

Under the direction of a skilled gamemaster, Harpoon4 can create a truly immersive game narrative that is hard to match.

The game itself, really has the field all to itself. When it first came out, back in 1981, there was similarly detailed modern naval rules set called Warship Commander or something along those lines, that was weighed down with abstract, yet complicated, subsystems. Harpoon quickly established itself as the No.1 modern naval wargame rules has never been seriously challenged. It achieved a certain amount of fame because of its association with Tom Clancy and The Hunt for Red October. Clancy used the game to help his novel achieve its authenticity. Harpoon design Larry Bond and Clancy then collaborated in Red Storm Rising, a hugely ambitious and very successful novelization of a potential World War III. Most of the combat action in the novel had been wargamed out using Harpoon. Bond later went on to a successful career on his own as a techno-thriller novelist. Clancy's later novels featured more cloak-and-dagger action than combat, but Harpoon/Bond was still reportedly consulted on occasion.

Bond and Harpoon also had an influence in the naval community. I doubt many naval officers serving over the last three decades were unfamiliar with the game, even if they're not gamers. Former Reagan-era Secretary of the Navy John Lehmen even wrote the foreword to the High Tide expansion and British Adm. Sir John "Sandy" Woodward, the naval commander in the Falklands War, wrote the foreword to the Harpoon4 rules. That's pretty high-speed for a civilian wargame.

The various editions of Harpoon have always had serviceable, if not spectacular graphics. The most recent, Clash of Arms edition, comes in a bookcase-style box, looseleaf-style rules, some die-cut counters for some ships, aircraft, missiles and markers and a data annex. Players may want to use miniature warship models for the visual effect, but frankly, so much of the action happens in the ephemeral realm of electronic warfare and across such enormous distances that maps and die-cut counters serve just as well most of the time.

Gamers primarily interested in competitive tests of skill will find little to interest them in Harpoon4. Needless to say there's even less of interest here for euro-style gamers. Harpoon4 is intensely detailed, treats nearly every possible facet of naval warfare exhaustively and requires mastery of more than 100 pages of rules in small type.

But for anyone interested in modern naval warfare and gaming out what might really happen if naval and air forces find themselves in battle, there is no unclassified substitute. I rather doubt that any classified wargame would provide better overall insight, although classified information might sometimes fill-in some unknown detail. But even classified naval wargames are limited by the knowledge intel provides and there's a good chance that some significant information is simply unknowable. The Soviet spy ring led by Walker would have had an impact if there had been a war in the 1980s, for one example. The Soviets had a super-high speed (200 knots!) nuclear-armed defensive torpedo aboard their subs that we had no idea existed. Think about how that changes things.

Red Storm Rising, a case of bad timing

Perhaps one of the worst cases of poor timing in wargames was the appearance of Red Storm Rising in 1989. While it was trying to capitalize on the earlier success of the Tom Clancy novel by the same name, and doing a pretty good job at depicting the sweeping scope of the battle recounted in the book, within a few months of its arrival on store shelves the Cold War ended.
Fortunately for everybody, it didn't end with the bang premised by the book, but peacefully.
Still, the end of the Cold War pretty much ended the reign of what had been one of the more popular genre of wargames -- "future history," particularly the NATO v. Warsaw Pact big show.
While there would still be some future history games published over the years, and at least one scenario imagined by several of them came true when the U.S. went Back to Iraq, they stopped being the major force they had been.
It's too bad, in the case of Red Storm Rising, because the game provided a reasonably accurate wargame that was playable in an evening. When linked with The Hunt For Red October you could play out the whole NATO v. Warsaw Pact Air-Land-Naval scenario in an afternoon.
There' still some residual interest in both games and they get played occasionally, according the BGG reports, but I think they'd have had more of a chance to build up a fan base if the wall hadn't come down so soon after they were published.

Tac Air personal reflections

For a long time I thought my only "wartime" service would end up being my active duty stint in the mid-1980s in West Germany during the Cold War, so Tac Air always held a special place in my collection. It was the one wargame that included a unit I served in. Or at least it was until 2003 and Iraq, but that's another story.

My unit was the 1st Battalion, 80th Field Artillery, a Lance-missile equipped artillery unit. In the game it looks like this:

The counter depicts the trailer-mounted configuration of the missile, which was almost never used. The missile couldn't be safely towed any distance while mounted this way. Normally the missile was carried on a specially modified tracked vehicle based on the M113 APC chassis.
Still, the game is correct to depict the counter as a wheeled unit because the vast majority of the battalion's vehicles were and there was no mobility advantage conferred by the tracked launcher because all its necessary supporting vehicles were wheeled.

We weren't allowed to take photos for security reasons during my time in Germany, but this photo taken at Fort Sill at the Artillery Museum in 2003 shows what the Lance launcher/transporter looked like in firing mode:

The game simplifies things somewhat by making the unit one counter because in reality the launchers operated individually spread over a wide area. Still, tracking individual vehicles is well outside the scope of the game.

Tac Air was very unusual in explicitly depicting a wide variety of supporting units in addition to the usual tank and infantry maneuver battalions usually seen in this level wargame.

That wasn't by accident, of course, because the game was designed by an Air Force officer and meant to show the interaction between air power and land combat.

When wargamers think of airpower they typically think of a few extra factors of close air support being tossed in to up the odds for their combats. While close air support is an Air Force mission, it's not particularly popular with them and for good reason. It's usually not an effective way to use airpower.

Frontline units are already doing their best to conceal themselves from nearby enemy ground units with time and opportunity to shoot at them. Those same efforts make it even harder for jets swooshing by at several hundred miles per hour to see and engage those units. In addition, those troops are usually in armored vehicles or foxholes and well-dispersed, severely reducing the effectiveness of whatever aerial weapons do get sent their way.

Using air units as artillery can be useful on occasion, but the Army's generally found it more useful to use actual artillery for the work of close support. It's more accurate, responsive and effective. When a little air support is needed, the Army can call on its own rotary-wing aerial force of attack helicopters. Compared to air force jets these are also more accurate, responsive and effective, although they are also vulnerable.

Where airpower shines is when it moves behind the lines and attacks the softer targets such as supply dumps, trucks, headquarters, artillery, EW facilities and the like. In order to give the air units something to attack these need to be on the map. To justify having them on the map, they needed to have work to do, and so Tac Air ends up being a rather comprehensive depiction of the entire spectrum of mid-1980s warfare. There are rules giving artillery, headquarters, EW, trucks, etc. stuff to do. Neat.

So the 1st Bn, 80th FA is in the game primarily to be a target, but it can get the chance to shoot to some small effect. There was a conventional warhead available for the missile, but the unit's primary task was to launch nuclear-tipped missiles, a task it can perform in the game. The game places strict limits on the number of nukes available, far below what was actually on hand. But the limits are not unreasonable given the political realities and the fact that setting off more than a few would change the entire character of the war and probably make the frontline fight shown in the game moot.

During Reforger 1984 the 1st-80th was part of the Blue Forces. This was as interesting exercise because it pitted the M-60/M113- equipped Blue Army against an Orange force that included the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Mechanized Infantry, which had been the first brigade in Europe completely equipped with the new M-1 Abrams tank and M-2/3 Bradley fighting vehicles. I got a front-seat preview of what Saddam's army would face a few years later in Desert Storm. The Orange army literally kicked our Blue butts so thoroughly that the exercise had to be halted -- twice. In one day our battalion (which was rather obviously not normally a frontline unit) was overrun several times and ended up retreating 60 kilometers!

I also got a mouse's eye view of what being an Air Force target was like. I'll always remember the moment I looked up to see a direct, head-on view of a West German F-104 on a dive-bombing run on my platoon in a logistics staging are. Had it been an actual war, my 2nd Lieutenant's combat career would have come to an ignominous end amid the ignition of my own funeral pyre. The Lance was a solid-fuel ballistic missile that was powered by mixing two substances in the combustion chamber that created a controlled explosion (not burn) creating tremendous thrust. But one 20-mm aircraft cannon shell piercing the missile would create a very uncontrolled explosion that would have blasted the entire log site. We represented a very "soft" target indeed.

Tac Air was published in 1987 and appears to be current as of 1986, my last year with the 1-80 FA, so it definitely covered the time I could have seen combat. As folks old enough will remember, this was the very end of the Cold War and many of us were very afraid that the Soviet regime would not go quietly. It's huge a tribute to leaders on both sides and to good fortune that the walls fell down in peace, not war. Certainly we wouldn't have bet that way in 1986.

Tac Air is a great reminder of the tragedy that was averted.

Team Yankee

Novelty games are somewhat unusual in wargame circles, but an example of the type is GDW's Team Yankee which was published in 1987.

The game was timed to coincide with the appearance of Harold Coyle's novel of the same name narrating the adventures of a company team led by a Capt. Bannon during the first month of fighting during a Soviet invasion of West Germany circa 1987.

Unlike Tom Clancy's epic-scale novels from around the same time, Coyle's story was very much focused on the point of view of one character and events directly affecting him and his men, with minimal attention to the larger picture or outside events.

Likewise, Team Yankee, the game, is ruthlessly focused on Bannon's war, with just the first, introductory, scenario not explicitly linked to a fight from the book. The other seven scenarios are very faithful reproductions of firefights from various pages of the book, complete with page references.

The game includes most of the elements one might expect to see in a mid-1980s tactical armor wargame such as hexes, ranged fire, attack and defense factors, movement and combat phases, and an odds-based CRT.

Unlike many similar games Team Yankee didn't attempt to cover all the bases, contenting itself with sticking to the novel. It was, however, the inaugural game in GDW's "First Battle" series which eventually became GDW's standard for 20th Century tactical armored combat, replacing its more complicated Assault series games. Team Yankee's rulebook included illustrations of sample counters for many NATO and Warsaw Pact vesicles and weapons that didn't appear in the game.

Because the game hews so closely to the novel, however, it may now be of very limited interest to most wargamers. The novel was set during a very limited time frame for the U.S. Army, the middle of its transformation from the M-60/M-113 force of the 60s, 70s and 80s to the M-1/M-2/M-3 AirLand Battle force of the 90s and 21st Century. In the novel/game the tanks and cavalry scout vehicles have upgraded to the M-1/M-3 but the infantry is still riding around in M-113s. Even in 1987 this was becoming rare.

There was also a doctrinal shift under way. The term "team" in "Team Yankee" reflected the common doctrinal practice of cross-attaching tank and mech infantry units. Tank and mech battalions would trade one or two companies to form mixed battalion-sized "task forces." This task forces would likewise exchange tank and mech platoons between some of their companies to create mixed "teams." In the novel Bannon commands a tank company cross-attached into a mech battalion. One of his platoons is exchanged for a mech platoon creating the "tank heavy" Team Yankee (two tank platoons, one mech) and the "mech heavy" Team Bravo (two mech, one tank). The other two mech companies remain pure as Charley and Delta companies.

This entire practice was largely driven by the inadequacies of the M-113-equipped infantry and as the M-2 Bradley came online this started to fall into disuse because Bradley-equipped units were powerful enough to stand on their own. By the 1991 Gulf War it was already becoming common for tank and mech battalions to fight as complete units without cross-attaching.
As an aside, combining the two has come back into vogue in a more formal sense, with the new Combined Arms Battalions having two companies of each.

All-in-all the game succeeds in its goal of bringing the novel to life as a wargame, although with some notable flaws. First among those are the sloppy rules. For a game obviously meant to appeal to military enthusiasts who might not have wargame experience it leaves a lot of holes and prompted me to write a two-page letter with rules questions. For example, the game doesn't explicitly say whether a line of sight that passes exactly along a hexside shared between a blocking and non-blocking hex is blocked or not. There isn't a consensus in wargame rules on this, so even prior wargame experience doesn't help. (The answer was it is blocked).
This sort of sloppiness was endemic to GDW rules, but a serious flaw for a game that appeared in mass-market bookstores.

For players today the game is more of a curiosity than anything else -- a novelty game. If you're interested in the general topic of World War III NATO v. WP armored combat there are any number of better games on the topic. Better First Battle titles include Test of Arms and Sands of War. As the entire genre of World War III novels and games has fallen into obscurity with the end of the Cold War both Team Yankee the game and the novel it's based on have become artifacts of a bygone era.

Drive on Frankfurt

There were a few attempts over the years to imitate Strategy & Tactics and its wargame-in-every-issue format. One of those was Counterattack magazine, which had as its premier issue game Drive on Frankfurt, an interesting entry in the NATO v. Warsaw Pact World War III genre by Jon Southard, perhaps best known for his solitaire games Carrier and Tokyo Express.

The game is an operational level depiction of a potential Soviet attack through the Fulda gap toward the major West German city of Frankfurt-am-Main. Units are battalions and regiments, but operate as parts of brigades (NATO) or Divisions (Soviet) in an interactive turn sequence. Basically, players alternate activating formations, moving and fighting.

There are special rules for helicopters, electronic warfare and air strikes. There are rules for different artillery missions and different attack postures (hasty, deliberate and assault).

Perhaps the most interesting design twist is the game's handling of step reduction and losses. Units that take step losses have a chit drawn with new combat values. As an optional rule even some units that don't take a loss can get a new chit. Unlike most games where untried units may be of unknown strength, in this game it's units that have seen combat that may now be of unknown strength.

The most unfortunate aspect of the game is the graphic presentation of the map. Why the plain terrain is grey and cities are yellow is a mystery. It's not attractive and is no improvement functionally so there's no apparent reason for the off-beat color scheme.

Overall the game is a good presentation of that great 20th Century what-if, suppose the Cold War had ended with a bang instead of a whimper. The problem for contemporary gamers is how many of those might still be worth playing, otherwise the game is primarily just a historical artifact. Drive of Frankfurt falls into the artifact category. It's really only of interest as one theory about how such a war might have been fought, but it's otherwise not all that interesting a game. It's therefore of interest mostly to collectors.

For me there's a small additional interest because I was once stationed in Aschaffenburg, which is on the map, during the time frame of the game. My unit doesn't appear in this game, though, it's in Tac Air instead.