Favorite anti-war poem

There's a very interesting thread over at Boardgame Geek with many worthy nominations, but my personal favorite is this classic:

ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.



What candles may be held to speed them all? -
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;


Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen

Mothers Day and a Star of Gold

Today is Mothers Day, a day celebrating motherhood and the sacrifices women who are mothers make every day. Many mothers spent today working, for example. If you took your mother out to dinner there's good chance some of the women you saw in that restaurant were mothers themselves, working hard on Mothers Day to support their families. So being a mother always means sacrifice.

Sadly, though, there's a singular sacrifice so many mothers have been called to make in history, and that is sacrificing a child in war. Even though we are fighting two wars at this very moment, the consciousness of those wars isn't very high in society.

But every lost soldier is some mother's son or daughter and I think it's good this Mothers Day to remember that fact of war. There's a lot of frivolity about decisions of war among our "elite" classes of office holders and pundits, especially among those who never served themselves, for some reason or other.

War is sometimes necessary in an imperfect world, despite its horror. And its easy to get carried away with the drama, the heroism and the glory. Gen. Robert E. Lee, who saw quite a bit of war, remarked that "It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it," after a particularly terrible and heroic battle at Fredericksburg.

We should even remember that each of our slain enemies is a mother's son and no matter how necessary, it is also tragic and delivers an unspeakable anguish into their lives.

Lightning: D-Day review

Lightning: D-Day was the second of the initial offerings in the Lightning series of wargame-like card games published by Decision Games.

Like Lightning: Midway, the play is too abstract to be considered any kind of simulation, but much too imbued with military arcana to be considered a simple military-themed card game.

Like its sister game it shares the problem of rules that are too succinct for the task. I didn't find it too difficult to figure out how to play, but many did and the game's official Q&A is longer than the main game rules. As with Lightning:Midway this is mostly because too much is assumed and not because there are any particular flaws in the game rules. Everything is a clarification, rather than a change.

Despite what the rules say, there are actually five, not four, different kinds of cards. Unlike Lightning:Midway, which has no explicit time limit, Lightning: D-Day is a 5-turn game. The turns are tracked using five "Turn Marker" cards which have varying special effects (such as "Wading Ashore! All Allied Attacks get -1" for Turn #1). Each card also informs the players how many cards to draw to prepare for the following turn.

There are a pair of "Country" cards which summarize the sequence of play and say who goes first (The Germans).

There are five Beach cards which are simple zone markers for (from East to West) Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah beaches.

These dozen cards are set aside at set up and don't form part of the players' hands, which comprise the remaining 98 cards (49 each). The fighting portion of the decks are made up of Force Cards which represent major formations such as the 1st Infantry Division. These are identified by beach and are divided up by beach, shuffled and placed face-down at each beach as "inactive" units. During play these are turned face-up in order to fight. Each has a combat strength and most have some special powers or conditions as well.

The leftover cards are all "action" cards which modify the game in various ways.

A turn consists of fighting a battle at each beach in turn, comparing the respective combat strengths as modified by various action cards. As the allocation of force cards is fairly scripted the players' main tools for influencing the battle comes down to the three dozen or so Action cards that can be played, for the most part, on any beach. Winning battles generally results in discarding force cards and Allied victory is measured by how many beaches have been completely cleared of German force cards (active or inactive). In order to win the Allies must clear at least four beaches, which is considered the historical outcome. I presume that, in game terms, Omaha beach was not cleared. Clearing three beaches is a draw, while the Germans win if the Allies clear two or less.

Playing the entire invasion takes about 30 minutes, making this another good filler game for wargamers once they have worked through the rules issues.

Tigris & Euphrates, a wargamey euro?

Of late I've renewed my interest in non-wargames.

While I'm primarily a waragmer, I've never been exclusively so. Back in my teen years my friends and I played a lot of non-wargames as well. The Stock Market, Stock & Bonds, Feudal, Football Strategy, Baseball Strategy, Regatta, Win,Place & Show, Ploy, Evade, Oh Wah Ree and a number of other titles hit the game table back then.

Unfortunately non-war games for grownups never really took off back then, but I've never lost my interest in them.

So the recent rise of the euros is an altogether positive thing for me.

Still, there's enough of the wargamer embedded in me that some of my euros involve some conflict and of all the popular euros I think Tigris & Euphrates might appeal to wargamers as a sort of cross-over game. It sure looks like there's some warfare going on.

Of course, Reiner Knizia is primarily a very talented game designer, not an expert in some historical period attempting to model some actual event. All three of his games that I happen to own are dressed up in very nice historical clothing -- T&E, Battle Line and Lost Cities -- but none are simulations in any sense of the word. No, they are really clever games, first and foremost.

But T&E does look like it involves wars and rebellions with its "external" and "internal" conflicts.

So is it a wargame?

No, not really. Not all conflict is war.

The classic principles of war, for example, such as surprise, security, mass, maneuver, objective, unity of command and offensive apply very spottily. The way one wins the game is very unwargame-like, because it emphasizes the need to be well-balanced. Winning by having the best "low" score is an intriguing, brilliant game mechanic, but not one that's easy to translate into military terms.

Indeed, the usual objective of military fighting is to achieve an overwhelming advantage in some key facet of power and leverage that into overall victory. Athens was clearly the better balanced civilization, but it still suffered defeat in its war with Sparta.

But Athens did, in the end, prevail. It's influence did not cease with defeat and it retained its role as the center of Greek culture, while Sparta declined into insignificance. So Tigris & Euphrates is better viewed as a rough model of the clash of cultures, not unlike the old Avalon Hill game Civilization, which was another pseudo-wargame. Like Civilization, fighting is as often as not a distraction in T&E and too aggressive a posture is unwise.

Viewed from the perspective of culture, rather than military might, judging victory on the basis of the weakest link may make sense. No, T&E is not a simulation and I assume Knizia used the unusual victory condition purely for its game interest. But it does fit the theme well-enough to satisfy my wargamer's urge for things to make some sense.

Grenada's Scrappy Little Army

First published in Command Magazine No. 46, December 1997. With slight edits.

Grenada’s Scrappy Little Army

The US invasion of Grenada in 1983 provided a welcome foreign policy vic­tory for the Reagan Administration, even as the dust settled from the deadly bombing of the Marine bar­racks in Lebanon.

Government and media reports at the time emphasized the involvement of the Cubans on the island and downplayed the Grenadian role. The invasion — Operation Urgent Fury — was officially termed a “rescue mission” to liberate hostage American medical students and free the Grena­dian people from communist domina­tion.

But a close look at the fighting that took place reveals a more complex story, and shows the main and dead­liest opponent the Americans faced was not the Cubans, but the small Grenadian armed forces.

A Marxist and good friend of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, Grenada’s leader ear­ly in 1983, was a truly popular politi­cian. While he had attempted to make over Grenada into a communist state with Cuban and Soviet help, he’d been careful not to push his people too far, too fast. But that caution then proved his undoing, when his doctrinaire and dour second-in-command, Bernard Coard, became impatient with the in­cremental pace of change and jealous of Bishop’s “cult of personality.”

The simmering feud within Grena­da’s ruling circle erupted in October, when Coard led the more radical ele­ments of the New Jewel Party in a coup that removed Bishop from power, jail­ing bum and his allies on the 13th.

Coard misjudged the people’s temper, however, and a few days later, on the 19th, Bishop and his colleagues were freed from prison by a massive crowd of civilians. Coard’s faction counterat­tacked using three armored personnel carriers and troops. Scores of people were killed and Bishop was recap­tured. Shortly thereafter, he and sev­en of his associates were cut down by a firing squad’s machinegun in the courtyard of Fort Rupert, in St. George’s, the island’s capital.

The U.S. administration was, of course, concerned with the new com­munist state evolving in the Carib­bean. The build up of the Grenadian military and the growing influence of the Cubans bothered many in Wash­ington. Of particular concern was the construction of a 9,000-foot runway near St. Georges. Ostensibly created to boost tourism, the facility had obvious strategic potential, and captured doc­uments later revealed the Soviets and Cubans did indeed have plans for its military use.

Bishop’s execution, then, and the revulsion it caused across the Carib­bean, gave the United States the op­portunity to move to rid the island of its communist regime. An invasion force was quickly gathered.
The Grenadians, well aware of the growing US enmity, had also been con­sidering how best to use their small army to defend their island. Their hope was to hold out long enough for world opinion to come to the rescue, forcing a premature halt to any at­tack.

The largest part of their armed forces was the People’s Militia, several thousand strong. Besides filling six in­fantry battalions, the militia men and women were also to bolster several of the regular army units. But that ap­proach had to be scrapped when the fighting at the jail and Bishop’s execu­tion deflated the regime’s popular support. Fewer than 250 militia even­tually reported for duty.

Another blow to the Grenadian com­munists’ cause was the generally pas­sive stance adopted by the Cuban con­struction troops and military advisors. Since Bishop had been a personal friend as well as a political ally of Cas­tro, the Cuban dictator was appalled by his murder. He also foresaw the US was soon thereafter likely to intervene and there was little he could do to stop it. For political reasons Castro couldn’t openly abandon a socialist ally state, but he had no stomach for throwing more resources into a lost cause.

The only reinforcement Castro sent was a lone officer to take charge of the Cuban mission on Grenada. He was given orders to “uphold the honor of Cuban arms,” but nothing more. The Cuban construction troops and mili­tary advisory mission, about 700 troops in all, were ordered to defend their encampment but not to fire un­less fired on. So the single largest body of troops on the island were thus put under orders to merely defend them­selves and not to cooperate in any de­fensive schemes put forward by the Grenadians.

The major combat element of the Grenadian army was the Permanent Battalion, which consisted of four companies and some platoon-sized support elements, totaling 475 men and women. Spread around St. Georges and other sites in small de­tachments was the Security Company, under command of Capt. Lester Red­head, who had played a lead role in Bish­op’s death. Also manning positions around the town were the regulars of the Anti-Aircraft Company and some militia, under Lt. Cecil Prime. The Peo­ple’s Revolutionary Army Reserve was massed at Fort Frederick, and comprised the Motorized Company, orga­nized into two platoons with BTR-60 armored personnel carriers and another truck-mounted platoon. There was also the Mobile Company, with yet another three truck-mounted pla­toons. Both the Mobile and Motorized Companies were under command of Lt. Raeburn Nelson. Rounding out the force were 80 of the militia who did re­port for duty. They were formed into the Rapid Mobilization Company un­der Lt, Iman Abdullah.

Nineteen Americans died in combat during the invasion. About half per­ished in combat accidents and friend­ly fire incidents, but nearly all the rest were done in by fire from Grenadian defenders. Several of the most notable fights solely involved Grenadian de­fenders.

One of the initial objectives of the invasion force was the Richmond Hill Prison in the capital. Five UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were supposed to land there carrying Delta Force cornmandos whose mission was to liberate the political prisoners being kept in­side. Driven off by heavy fire from the anti-aircraft guns sited around the prison, the Black Hawks made a second attempt that resulted in one chopper going down, killing the pilot and wounding 11 other soldiers. The pris­on wasn’t liberated for more than a day.

Another special forces target in the initial assault was Government House, home of British Gov. Gen. Sir Paul Scoon, who was to form the post-inva­sion government. While the Navy SEALs succeeded in reaching him, they were then pinned down by Grenadian fire and unable to leave. It was only af­ter Marines, led by tanks, approached the next day that the siege was broken. One of the elements called in to help the beleaguered SEAL team consisted of a pair of Marine Cobra helicopter gunships. Anti-aircraft fire from the Fort Frederick battery succeeded in downing both of them, killing three of the four crewmen.

A third special forces target was the transmitter station at Beausejour. While the commando team succeeded in capturing their objective, they were soon faced with a counterattack by a scratch force led by Prime and con­sisting of one BTR-60, and 82mm mor­tar and a 20 man platoon from the Mobile Company. Prime’s men drove off the Americans but didn’t kill any.

The decisive fight was at the Point Salinas airfield. Two battalions of U.S. Army Ran­gers dropped from dangerously low altitude to capture the facility and at­tack the nearby Cuban encampment. Although no Rangers were killed in the ini­tial drop, one man later died in the fighting to expand the airhead. Both Grenadian and Cuban troops were in the area, so it’s unclear who fired the fatal bullet.

The main Cuban position was in the hills north of the airfield, and it was soon brought under attack by ele­ments of the US 82nd Airborne Divi­sion, who’d flown in to reinforce the Rangers. One officer was killed during a night-time reconnaissance of the Cuban lines, and he was the only fatality known for certain to have been caused by those forces. The Cuban camp was finally taken in a violent as­sault the next day. Sixteen of those de­fenders were left dead, but no more Americans were killed.

The biggest combat disaster for the Americans came during the afternoon of the first day, when a five-man, jeep-borne recon team of Rangers got lost while scouting a road leading from the airfield. They drove into an ambush set by the militia of the Rapid Mobi­lization Company in which four of the Rangers were killed.
The largest counterattack launched against the Americans was conducted by a BTR-60 platoon from the Motor­ized Company. All three vehicles were quickly destroyed by light anti-tank weapons and gunship fire. It was, in the words of one US soldier who ob­served it, a “valiant, heroic, but stupid move.”

By noon of the second day it was clear the Americans had arrived in overwhelming force. The Cubans had surrendered and soon the still-surviving elements of the Grenadian army simply began melting away, trying to blend in among the populace. While the Americans reported occasional sniper fire for days afterward, no more invaders were killed by enemy fire.

The small Grenadian army had man­aged to kill in action at least eight Americans, wounded scores more and shot down several helicopters. Despite their limited resources, they also man­aged to launch several counterattacks, including one that temporarily suc­ceeded. Looked at another way, if Saddam Hussein’s army had been propor­tionately as effective in 1991, the Coal­ition would have suffered tens of thousands of casualties, rather than hundreds, in Operation Desert Storm. And in contrast, though they received most of the press attention, the 700 Cubans on Grenada killed just one or two Americans.

— Seth Owen

—
SOURCES

Adkin, Mark. Urgent Fury: The Battle for Grenada. London: Leo Cooper Books, 1989.

Bolger, Damel P. Americans at War Novato Calif., Presidio Press 1988

Russell. Lee & M Albert Mendez Grenada 1983 Osprey Men at Arms Series No. 139 London Osprey 1985

Phase Line Smash armored cav

One of the pleasures of a real in-depth military simulation such as Phase Line Smash is the insight it can provide into actual historical events.

PLS is, perhaps, the most ambitious solitaire manual wargame ever attempted. The basic game has 55 pages of rules, in small type! A good chunk of the other 55-page book in the game also has rules.

But a large portion of the second book is a detailed battle history of the portion of the Gulf War fought by the VII Corps. The roughly 44 pages of history-related material would probably be a 100+ page book if published in the usual format for hardcover history books, so this is no simple set of designer's notes.

One of the facts depicted in PLS is the differing employments of the two armored cavalry regiments deployed for Desert Storm. Both were storied formations with long and distinguished histories.

The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment assigned to VII Corps is the longest continuously serving regimental-sized unit on active service, dating back to the original 2nd Dragoons from 1836, which was renamed the 2nd U.S. Cavalry during the Civil War.

The 3rd ACR assigned to XVIII Airborne Corps started its organizational existence as Regiment of Mounted Rifles in 1846, (hence it's nickname of "Brave Rifles") and was later renamed as the 3rd. U.S. Cavalry during the general reorganization of the mounted branch on Aug. 3rd, 1861.

Almost 130 years later the two venerable regiments were in the Arabian desert preparing to take part in the largest armored battle in history.

The game designer notes, however, that the two regiments were employed quite differently even though organized the same.

The 2nd ACR operated independently, under VII Corps control, as an advance element of the corps. It was reinforced with an entire brigade of field artillery (the 210th FA Bde), which was a very unusual subordination of a colonel-level command to another colonel-level command. It's a testimony to the professionalism of the late 2oth Century (and early 21st Century) U.S. Army that it could make this kind of command relationship work smoothly without the kind of drama about ranks and date of rank one is used to seeing in military history. Certainly the 1861 U.S. Army could never have tried something like that! The unconventional reinforcement aside, the 2nd ACR was fulfilling a very conventional role as the advance element for a heavy armored corps.

The 3rd ACR, on the other hand, was assigned directly to the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, in effect becoming a fourth maneuver brigade for that heavy division. The 3rd ACR wasn't even much weaker than the 2nd ACR. It didn't have an FA Bde in support, it did have an attached FA battalion, to in total it was merely 24-guns smaller. Why the different treatment?

The game doesn't say, and I don't know if any of the commanders ever explicitly explained their decisions. It could have simply been due to the personal preferences of the respective corp commanders, and if Lt. Gen. Gary E. Luck had commanded VII Corps instead of XVIII Airborne, and Lt. Gen. Frederick M. Franks Jr. headed XVIII Corps instead of VII Corps maybe things would have been done differently.

But analyzing the situation by the Army method known as METT suggests that the decision might well have been the same even if the corps commanders had been switched because there were significant differences in the conditions facing the two corps.

The M in METT stands for Mission, the the mission of the XVIII Airborne Corps was to act as the flank guard for the entire Coalition army assembled for the offensive to liberate Kuwait. The corps was supposed to prevent any Iraqi forces from interfering with Coalition plans.

The E stands foe the Enemy. In the XVIII Corps zone Iraqi forces were sparse and deployed in widely separated strong points. They were not strong, but they were located in many distinct positions that would have to be neutralized.

The first T stands for terrain. For the airborne corps there were miles and miles of trackless desert to cross. The corps area of operations was very spread out.

The final T is Troops Available. For the XVIII Airborne Corps there was the problem of coordinating different nationalities and troops with very different capabilities. There was a very light, ground mobile force based around the small French division reinforced by a brigade of truck-borne U.S. paratroopers. There was an airmobile force comprised mostly of the 101st Airmobile Division and there was a heavy mechanized force built around the 24th Mechanized Division.

Given the dispersed enemy, huge distances and disparate capabilities of his units Luck evidently decided that the best approach would be to decentralize control as much as possible. Thus it made sense to subordinate the 3rd ACR directly to the 24th Mech instead of trying to coordinate their actions remotely at corps level.

On the VII Corps front things couldn't be more different.

The Mission of VII Corps was to engage the most powerful enemy armored force and destroy it in direct combat.

That Enemy force was the six-division Republican Guard (reinforced by several divisions worth of regular Iraqi troops). While the course of the war revealed the limitations of the Iraqi forces, pre-war planning had to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was a substantial enemy force.

The terrain was still trackless, but it was constrained by unit boundaries on both left and right which meant that the VII Corps would be operating in a fairly constricted space given its size.

And that size was considerable, as the Troops Available comprised five heavy armored divisions. While there were some variations in equipment and size, all five divisions were large, very heavily armored extremely mobile ground forces. Orchestrating their movement, let alone their fighting, would require close supervision by the corps headquarters, tremendous synchronization and adherence to strict timetables.

And helping those armored divisions keep their timetables was the responsibility of the 2nd ACR, which raced ahead of the corps to clear the way and make sure that no Iraqi forces of any size was able to act as a speed bump to slow down any part of the VII Corps. Franks planned to wheel the entire corps and smash into the flank of the Republican Guards with annihilating force. It wouldn't have taken much to throw the whole schedule off kilter.

So given the realities of METT the different employment strategies for the 2nd ACR and 3rd ACR make perfect sense, and are even reflected in the game. Consider how much more difficult coordinating the boundary issues between the XVIII Corps and VII Corps would be if extra levels of command were included. Instead the player (who represents VII Corps commander Franks) can deal with the 24th Mech alone on his flank, instead of multiple units.

Phase Line Smash is an amazing study of this singular campaign and even unplayed it's is worth having.

Female combatants in wargames

One might be excused if one thought women were nearly as fully involved in the violence of war as men if one went by science fiction and fantasy games. Indeed, in some of the games they seem to be getting close to parity. Of the figures in Dream Blade that have an identifiable gender, a very large faction are female. In Battle Lore at least one of the Lore masters is female and there's a whole army of Amazons in Wizard Kings.

Female fighters make at least a token appearance in nearly all the science fiction wargames and sometimes much more than that.

Of course, in actual history female combatants are very rare and the cases when a woman actually take up arms usually become the stuff of legend.

There are many cultural reasons for this, of course, but it's also true that physical strength was an inseparable part of hand-to-hand combat in the pre-gunpowder era and even once gunpowder weapons became available, most military tasks and most weapons required the kind of upper body strength that women didn't possess.

Women were somewhat better represented among high level leaders, and female commanders such as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I and Maria Teresa led their nations in war, often successfully. Indeed, in Friedrich the German king's three opponents are represented by female leaders although Madame Pompadour might be a little bit of a stretch.

But it's really just in the last few decades that women actually started to take part in a direct way in combat. The Bolshevik Red Army and Spanish Civil War Republicans had some female fighters who got attention. The Soviets again fielded some famous women fighters, while women played a notable role in many of the resistance movements against the Nazis. By Vietnam it wasn't uncommon to see women bearing weapons in a revolutionary army and since then it's been a staple of left-wing insurgent forces.

Women serving in regular forces has been much more uncommon. The Israelis have experimented a bit with women in combat and near-combat roles but it's been the U.S. military that's given women the greatest opportunity to serve in direct combat -- although often by happenstance as the non-linear battlefield of the 21st Century puts all military people at risk. At least two Army women have been awarded the Silver Star for gallantry under fire. Still, the most direct combat jobs such as infantryman, tanker or gunner remain off-limits so far.

So it's not surprising that there are very few examples of women being explicitly depicted in a combat role in history-based wargames. One example of women being shown as a combatant is in Axis & Allies: Miniatures, where the Soviet sniper is depicted as a female (Mila Mikhailovna Pavichenko).

Another is in Thunderbolt / Apache Leader, the GMT solitaire game. One of the A-10 pilots, "Viper," is a woman. Female A-10 pilots have flown many hundreds of hours of actual combat missions over Iraq, so this depiction isn't just a "what-if" but is a "has-happened."

So far the negative consequences predicted by opponents of women in combat have generally not come to pass, although there have been some problems. The scale of those problems has not been more than the military has been able to handle, however, and more and more regular military forces are placing women in combat and near-combat roles, so this trend seems to continue.

It will be interesting if the next generation of modern squad-level wargames will start to include female soldiers. Leaving them out might now be considered unrealistic.

Arabian Nightmare remembered

It's really a sign of how old I'm getting that it occurred to me today that our newest eligible voters this fall were born after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that was the first act in the first Gulf War.

It seems like just yesterday that the Berlin Wall fell, communism collapsed and Saddam Hussein displayed his trademark appalling sense of timing by invading oil-rich Kuwait just as the U.S. was looking for someplace to use its Reagan-buildup-honed Cold War army before paying it off as part of the "Peace Dividend." But it wasn't yesterday, of course, it was 18 years ago this summer.

There are a lot of remarkable aspects to that episode of history, but among them it was the "golden era" of paper wargaming's public influence. Frank Chadwick's Desert Shield Fact Book was on the New York Times' best seller list. Wargame designer and military analyst Jim Dunnigan was a regular on CNN. Other game designers/analysts also appeared on TV and on op ed pages of major newspapers. Wargame publishers rushed a number of games into print to take advantage of the moment, among them Avalon Hill/Victory Games with their updates to Gulf Strike, Omega Games' Desert Victory and TSR's A Line in the Sand.

Perhaps the most notable, however, was Strategy & Tactics and its Arabian Nightmare in issue No. 139. It was literally thrown together on the fly, under the direction of Dunnigan (in his second go-around as S&T editor) and designed by Austin Bay with assists from a nationwide circle of playtesters and experts. The whole thing was coordinated by emails, which might seem rather unremarkable now, but this was quite ground-breaking in 1990.

The end result was not a polished commercial product and competitive wargame, but more like a wargame kit that allowed the general public to get a first-hand look at the military possibilities. This was no small achievement, given the garbage that passed for commentary in newspapers, news magazines and, especially, television. There were plenty of alarmist voices grinding their various political axes with scant regard for the military realities. Pundits predicted tens of thousands of American casualties in a bloodbath against the "battle-hardened" and well-fortified Iraqi army. Indeed, Saddam himself seemed to believe the hype. Had he understood the actual balance of forces he might have saved himself from starting the long sequence of events that led to today's situation in Iraq by arranging for a face-saving exit.

Arabian Nightmare did a very credible job of presenting the likely course of events. A friend and I played out the first few days of the war and according to the game an air campaign would reduce the Iraqi army to impotence in short order and even if it didn't, the Coalition ground forces would run right over them.

It's mostly of interest now as a historical artifact, although it could be used to explore what-ifs about the campaign easily enough. It probably could even be used to look at the 2003 war, although I haven't tried that.

Unfortunately the run-up for the 2003 war didn't enjoy as much attention from wargame designers as it probably should have, although there were some efforts such as Back to Iraq in Command and S&T and Millennium Wars: Iraq. Maybe this was because the war seemed like another forgone conclusion. Certainly the public debate over the war didn't seem well-informed. In particular, there was very little attention given to the question of "what next?" Both Back to Iraq and MW: Iraq only concerned themselves with the first few weeks of fighting, although they did correctly predict the historical outcome.

Ironically, the earlier Gulf War games like Arabian Nightmare, A Line in the Sand and Gulf Strike paid more attention to the political ramifications of that war than any of the more recent games did.

Indeed, despite more than a year of speculation about a possible war with Iran, no wargame designer has tackled that topic in the detail it deserves. An updated Gulf Strike-like treatment of the issue would be quite illuminating. I know that my own wariness about launching a war against Iran is based in part on my memories of how challenging invading that country was for the much more numerous Soviets in the original Gulf Strike. I simply can't see it as doable with the force levels the U.S. could apply.

It would be a public service if one of our knowledgable modern specialists like Joe Miranda or Joe Balkoski would take a swing at the topic.

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.

Mission: Grenada -- 25 years after invasion

It was a quarter-century ago that a coup in the tiny West Indian island nation of Grenada gave the Reagan administration a chance for a sure military victory that removed a long-time irritant and at the same time helped provide a public relations counterweight to what was one of the biggest disasters of the Reagan era, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that same October week.
There's only been one professionally published game on the campaign and its unlikely there will be another one, considering that there was never much chance of a contest between the world's strongest superpower and one of the world's smallest independent states. Most of the interest in the affair over the years has turned on its diplomatic significance. Militarily it's been eclipsed by the much bigger operations that followed in Panama, the First Gulf War and the Afghan/Iraq wars.
At the time, however, it seemed like a big deal as it was the first test of the revitalized U.S. military under Reagan and it revealed some flaws in training and joint operations that were remedied in large part in time for the later operations.

The game was published in 1985, less than two years after the event. While it does a good job with the U.S. order of battlee, which was extensively publicized at the time, the Cuban/Grenadian OB is seriously off the mark and so the game as printed is somewhat limited in its portrayal of the actual events. Within the game, however, are sufficient resources to reflect the actual match up.

Graphically, the game is a mixed bad. It's published in the "microgame" format pioneered by Metagaming and Steve Jackson games, although in this case the publisher is the designer, Wayne Close and his company, Close Simulations. As such the components are minimal: One die-cut countersheet, a map, a small rule book and a small cardboard box.

The best components are the counters, which abandon the usual NATO-style symbols for an imaginative mix of icons, unit insignia and silhouettes. The U.S. counters are black on dark green, and therefore hard to read in poor light, but otherwise a nice presentation. Besides unit designation and type the counters include attack and defense factors and something called "action points" which are a sort of souped-up movement factor.

Perhaps the worst component is the map. Most of the island was covered in dense tropical foliage, which Close chose to represent with dark green. On top of that is overlaid a road net and buildings in black, which is hard to read and makes the U.S. units too well camouflaged to see in anything other than excellent lighting. What's not in black is in red (namely contour lines, beaches and some key landmarks) is in red, and red on green is very hard on the eyes in any lighting condition.

In-between is the rulebook, which appears to have been produced with an early word-processing programming (it was 1985) instead of being typeset, which hurt readability a little, especially given the small type size.

The game system is variation on the action point system seen elsewhere where combat is a function of movement and action points are expended as part of the fighting. In every turn the U.S. player activates units and spends their action point allowance to move and fight, followed by the Cuban/Grenadian player. As a tactical game (units are mostly company-sized) the game system takes into account things like weapons ranges, combined arms, spotting and line of sight.

There are two scenarios included, one depicts the historical assault while the second assumes that the Rangers were used off-map to secure the island's second airport and so the main effort around the capital of St. George's fell to the U.S. Marines.

Both scenarios use the same Cuban/Grenadian OB, which would have represented the "best case" scenario for the defenders if the U.S. had invaded against a unified island well-supported by its Cuban patron.

The actual event, however, was considerably different. The bloody coup by the dour Marxist ideologue Bernard Coard against the popular and charismatic Prime Minister Maurice Bishop robbed the revolutionary government of all its significant public support. Bishop was a personal friend and protege of Cuban leader Fidel Castro who was very upset at Bishop's murder. While Cuban prestige required that the 800 Cuban construction (NOT combat) engineers defend themselves with their small arms if attacked, there was no attempt to coordinate defense plans with Coard's regime. One Cuban officer was sent to the island to take charge of the Cuban detachment, but that was the only reinforcement the island got before the invasion.
The Grenadian regime had been very unpopular with Reagan because of its closeness to Castro and the Grenadians had spent several years preparing for a U.S. invasion, mobilizing almost the entire able-bodied adult population, male and female, into a popular militia. Had the U.S. invaded against the Bishop-led government it would have been a tragically bloody affair. As it turned out, however, Bishop's murder (he and his top advisers were cut to pieces by machine guns in the prison courtyard) destroyed the morale of the popular forces and only a hundred or so reported for duty. They augmented the regular battalion.

That regular battalion, as it turned out, would provide the only organized resistance to the U.S. invasion. The major parts of the unit included a mechanized company, a motorized company, a heavy weapons company and an anti-aircraft battery. These Grenadian (NOT Cuban) troops would fight for most of the day against the larger U.S. invaders, killing 17 or 18 out of the 19 American KIAs in the battle, as well as shooting down a couple of helicopters.

In game terns the best way to represent the actual defenders is to put two 2-4-4 battalions on the hill overlooking the Point Salines airport (hex 0860/0807). These represent the Cuban construction troops.
Use one of the 2-3-21 mech companies, one 2-4-21 motorised company, the mortar unit and both anti-aircraft units to represent the Grenadian regular battalion (not Cubans). Mix the rest of the Grenadian units together and randomly draw three of them to represent the militia that decide to report for duty. This should be everything. In addition to the regular VP schedule award the Grenadian player 2VP for every turn that the U.S. has NOT scored VPs for achieving his major geographic objectives (Gov. General Evac; Point Salines; Med students evac).

Mission: Grenada is the only simulation of this interesting fight and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. With the OB adjustments noted it's also authentic to the actual battle. The Grenadian "Mouse" still won't be able to hold off the American Eagle in either version of the OB, but the revised version better shows how long the odds truly were. As it was, man-for-man, the tiny Grenadian army may very well have been the most dangerous forces faced by the U.S. since Vietnam.

Tactics, 25th anniversary edition 25 years later

There are few games published that are never meant to be played. Quite a few are published that end up not getting played much, for various reasons, but generally the publisher's hope is that the game will be played some.
One notable exception, however, was the 1983 edition of Tactics, which was published as a commerative by The old Avalon Hill Game Company. It was a reprent of the very first published Chareles Roberts Wargame, Tactics, although with a different board. The board in the 25th anniverasry editon was an unpublished prototype of the orginal Tactics game board. I believe that the board seen in Tactics II was the same board as used in the original Tactics.
The most notable aspect of the game was the 25th Anniversary booklet, which was a company history for Avalon Hill. Unfortunately the company never saw its 50th anniverasry, being long since swallowed up by Hasbro and now just a brand name.
Still, for those of us who started with AH, it's nice to look at how it all started.
Like looking at a stone axe, or perhaps a Model T Ford, it's hard to imagine that people even managed to use the thing, when you look at it now.
Key concepts are completely unexplained. For example, the game end when you occupy all the enemy cities, but it doesn't explain exactly what that means. The players will have to figure that out for themselves.
The game pieces are extremely plain, just numbers and abbreviations. No graphic element at all. Not even the NATO symbols we associate with AH/SPI wargames.
There are no movement factors, Instead, each army has a Basic Turn Allowance of 30 to split between all its units. One unit could move 30, or 30 units move one square or anything in-between. Oh yes, squares. It will not surprise grognards, but slightly younger wargamers may not know that the first wargames used squares rather than hexes.
There's an army organization provided, and players are urged to keep their corps organized in some fashion, but exactly how all that is supposed to work is also left to the players.
The classic AH 3-1 CRT makes its first appearance, albeit in a primitive form. The famous D-Elim appears only in the 1-1 column. Otherwise it's just "1 Elim."
All in all, the game is simply unplayable by current standards. But it is interesting as an artifact.

Review: The Complete Brigadier

The Complete Brigadier is, in many ways, a very old-fashioned kind of miniatures wargame covering the black powder era, from 1680 to 1880. It's more reminiscent of Little Wars or Charge! than many newer sets of rules.
It has a ruthless focus on the brigadier's fight, unlike most popular rules of recent vintage which try to cover whole battles.
No, in The Complete Brigadier the objective is immediate. Take that hill, flank that line, defend along this creek, and so on.
The player represents a brigade commander, generally in charge of a four or five battalions of infantry, a battery of guns and an attached regiment of horse. Each figure represents 20 men. The game concerns itself with formations, orders and weapons in direct and explicit ways.
There are no fancy interactive phases or abstract shortcuts.
Brigadiers first write up orders for their units, using specific commands drawn from historically based options, specifying formation, direction and rate of march.
Next, melee battles initiated the turn before are resolved, using a deterministic process that considers morale, numbers, weapons, formation and terrain.
Units then move in accordance with their previously written orders, reacting automatically to unexpected encounters based on historical doctrine. For example, an infantry unit encountering enemy cavalry may form a square.
Then units engage in fire, selecting targets based on a formula that again is based on historical practices. Unlike most games, firing is not generally optional. Unless specifically ordered not to shoot, a unit will fire on targets within range. The results of fire combat are determined by formula without any dice, but taking into account weapons, morale and various other factors.
After resolving all fire units check morale, based on quality, losses and local circumstances, again with no roll of the die involved.
Finally, based on actions taken that turn, units expend some of their limited pool of "stamina." Firing, meleeing and moving at anything faster than a slow walk all cost stamina. As one might expect, it's easier to expend stamina than replenish it, and better troops have more of it than poor troops.
The game includes all sorts of special rules for special cases such as burning buildings, moving on boats, irregular troops, building fieldworks and most anything else one might expect to see affecting a brigade level fight.
Probably the hardest thing for most wargamers to get used to is the lack of any luck element. While the designer lays out his case for the historicity of his approach, the main reason for minimizing the role of luck is to maximize the extent that The Complete Brigadier can be a duel of skill between two brigadiers. The only pure luck element in the entire game is a fate roll for the chances of the brigadier himself getting hit, and if hit, how badly hit. A couple of D6 rolls will determine his fate, although only two consecutive sixes will "seriously wound" the brigadier, resulting in him being "carried from the field by his staff" and replaced by his previously identified second-in-command.
The game includes many clever and entertaining illustrations, a well-organized and well-indexed set of rules, and entire booklet devoted to explaining how to get into miniature gaming with tips for making terrain, painting troops and organizing scenarios. It has references and suggestions for fielding armies throughout the era from 1680 to 1880. It includes five scenarios, all based on battles in North America: Plains of Abraham, 1759; Guilford Courthouse, 1781; Crysler's Farm, 1813; Palo Alto, 1846 and Mill Springs, 1862. Information for troops and weapons from throughout the period are included, however, and there's really no limits on what setting can be used.
While my usual and favorite era for the game is the American Revolution, I've also organized games from the American Civil War, the War of 1812 and the Zulu War of 1879.
The game can be used with any scale figures. Distances are measured in "spaces" which represent 20 yards on the ground. Based on figure scale a space can be anywhere from 3/4-inch (for 9mm figures) to 2 inches (30mm figures). A space is one inch for the most popular scale, 15mm, and also for my preferred scale 20mm.
Unlike many miniatures games, a game master or umpire is not required. The game can be played by just two, although I would highly recommend players play in the the proper spirit of traditional miniatures wargaming, as exemplified by the accounts in Little Wars and Charge! Rules lawyers, Munchkins and people who would rather win than be a proper gentleman or gentle lady are advised to play something else, or at least avail themselves of an umpire.
As a game master I generally only make minor modifications to the rules. I add a small luck element by allowing players to roll for fractional hits instead of rounding up or down as per the rules. This seems a minor concession to player expectations and historical accuracy without changing the game in any significant way. I also generally allow players more leeway with their Follow Me command (when they attach themselves directly to a unit) than a strict interpretation of the rules as written would allow.
Other than that, I play the game by the book and have done so for more than 20 years now. It's been an excellent investment, resulting in many hours of fun for me and my friends.
It's still one of my all-time favorites, despite more than two decades of competition from newer stuff.

First impressions of Napoleon's Triumph

Well, Marty and I got the chance to play Napoleon's Triumph for the first time.
It was a very good and enjoyable. It took rather longer than billed (about four hours) to play because we were both new and we had to pick our way through the novel procedures, but it was enjyable trhoughout.
While different ind etails from Bonaparte at Marengo, it's much the same in how its a real thinking game.
I played the Austrians, while Marty was the French.
My strategy was to make a big push on the left that looked dangerous in order to prompt Marty into committing his reinforcements early, but then fall back beforer I became decisively engaged. While probably very risky against experienced players, I hoped the fact that Marty was also a newbie would mean he'd have a hard time following me too aggressively.
On the right flank I gave Bagratian a strong corps and put all the Guard and some other strong units with Constantine. I planned to make a decisive counterattack against the French flank once he was well committed.
In general the strategy generally worked as hoped, although I did lose in the end because of some tcatical errors.
Marty actaully got first blood when he launched a successful spoiling attack on one of my corps as it approached his main line. There was some see-saw fighting in the center and left. Overall the Austrian losses were a bit higher than the French. I was, however, able to pull back most of my units without getting too many caught and even start redeploying units from the left to the center.
My right flank attack wasn't quite as decisive as I had hoped, Even though I won my big Guard attack, I didn't do the damage I had hoped to inflict and I ended up being too close to demoraliziation at the end. The French were able to get a couple of free hits with guns and then get their last morale point with an attack on an area that couldn't be stopped due to an error on my part.
It was a very good session and both of us are eager to try again.

Featured game: Sticks and Stones, 30th anniversary

There are dozens or scores of wargames on some topics: Battle of the Bulge, Gettysburg, The Eastern Front. But despite the passage of 30 years since Sticks & Stones, Microgame No. 11, was published, it's apparently the only wargame to explicitly depict warfare in Neolithic times.
While the popular imagination sometimes imagines that humans once lived in more peaceful times before civilization, archeological evidence suggests that humans have died violently at the hands of their own species for a very long time. A graveyard in Egypt dating back some 12,000 years contains the remains of dozens who died from multiple wounds by stone-tipped weapons.
Whether humans are naturally violent may be unanswerable, but once humans developed weapons -- such as bows -- that enabled them to kill other men with relative safety, they got to it. There's ample evidence for fortified settlements dating back thousands of years and by the time the first battles were recorded in history after the development of writing it was clear that the military arts were already far advanced.
Sticks & Stones depicts the very early age of organized fighting using the typical techniques of a 1970s-era wargame. Units, which appear to represent small groups of warriors (a dozen or so) maneuver on a hex-gridded battlefield. Their military abilities are quantified with attack, defense and movement factors and battles are resolved via a D6 roll on an odds-based Combat Results Table. Units move and then fight in alternating player-turns. Aside from the uncommon, but not unique, rule allowing in-hex melee combat, it's a fairly standard wargame.
Various special rules give the game period flavor. There are dependents (women), goats and goods to be fought over. Newly domesticated dogs to help the warriors. And a straightforward scenario-development system that allows playrs to customize their tribal armies with reasonable historical accuracy.
Warriors come in two basic defense-styles, armored with a defense value of 3 and unarmored with a value of 2. Armor, at this early date, should be understood to be merely thicker clothes, extra animal skins or perhaps leather.
Weapons come in four varieties. There are "hands" with an attack value of 2. As it's against human nature to engage in deadly combat with just bare hands, I'd interpret "hands" to mean being armed with sticks, primitive clubs and rocks, not just fists. Men armed with stone axes have an attack value of 3. Spearmen have an attack value of 4, plus the abaility to attack from a distance of one hex away up to three times per game. The deadliest weapon is the bow, which can attack up to 3 hexes away with a value of 6 up to six times per game. The rules inform us that "bows" can also represent blowguns or throwing spears as well as bows and arrows.
Warriors can come in any mix of weapon and armor style, within the countermix and available "weapons points" running from 0 for an unarmored and weaponless man to 7 for an armored archer.
The game includes five scenarios which do a good job of covering the gamut of likely stone age fighting. There's a small raid on an unprotected village, a territorial ritual battle (which ends when someone is actually killed), a mastadon hunt (solitaire), a bigger raid on a protected village and a full-scale war between two neighboring villages.
In the last scenario there is a slight problem because the countermix doesn't include the two fortified villages required. One could either make another fortified village or alternately let one side use a protected village and give them 6 extra weapon points to make up the difference.
There are some optional rules including setting fires, running warriors, extended range for missile weapons and poisone weapons.
Considering the game has just a couple dozen small pages the game manages to cover a lot of ground and present what seems like a good simulation of prehistoric fighting within the limits of our knowledge.
The presentation is good considering the limits of the microgame format and 1970s printing. The map is functional, if undecorative. The counters have to be cut out and feature a rather idealized and buff view of cave men, but they work. The only color in the rules is the cover, but the body of the rules are clearly written and very well-illustrated for the era and format.
All-in-all it's a good and still unique wargame and well-worth picking up out of historical interest as well as an interesting game challenge.

The Battle of Nations

The Battle of Nations (SPI, 1975) is an old-fashioned straightforward hex-and-counter wargame using the Napoleon at War game system. It was well-received at the time, receiving a 6.9 overall rating from Strategy & Tactics readers making it the 15th-ranked Pre-World War II game in January 1977.
It's gotten a second lease on life as one of the more popular titles offered by the online game-playing service Hexwar.com.
The situation is dramatic enough. Napoleon was brought to bay by the combined armies of the anti-French coalition at the city of Leipzig in October 1813. This resulted in the largest battle of the Napoleonic wars, with more than 500,000 troops on the field.
The system is standard SPI-style with combat-movement factors on the units, a Combat Results Table and locking zones of control (a unit must stop and a cannot leave a hex next to an enemy unit except through a combat result.)
Uniquely among the NAW-system games there are no separate artillery units, which changes tactics significantly.
The battlefield is strewn with a large number of towns that double defense as well as some hills and streams. The most important feature of the battlefield are several rivers running through the middle of it that can only be crossed at some bridges. This has the effect of dividing the battle into several smaller battles. The French have the central position and can use their interior lines to switch between fronts. The French have an initial advantage in numbers but get few reinforcements while more than half the Allied army arrives during the game.
The game is somewhat unusual for one that depicts a historical battle in that the most popular scenario really amounts to a big "what-if." The Grand Campaign game covers the entire four-day battle from 16-19 Oct. 1813, but historically there was no serious fighting on the second day. This will not happen in The Battle of Nations. As a matter of fact, the campaign game will often be decided on the second day.
While historically Napoleon did not attack on Oct. 17 he probably should have, because time was against him as the Allied army became stronger as time passed.
Victory in the game is based on losses. Losing a set number of combat factors results in an army's demoralization. In this game demoralization explicitly equals defeat, although the reality is that it's very hard to win any NAW game once demoralized.
BON is a little out of the ordinary because the Allied demoralization level increases as more troops arrive. The French have an opportunity for a quick win, but as more Allied troops arrive that chance slips away and eventually its the French who have the lower demoralization level
The Grand Campaign is, by far, the most popular way to play on Hexwar, and it's a fairly balanced contest. Hexwar statistics as of Jan. 20, 2007 show 3,172 French victories, 2,717 Allies wins and 77 draws.
The First and Third Day scenarios are decidedly less popular, albeit for different reasons.
The problem for the First Day scenario is that it's very drawish. It's hard for either army to inflict enough losses to achieve victory in the five turns. Hexwar stats show 76 French wins, 79 Allies wins and 110 draws. It's a more even fight than the full campaign and takes much less time, but most players prefer their games to end with a clear winner.
The Third Day scenario, which covers the actual day of major fighting, is grossly imbalanced. Hexar stats show just 18 French wins and 200 Allied victories! There are just 14 draws, which ought to be considered moral victories in this scenario.
The main action in the game happens on two fronts, with some minor action in two secondary areas.
The first secondary front is the region southwest of the Elster River, which starts with a couple of Austrian units astride the French line of communications. The French usually dispatch a handful of units to chase the Austrians away. Once the Austrian units are eliminated or retreat its fairly easy for the French to seal it off because there are just a few bridges providing access.
Just east of this zone is the area between the Ester and Pleisse rivers. While sometimes important fighting develops in this area, it's also easily sealed off and often turns into a strategic cul de sac.
The most important fronts are in the North, where the French are faced with delaying the Russo-Prussian Army of Silesia (later reinforced by the Army of the North), and the southeast, where Napoleon typically attacks the Army of Bohemia seeking the quick win. Time is of the essence, however, because help is on the way from the Reserve Army and Bennigsen's Russian/Polish Army.
This combination of attacking and defending roles for both players creates an interesting and entertaining wargame situation.
Admittedly the game's realism suffers a bit because there's no reason for the second-day lull in game terms. This was a common problem with many SPI games, where factors such as fatigue, command confusion and logistics that created historical delays don't play a roll. Other games with this problem include Borodino and Cemetery Hill.
On the other hand from a game player's point of view the situation is interesting and challenging, and in my view this outweighs the unrealistic pacing.

Featured game: Quebec, 1759

The granddaddy of block games, Quebec 1759 has been in print since 1972, which probably sets some records for wargames.
The essential feature of so-called block wargames are the wooden blocks. Military units are represented by wooden blocks which are placed on edge, Stratego-style, to hide their identity and strength from the enemy. The four sides of the blocks are used to provide a paperwork-less method of step reduction. Typically a unit will have a “Combat Value” (CV) of 1-4, with numbers or pips along each side to depict its current strength. As the unit takes losses the block is rotated to show the current strength on top. Typically the number of dice a unit can roll is the same as its CV, so a CV 3 will roll three dice when it attacks an enemy unit. Which die roll numbers represent hits can vary from game to game, and is often modified by various conditions, but in Quebec 1759 each “6” is a hit.
Quebec 1959 introduced these mechanics and its still a very good introductory wargame. Usually taking less than an hour to play, it takes just a few minutes to explain and set up.
Each side has 25 blocks, blue for the French and Red for the British. Each side has some blank decoy blocks. The British army comprises nine battalions of regular foot at CV 4, a regular foot of 3 CV, a light infantry unit with 3 CV, some American rangers at 3 CV and a small Grenadier battalion with 2 CV. The French have an Indian unit with 4 CV, six regular battalions with 3 CV each and 13 militia units with 2 CV each. The British also have four naval units which have no CV but can each ferry one block across a water area.
The intriguing thing in the game is the geography of the battlefield. Depicting the area immediately surrounding Quebec City in what is now Canada, there are only 10 land areas and two sea areas, making this map one of the smallest, in terms of distinct locations, ever used for a wargame. The two water areas, the Bason (downriver from Quebec City) and St Laurent (upriver) divide the land zones into three distinct regions. The Ile d’Orleans is where the British army starts, across the Bason from the other land areas. Along the southern side of the map is Levis and Etchemin. Along the northern side of the map, from east to west, are the areas of Montmorency, Beauport, St. Charles, Abraham, Sillery, Ste. Foy and Cap Rouge.
Movement is simultaneous, with each side able to conduct one move per turn. A move consists of moving units from any one area to one or more adjacent areas or by ferry across a water zone to an area. The British can, instead of a regular move, move his ships from one water zone to the other.The British problem is to ferry their troops across the river in the face of the French and march to capture the Abraham area. If the British are in sole possession of Abraham on the 16th turn and still have at least 20 CV total, they win. If the French reduce the British to below 20 CV at any point, they win. No draw is possible.Combat is conducted by dividing the block in a mutually occupied area into three columns (left, center, right) and a reserve. The blocks in each column alternate firing (defender first) at each other until one enemy column is emptied of units, at which point that force instantly routs and must retreat from the area.
Elegant in its simplicity, Quebec 1759 was under appreciated when it came out in 1972 during the early days of the hex-and-counter wargame era. Now that tastes in gaming have changed and we are in the era of the stylistic, elegant Eurogame, Quebec 1759 and its ilk are finding new fans.The game takes less than 5 minutes to set up, plays in less than an hour and has less than four pages of rules.
Recommendations
(Yes) For Wargamers: Uses simple mechanics to capture the campaign with authenticity yet provides a competitive game as well.
(Yes) For Collectors: The first block game, early editions are sought by collectors.
(Yes) For Euro gamers: An excellent entry into board war gaming with quick game play, elegant mechanics and attractive components.

Featured game: 1914

1914 holds an unusual post in the annals of wargaming. It was never terribly popular, as such. It was never reprinted or updated after its original appearance. It didn't spawn an extensive line of sequels or imitators. It wasn't designer Jim Dunnigan's most famous or successful design.
For a while in the 1980s and 1990s it was highly sought after by collectors, with good copies fetching several hundred dollars at auction. But that, too, seems to have passed, and copies can be had on eBay for well under those peak prices.
But 1914 was, and is, an important milestone among wargames because it pointed out the potential for wargames as not mere games about war, but a new way to explore history in an interactive way. In 1914 one really got the impression that you were truly exploring ways in which history could have been different, has different decisions been made.
There have subsequently been interesting and entertaining discussions that have exhaustively explored how much a manual wargame can truly be a simulation of a historical event, given the many and inevitable compromises necessary to make it playable by human beings. But those discussions were made possible and necessary by 1914 and similar simulation-oriented designs that came from Dunnigan and Dunnigan-mentored game designers in the 1970s and afterwards.
More than any wargame that had gone before, and most that came afterwards, 1914 aimed to be a simulation. The game contest was clearly secondary to the history. Both players were really cooperatively working to see how the events of the Summer and fall of 1914 might have developed, instead of competing against each other in a test of wits and strategy. The game system did not reward clever gamy tactics. The overall strategies were rather obvious and not easily adjusted. Indeed, the game, when played, seemed to march inexorably forward into bloody tragedy with little ability for the "commanders' to change much at all. It was more than a little bit like a boardgame version of Tuchman's The Guns of August. No Zones of Control, no 3-1 sure-thing attacks, no D-elims, it was a break from convention in most respects.
The use of step reduction provided a graphic illustration of the grinding attrition of 1914-era fighting. More so than simple eliminations would have, watching your powerful "A" corps slowly attrit down to impotence drove home the character of the fighting.
Particularly when played with all the advanced and tournament options, 1914 was a "monster" game before monster games were conceived. The game took a long time to play, several sittings at least or a weekend. In the end, history was most likely to repeat itself, because the game depicted the forces working against changing history as very powerful indeed. In the game it's easy to see how little chance there was that the Germans could score their hoped-for knockout blow. That failure set the stage for the rest of the tragedy of World War I. As that war's centennial approaches interest in the war has grown. The passage of time allows us to see that the Great War was the pivotal event of the 20th Century, affecting everything that followed. World War II, totalitarianism in all its forms, genocide, nuclear war, post-colonialism and so much more followed in its wake. Only with the fall of Communism in 1989 and the post-Cold War reordering of affairs have the ripples of World War I started to fade away.
I wonder if interest in 1914 will be revived as 2014 nears.