New Axis & Allies miniatures set -- models good, cards not so good

Picked up my first couple of boosters from the new Early War set of Axis & Allies Miniatures today.

I've been looking forward to this set because it provides a chance to highlight some of the lesser-known aspects of World War II. Besides being a good wargame, I've always liked the educational potential of the A&A series. This Early War set comes out just in time for the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Campaign in France on some other early war events such as Greece and the Balkans.

My initial draw from two packs was the following:

Rares: German Panzer II Ausf. F, nicely done if ordinary looking model and Slovak PzKpfw 38(t) which is a nicely detailed model with an eye-catching camo paint job.
Uncommon: German Panzer II Ausf. F, I'm glad this is an uncommon because many will be needed for 1940 battles and German Sd Kfz 231 armored car. Both are good models with the kind of basic paint scheme expected with uncommons.
Common: French Canon de 75 modele 1897, I think the trail is truncated, but otherwise a nicely done piece; Japanese Type 99 LMG, very nicely detailed; Belgium Officer, good detail and animated pose; Japanese Bicycle Troop, very unusual pose of the trooper firing while sitting astride his bike; and two South African Infantry, another nicely animated figure.
One change I didn't like is that the bases no long include any identifying information except for the set logo and the collector number, requiring players to reference the data card to find out what the unit is.

Overall I'm impressed with the modeling. So far it's some of the best yet.

On the other hand, the recent trend of skimping on the data cards has continued. The Eastern Front set abandoned the use of quality illustrations of the unit on the card, going with a standard set illustration on the back and a silhouette on the data side. Now, in this set the silhouette is gone as well, so players will have to refer to the numbers only to ID units. One improvement is that the special abilities are listed in a larger type and all the data needed for play is bright and easy to read. On the other hand the historical text is definitely a step down from previous sets, with much of the text banal mere statements of the obvious like "South Africa Declared War on Germany in September 1940" without providing any flavor about the unit depicted.

All-in-all the quality of the models is more important than the cards, so overall the set is an improvement over the previous set. I'll say more as I get more sets.

New design entry for Guns of Gettysburg

As always, a fascinating read.

http://www.simmonsgames.com/products/Gettysburg/diary/Entry16December2009.html

Axis & Allies -- Bazooka

I'll be posting, on an occasional basis, musings about particular pieces in the Axis & Allies series of miniatures.

Base Set

The Bazooka, collector No. 16/48 from the Base Set and No. 27/60 from the 1939-45 set, is the game depiction of one of the most distinctive American weapons of World War II, formally known as the Rocket Launcher, M1 (and later M1A1, M9 and other models).

Stats:
Rarity: Common
Speed: 1
Defense: 4/4
Cost: 4
Attacks vs troops at short-medium-long ranges: 4 - 0 - 0
Attacks vs vehicles at short-medium-long ranges: 9 - 4 - 0

Special abilities:

Close Assault 10 — This unit has an attack value of 10 against Vehicles in its hex. This attack
ignores cover.

Historical text: The M1 rocket launcher, or bazooka, fired a 60mm rocket. It was rushed into production for the North African campaign in 1942.


A bazooka team destroys a German tank in street fighting in 1944.

The unit in history: Ever since tank started terrifying infantrymen in the Great War there's been a search for a man-portable anti-tank weapon to hold the beasts at bay. Close-in weapons such as Molotov cocktails, satchel charges and grenades were risky to use and of limited effectiveness. The usual solution at the beginning of World War II was the same one from a generation before, the anti-tank rifle. Unfortunately ATR's were already reaching the limits of their effectiveness against the lightly armored tanks of 1939 and would soon be hopelessly inadequate against the up-armored later tanks.

1939-45 set

The bazooka was a happy marriage of two technologies, recoilless rockets and shaped charge warheads, and was tested by the U.S. Army's Ordnance Corps on the very eve of World War II. The initial tests were so successful that the weapon was rushed into production for fielding with the troops invading North Africa in November, 1942. It was such a rush job that the troops weren't even trained in how to use it, so its combat debut was unimpressive. In fact, it backfired on the Allies. The Germans captured some bazookas and, recognizing a good idea when they saw one, reverse-engineered and improved it to create their own Panzerschreck.

Unsurprisingly for a hastily fielded weapon the bazooka had a lot of flaws in field service, but it was still a very popular, versatile and useful weapon. Among its tactical drawbacks was the large back blast, which created a friendly fire danger and gave away the firer's position while making the weapon hard to use in confined spaces such as buildings.

The unit in the game: The bazooka is an economical way to make American infantry units dangerous to approach. The 10-dice close combat attack is enough to threaten the heaviest armor with damage. The back blast drawbacks are not reflected in the game, but neither is the bazooka's ability to stealthily stalk tanks. The Axis player will be very aware of where the bazookas are. Still, it's well worth tossing a few bazookas into any mix of U.S. infantry that might face any armor.

Axis & Allies Miniatures -- Making do with what you got, the KMT

One of the irritating things about most published strategy advice and army/warband/deck builds in collectible games is that they assume the players have access to the full line of available figures/cards. I suppose there may be a few players with unlimited budgets and time out there, but most of us have to play with what we got -- either putting up with the luck of the draw from randomized boosters or making a few strategic purchases of singles.

Most articles also seem to assume a minimum of external constraints so the army creator has the most flexibility to make use of clever combos. This may be OK with fantasy game, but I think the history-based AAM game loses a bit when you let it drift into fantastic anything-goes army builds that mix Germans and Japanese or 1940 French with 1945 Soviets.

So here's an exploration of an army build that shows more than a passing nod to history and tries to make the most out of what one player has in the box while obeying the standard army construction rules from the Expanded Rules.

The basic parameters in force will be for a 100-point army using historical army limits and year restrictions. The 100-point army is being picked because I intend to field a KMT Nationalist Chinese army and I am certain I can't field a larger force. I will only use models I own, with no proxies. The army will be tried out later against a contemporary Japanese build.

The Historical Army limit in this case is that the Nationalist Chinese can't be in an army with any other nationality. This is a pretty strict condition, in that the Chinese don't have many units to choose from. Some "historical" builds get around this by giving the Chinese access to some weapons they did actually field such a P-40 fighters and Sherman tanks, but going by the rule book these aren't available yet. (I'd like to see the Chinese eventually get a little help here. A Flying Tiger reprint of the P-40 would be good and giving the Chinese a few support weapons would be appropriate -- maybe some captured Japanese mortars and anti-tank guns).

On the other hand, being a pure Chinese army gives them more points to use -- their "100-
point" army will actually have 110 points to spend. Their biggest challenge will be spending that many points while remaining within the 15-piece army maximum size rule.

The year restriction will be 1939. This actually helps the Chinese, because they have no post-1939 units yet, but it limits the Japanese considerably.

The process of building our KMT force starts with taking advantage of the Formation Rules to field the Chinese Infantry Company for 26 points. While somewhat cheaper in build points as a formation than its components would cost individually (26 instead of 31) the biggest advantage of the formation is that it gives the Chinese 12 pieces while only counting as 5 against the army maximum size. I'd have considered fielding TWO of these units, but I don't have enough KMT Riflemen to form a second company.

In any case this gives us the following units to start with



1 KMT Officer (Key Special Ability is +1 initiative)

10 KMT Riflemen (Special Ability is actually a big disability, disruptions kill the unit)

1 KMT Machine-gun team (Double-shot SA, but subject to "Overheat")


I have just one T-26, so we'll toss that in for the limited antitank ability it brings. It costs 11 points, so the total build is now 37 and six units.

I happened to draw a lot of machine-gun teams out of my boosters, so I can add seven more of these units to the order of battle for 42 points. They will obviously form the real core of my force.

The build is now 79 points and 13 units. I'll toss in one more KMT officer to add a little redundancy in that department, which brings the force up to 14 units and 84 points.

I still have 26 build points left but one more slots for units, so the balance will have to be spent on support units and obstacles.

There's little point in buying a fuel dump for one tank and I have no confidence in the Chinese being able to protect an ammo dump, but a Headquarters seems like a useful support, giving the Chinese a second bite at the initiative apple each turn. Adding one of these costs 7 points, bringing the total to 91.





I'll add a couple of pillboxes for four points, bringing the total to 95. One pillbox will probably hold the HQ, hopefully protecting it from a marauding Zero and the other one will likely hold an MG team.


I think minefields are likely to be useful, so I'll add in all five of those I own for 10 points, bringing the force total to 105 points.





I'll spend three points to buy six barbed wire, which may be helpful if the Japanese field a lot of infantry. I'd buy more, but I don't have any. This brings the total to 108, so I finish off the buy with two tank obstacles. The Japanese will probably field some tanks and this may help keep them out of a key hex or two. I debated whether another pillbox might not be a better purchase, but the pillbox benefit isn't very strong, and I'd rather have the variety of options having another type of piece may provide. This brings the total to 110 points.

This Chinese army has some obvious deficiencies, but most of them can't be helped. First off, it doesn't have any dedicated AA guns, for the good reason the Chinese have none. There are lot of machine guns, though, so any Zero that shows up will have to be wary. More seriously the Chinese force has minimal anti-tank ability. There's only one proper AT gun, on the T-26, and the Chinese infantry and officers have no Close Assault ability.

Mitigating this, however, is the fact that none of the available 1939 Japanese armor (Type 89A Chi-Ro, Type 87 armored car, Type 95 Ha-Go or Type 97 Te-Ke) has any armor greater than 2, so even the Chinese machine-gun teams have a 25% chance of disrupting them out to 8 hexes away! Add in the double-shot SA and there's about a 6% chance of a single MG team damaging any Japanese armored vehicle. With a total of 9 MG teams in the Chinese force the cumulative chances are not negligible.

In the future I'll post a session report on how this force fares in combat, but comments are welcome.

EDIT: A ForuMini commenter pointed out that the rules were modified on Nov. 12 and the 15-unit army maximum has been dropped, but a new restriction has been placed on obstacles -- only 10% of an army's maximum allowable cost can be spent on Obstacles, so my proposed build runs afoul of that limit. So we will eliminate one pillbox, the two tank obstacles and two of the minefields to bring the Obstacle total back within limits and add in one more machine gun team and two more riflemen to replace them. This gives the Chinese a little more offensive ability.

I expect that my plan will be to use the massed machine guns to lay down a base of fire and then rush the objective with my mass of riflemen on the theory that "they can't kill us all."

Battle of the River Plate -- 70 years ago today

The Battle of the River Plate figures prominently in the public memory of World War II. Partly this is because there was a certain amount of inherent drama about the whole affair -- the gallant German captain who managed to ravage British shipping without killing merchantmen, and who took his own life in defeat. The apparently even nature of the fight. The fact that it's final stages played out in the glare of the international media, among other reasons.

But I think it also played an outside role in the public perception of the war because it happened to be the first major battle involving the Western powers in the war, so it got an extra amount of attention. Few had any inkling that the world was about to see nearly five years of the most intensive naval combat in the history of the world -- combat so intense that many larger, bloodier and more important battles from the war are nearly forgotten today. In the end the Battle of the River Plate was merely a cruiser action between an overgunned German heavy cruiser, an undergunned British heavy cruiser and two light cruisers of average power.

The "pocket battleships" of the pre-war German Navy got a lot of attention in the press, and had a certain amount of glamor in the public eye, but naval professionals were well aware of the type's weaknesses. It's no accident that the British hunting groups formed to find and neutralize the Graf Spee contained two cruisers each -- it being judged that two cruisers should be a match for a German raider that was far from home -- it wasn't necessary to sink or even badly damage the Graf Spee. It was only necessary to force it to use up most of its ammunition and cause an irreparable hit or two that would compromise her ability to continue.

In his ground-breaking set of naval miniatures rules The Naval War Game (1942), Fletcher Pratt remarks that "The battle off Montevideo was not too much of a surprise to some of the players who had participated in a floor game in which the Admiral Graf Spee was pulled down by lighter ships -- though at the time the result of the floor game was discounted."

In the Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures War at Sea game the Graf Spee is awarded a point value of 21, which is pretty good for a cruiser -- but the HMS Exeter at 12 and the HMS Ajax at 13 already match it -- and that's before adding in the Ajax's sister ship Achilles which is not in the game yet, but we can assume would also be worth 12 or 13 points.

In the slightly more detailed Avalanche Press Second World War at Sea series game Bismarck we see a similar disparity. While the Graf Spee is not in the game, her sister ships Lutzow and Adm. Scheer are, and they're worth 37 points each. The HMS Exeter is credited with 23 points. Neither the Ajax nor the Achilles in the game, but their sister ship the HMS Neptune is, rated at 20 points.

More detailed games don't normally try to assign point values for ships, but the same rough calculation holds, the Graf Spee is dangerously overmatched when faced by three cruisers.

I had my introduction to that state of affairs nearly 40 years ago when, as a teen attending my first wargame convention, I got to play a then-new set of rules called Victory at Sea (not to be confused with the later Mongoose Publishing game of the same same). I had the good fortune to command the British cruiser force in the second round of a 3-round tournament using the rules. My opponent was probably more experienced than I was (as I had no experience at all) but there was little he could do as I merely had to sensibly continue to close the range and roll the dice in order to win. (I had won my first round game, a refight of Denmark Straits, by repeating the Bismarck's good fortune by getting a magazine hit on the Hood! My luck ran out in the final round as I drew the luckless British side at the Battle of Coronel).

So to commemorate this battle on its 70th anniversary and relive a bit of my youth, I drafted my Stepson to help me refight this scenario from Victory at Sea.

The initial set up has the Ajax and Achilles in line ahead 24,000 yards off the port bow of the Graf Spee, while the Exeter (oddly enough mispelled 'Execter' ) in this game was 22,000 yards off the Graf Spee's starboard bow.




On turn 1 the Graf Spee turned to starboard to unmask its batteries. I decided to try to get early hits on each British ship and see if I could get a speed advantage to allow an escape. In Victory at Sea non-penetrating hits cause NO damage, which actually seems inaccurate to me. Many armored ships took important hits that didn't penetrate the armor and a more modern set of rules would take this into account. But in this 1973 rule set the British light cruiser 6-inch guns had no chance of doing damage to the Graf Spee unless they closed the range to less than 12,000 yards.

Graf Spee fired at the Ajax with two turrets at 21,00o yards, which provided "12 chances in 36" of a hit. Victory at Sea uses a very unusual system to determine hits. In the early 1970s the only sort of dice available were 6-sided. Dungeons and Dragons and the invention of polyhedral dice was a few years in the future. A modern set would use percentile dice. Victory at Sea approximates the effect of percentile dice by using a table that breaks out the "chances per 36" of achieveing a hit. In this case 12 chances per 36, doubled to 20 chances per 36 because the Graf Spee is "crossing the T" of the Ajax, about a 55.5% chance. 20 chances per 36 translates int0 die rolls of 5 through 8 being hits when rolling a pair of D6.

The German ship's results were as expected, 1 hit on the Ajax. Taking into account rate of fire, number of guns firing and the armor of the target, all computations normally done by the game scenario designer ahead of time, but in this case published for us in the rules, the Graf Spee normally would do 6,120 points of damage. to the Ajax. Due to the range, however, only 50% of that damage is inflicted, so the Ajxa takes 3,060 points of damage. This is enough to knock out one 6-inch turret and reduce its speed to 24 knots, slower than the Graf Spee. The Graf Spee's 11-inch gun was also entitled to draw a card from a standard deck of cards to see if it inflicted a critical hit - needing a spade. None was drawn this time and, as a matter of fact, the Graf Spee didn't cause any critical hits in this battle at all.

Meanwhile the Exeter fired her two front turrets on the Graf Spee at 16,000 yards and managed to land a hit on the Spee's deck armor. For the Graf Spee's shots on the British ships the armor hit was of no import because all the British ships had identical 2-inch thick armor on decks and belts. But the Graf Spee's belt armor was much thicker at 4 inches than its deck at 2.5 inches, so it was fortunate for Exeter to hit the deck, a 50/50 shot at 16.000 yards. This did 1,935 points of damage to the Graf Spee, which wasn't enough to affect the ship's fighting ability. All damage is cumulative, however, so this hit was important.

On Turn 2 the British ships continued to close as best they could, although they angled away to bring guns to bear and avoid the "Crossing the T" penalty. Graf Spee changed targets for its main guns to the Achilles and got one hit on the Achilles, reducing that ship by the same 3,060 points as its sister for the same loss of speed and destroyed turret. The Graf Spee's 5.9-inch guns fired on the Exeter, getting three hits for 1,620 points. This also had no effect on the Exeter fighting power. Unfortunately for the British, the Exeter rolled very poorly, much to the frustration of my young commodore., getting no hits despite having a 47% chance per turret. The battle would undoubtedly have unfolded differently if the Exeter had even average luck this turn.

On Turn 3 the Graf Spee turned its attention to the Exeter, now that it had achieved a speed advantage ouver the two light cruisers. This time it was the German ship's turn to shoot badly., missing with both 11" turrets, although three of the 5.9-inch turrets scored. The Exeter's return fire again landed a penetrating shell on the Graf Spee's deck. This brought the Graf Spee's cumulative damage to 4,837, reducing the German ship's speed to just 20 knots and knocking out two 5.9-inch guns. The British light cruisers could again catch the Graf Spee and would have to be dealt with! The German 5.9-inch hits did reduce the Exeter a bit, though. The British cruiser's cumulative damage dropped its speed to 24 knots and it lost one turret.

Turn 4 was a brutal turn as the Exeter and Graf Spee slugged it out at 12,000 yards. The Graf Spee landed another 11-inch hit on the Exeter and both remaining 5.9-inch guns also hit, bringing Exeter's cumulative damage over 8,000 and leaving the heavy cruiser dead in the water and weaponless. The Exeter's two remaining turrets also fired true, slamming into the Graf Spee's belt and causing another 5,130 points of damage, bringing the pocket battleship's total to 9,967. This was a serious level of damage, disabling the rear 11-inch turret and reducing speed to 14 knots. The Graf Spee would have no choice but to turn about and face the light cruisers.

The next three turns saw the British lights try to get close enough to penetrate the Graf Spee's armor. They were too close to run away from the Graf Spee's 11-inch guns and had little choice. Both ended up being sunk, with their only hit bouncing off the Graf Spee's belt armor.

So the battle ended with the Graf Spee afloat and all three British ships sunk or dead in the water, so at first glance that might appear to be a German victory. As was pretty common in 1970s rules sets, there was no attempt to define victory provided by the scenario. You were supposed to argue about it afterward, just like real admirals!. Still, knowing the Graf Spee's strategic situation, losing a main gun turret and, especially, half the ship's speed would have to be considered fatal damage. While the Graf Spee succeeded in mauling the British, she didn't succeed in escaping.

Still, the outcome suggest that there's at least some chance for the Graf Spee under these set of rules, so long as the German has decent luck while rolling dice and the British don't.

Some 70-year Winter War anniversary games

Young General and Old Warrior got in a quick anniversary commemorative game of Memoir '44 about the Battle of Suomussalmi, Dec. 8-16, 1939. The setup is shown above.

It was actually a fairly sedate fight. The very first card the Soviets got to play was a Dig In card, so almost all my force that wasn't dug in became so before the Finns could do much damage. The Finn ski troops milled around a bit, but Young general was a little slow to close the range and in the meantime the Soviets got some good shooting in and soon the Soviets were up 3-0.

The Finns became more energized and made a special effort to take out the Soviet tanks and eventually both did go down, but the Finns also took more casualties and eventually a long-range shot from the Russian guns picked off the sixth Finnish unit. The final score was 6-2 in favor of the Soviets.

This game wasn't the only Finnish anniversary game I got in today. I also visited the local comic/game store and played a few games of Axis & Allies Miniatures. Two of the games were a modified version of Scenario WW-2, the Battle of Lake Toilvajarvi, fought on Dec. 12, 1939.

This scenario came out after the first couple of sets, so there were a lot of substitutions needed. The whole Finnish force was represented with German troops, and the Soviet machine gun unit was represented by a British Vickers machine gun piece.

Since then a lot of the necessary pieces have come out, so I was able to substitute more authentic pieces for much of the OB.

I replaced the two SS leaders with Finnish Officers. Slightly less effective as leaders, but the Finns have a powerful Hand-to-Hand special ability. All the German infantrymen were replaced with Finnish infantry with identical stats and the German MG42 machine gun team was replaced by a Finnish machine gun team with slightly lower stats. The German an light mortar and expert sniper remained,a s there are no Finnish units of those types yet.

On the Soviet side everything was the same except for the Vickers machine gun, which was replaced by the new Soviet MG team.

This is the battlefield:


The blue is are represents a frozen lake. The Finns set up on the left edge with most of the force, with a reinforcing leader and four squads on Turn 5 coming in on the flanks. Their objective is the "hotel, represented by the hill with objective markers in the middle of the map. It starts off held by two Russian squads, but the rest of the Soviet force is nearby on the lake.

The first battle saw my Soviets trying to hold back a young gentleman's Finnish attack, which was remarkable well-run. His sniper, mortar and machine gun team were very effctive at laying doen fire and knocked off quite a few Russian defenders around the hotel. He timed the rush of his infantry well and they swept into the hotel simultaneously with the reinforcing Finns on Turn 5. The Soviets were wiped out.

Young gentleman's dad now had a go at the same scenario. This time my Russians took a little more circumspect defensive posture, trying to avoid Finnish lines of fire more. The Soviets were able to eliminate the light mortar unit early and it turned out that the dad's Finns were much worse shots than the son. Neither the sniper nor the machine gun team did very well in laying down fire. So the final Finn rush found the Soviets fairly numerous and a vicious close-range melee ensued that saw troops flying off the board. It all came down to the very last die roll where a Soviet SMG unit took a shot at the last Finn on one of the objective hexes, getting a "destroyed" result. The Finn failed its cover roll and that was it. There were just two Finnish survivors at the hotel (one rifle and one leader) and the Soviet SMG unit.

It was nice to be able to commemorate this fighting on its 70th anniversary.

Heroscape meets D&D

The next base set for Heroscape is going to have a Dungeons & Dragons theme, which is an interesting juxtaposition of two major Hasbro brands. D&D is, of course, the venerable RPG originally marketed by TSR in the 70s and 80s and Hasbro already has a line of Dungeons & Dragons miniatures and, until recently, a D&D skirmish rules set to use them with.

So one might legitimately wonder if there's some redundancy here, but Heroscape, despite its RPG-like back story and aura, is essentially a simple skirmish-level wargame with little pretension for any kind of story continuity or even theme. Sure, there's a meta-narrative of the lord Jandar leading his colleagues against the lord Utgar's attempts to seize control of Valhalla, but it appears to be a very loose alliance and there's plenty of times when minions summoned by Utgar and Janadar will be on the same side fighting against other minions summoned by the same lords for the purposes of a scenario.

D&D is much more about internally consistent narratives, and while there have been D&D campaigns set in a vast variety of settings and "worlds," 30+ years of D&D have slowly built up a core D&D mythos that is recognizably different from Tolkien or other fantasy stories. So creatures from the D&D Mythos have assumed enough of a "reality" to be just as valid a summoning source as Earth, Alpha Prime or Grut.

Over at Heroscapers.com they've started reviewing the new base set, which will be more like the Marvel set than similar to the original set or the Marro-themed set. There will be just 10 figures (4 heroes and 6 bad guys) and a limited number of terrain pieces. To attract veteran players there will be some new terrain types and rules introduced, but the set is also geared toward new players by being completely self-contained.

It's hard to predict where this may take the Heroscape brand. There seem to be no plans for any new waves or follow-on sets in the existing Heroscape universe. The Marvel Heroscape never caught on -- I still see them sitting on store shelves -- so there's reason to wonder if this D&D-theming will work out. Presumably real D&D fans already are pretty invested in their existing miniature lines. Or is the hope that Heroscapers will be lured into trying more D&D products after being exposed to it through Heroscape?

I've though for quite some time that the last decade or so was an unusual state of affairs, where a combination of economic conditions allowed game manufacturers to import large numbers of good-quality miniatures from China at a low cost. We had an explosion of "bling" in games, where it wasn't uncommon to see games with dozens of painted plastic minis or hundreds of unpainted minis.

Heroscape was just one of the manifestations of that trend. The first base set had an amazing amount of stuff for the price. So much stuff that it was hard to get it back in the box. Of course getting stuff back in the box became moot as all the expansions came out. My complete set of Heroscape stuff takes up the better part of two plastic storage bins now.

So I wonder of the kind of product offering Heroscape fans got used to, such as multiples "waves" of expansions with a couple of dozen figures each, is a at hing of the past.

And maybe the new D&D Heroscape is an attempt to merge the Heroscapers into the existing D&D hobby. Time will tell.

Axis & Allies game day is Saturday

Still on tap for a game at The Arkham Asylum, 276 West Main St., Norwich, CT starting at noon this Saturday, Dec. 12..

Winter War battles 70 years ago today

After trudging through the snow for a week, brushing back border forces, the Soviets started running into stiffer resistance in their drives to outflank the main Finnish defenses 70 years ago this week.

At Suomussalmi in central Finland and Tolvajarvi near Lake Ladoga the Finns, with their ski troops and sissi tactics proceeded to stop, and then drive back the Soviet spearheads in what is the classic image of the Winter War -- outnumbered white-clad hardy Finns beating back hordes of ill-prepared Russians. Both locations are shown below in this map from the GURPS source book GURPS WWII: Frozen Hell, which provides an excellent overview of the war even if you don't play that role-playing game.


That image is certainly the impression most wargames would leave. The Tolvajarvi battle in particular has been a popular wargame topic with at least two comprehensive simulations being published.

Rarely shown in wargames are the grimmer, more conventional battle along the Mannerheim Line where the war was really decided. There's little glamour in bloody frontal assaults against grimly held fortified lines. The Soviets' December offensive failed.

The old SPI game Winter War does manage to show the true balance between the fronts. While there will usually be some entertaining and dramatic thrust and parry in the center, the game and the war will be decided around the Mannerheim and Ladoga lines in the South.

Pearl Harbor mystery solved?

Looks like the fifth Japanese mini-sub has been found, and there's evidence that it's attack succeeded.

Pearl Harbor Day

When I was a child, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a fresh memory for the adults in my life, so it hardly needed special reminders that it was an important day. But today, 68 years later, one can sense that the event is fading into history, as all events do. Americans today have a new nationally traumatic shock foremost in the minds. Our world is a far different one than 1941. Japan is an ally, China a competitor, our biggest international threat a religiously based fanaticism, instead of the political fanatics of the 30s and 40s. So today it is appropriate to take a moment to specially mark this event, despite the amount of new history that's been added to the annals of America in the meantime.

Despite its importance, the Pearl Harbor attack hasn't been the subject of many games. Some strategic-level Pacific wargames do start off with the attack on Pearl Harbor (Victory in the Pacific) while others just assume it's results (Pacific Victory) or give you a choice of starting conditions (Asia Engulfed).

As far as depicting the actual attack goes, there are few. Zero! from the Down in Flames series, has a solitaire scenario about the attack (the map is shown above). The Avalanche Press game Midway also depicts the attack explicitly, and it may be the most comprehensive treatment of the battle in wargame form. It has a battle scenario (No. 1) showing the air raid itself where the Axis player controls two separate attacking waves of planes and the American player the defending ships. While not described as a solitaire scenario, it really plays like one. But the game also provides an operational scenario (No. 5) that gives the U.S. player a much more active role.

That operational scenario starts with the Japanese surprise air raid, but illustrates the risks the Japanese might have faced if they continued to hang around Hawaii making follow-on attacks. While having a powerful air arm in its four fleet carriers, the Japanese strike force doesn't have a strong escort, with just two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser and 8 destroyers. Even after a successful air raid, the American Pacific Fleet is likely to have a mobile battleship or two as well as up to eight heavy and light cruisers and a couple of dozen destroyers to sortie for retaliation. Already at sea are two U.S.carrier task forces, each with a fleet carrier, three heavy cruisers and 5 or 9 destroyers. Two other American heavy cruisers with escorts are also at sea sea Hawaii. Sticking around could have been risky.

Of course, the biggest risk of an attack on Pearl Harbor seems to have been missed by Japanese planners -- that the Americans would be so enraged by the attack that they would not stop until they had achieved total victory. One really wonders if the Japanese might not have been better off awaiting the American fleet on their side of the Pacific, especially given their advantage in carrier doctrine.

Bananagrams Game of the Year? Or Tuf-Abet Re-imagined?

Certainly Bananagrams is the closest thing to a popular fad "board" game to come out in a few years.

There's an interesting Boston Globe profile of the game and it's Rhode Island designer here.

I got to try it recently and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Like many truly classic ideas, it's so simple you have to wonder why nobody came up with the idea before. The basic idea behind the game is to form crossword-style anagrams based on speed, rather than maximized points as per the game Scrabble.

It's really pretty clever and a lot of fun. It comes in a banana-shaped pouch and has144 plastic letter tiles. Player's start with a specified number of tiles and try to use them all to form words, crossword style. The first player who does says "peel" which forces everybody to draw a new tile. Players continue, and every time a player succeeds in using all the tiles they call out "peel" again until there are fewer tiles left than players in the game. Whichever player succeeds in using all his tiles at that point calls out "bananas" and wins.

This reminds a lot of the old Avalon Hill game Tuf-Abet. In that game players rolled dice with letters on their faces. Each player had his own set of 20 cubes of different colors. They used the letters to form crossword-style letter groups. The first player who used all (or most) of his cubes said "Tuf" which started a 3-minute timer where the other players tried to outdo the first player in how many cuibes they used. If someone did then they said "Tuffer" and started a 2-minute timer where everybody tried again to outdo the others. A third round and any subsequent "Tuffest" rounds are 1-minute long. Play continues until somebody uses all their cubes. The winner is determined by a point scoring system that rewards being the first declarer, the final declarer and the number of cubes used, with a bonus for words over 5 letters long.

Interestingly, game documentation included in my copy of Tuf-Abet from 1969 indicates that a patent was applied for. If a patent was ever granted, it is long since expired, as patents are only good for 20 years or less. The Banagram site makes no patent claims, only copyright. The Boston Globe article and the Banagram Web site both mention Scrabble as an inspiration and have no mention of tuf-abet but the designer is certainly old enough to have come across Tuf-Abet in his lifetime, so I wonder if the resemblance between the two games is entirely coincidental.

There don't seem to be any intellectual property problems. As I noted, any patent is long-since expired and there seem to be no copyright or trademark issues either. What is fascinating is how two rather similar games have had such a different reception. Tuf-Abet was never a big breakway hit for Avalon Hill, although it seems to have been a steady seller. Bananagrams is Game of the Year. Bananagrams has a very clever marketing hook, while effective marketing always seemed to be a weakness for the old AH. Tuf-Abet's scoring system and multi-round format is a little more intricate than Bananagrams, but it's still not very complicated by either 1969 or contemporary standards. Perhaps, if Hasbro still has the rights from its AH acquisition, we might see a reprint of the game, given the success of Bananagrams.

I've always liked Tuf-Abet, although I haven't had much success in getting people to play it over the years. While there are similarities, I do think Bananagrams is the better implementation of the idea. By dispensing with any kind of scoring system and going with a simple win-lose game condition the newer game is probably more accessible for a mass market that considers games like Monopoly, Scrabble and Risk as pretty complicated.

Retiring from Geek of the Week

I'm in my last few minutes as BoardGame Geek's Geek of the Week, but just as they say, "The King is dead, long live the King!" the next Geek of the Week is ready to go, Debbie Ohi, better known as InkyGirl, who drew this nice picture of me:

It was a lot of fun being Geek of the Week.

Martian Fluxx -- a Creepy version of the game!

Martian Fluxx contents

Copyright Looney Labs

I'm a serious fan of wargames and simulations, but I also have a definite weakness for silly multiplayer card games and there are few sillier, but great multiplayer, games than the Fluxx series of games from Looney Labs.


The fundamental structure for all versions of Fluxx is extremely simple. You deal out three cards to each player and they start laying by following the Basic Rules: Draw a card and then play a card (following the instructions on that card, if any).


The key cards in Fluxx are New Rules, marked in yellow, that change or add to the Basic Rules. They may change how many cards, you draw or play introduce new rules such as a limit on how many cards you can have in your hand. New rules take effect immediately, so if you play a Play 3 card as your first play you can now play 2 more cards from your hand. These might include Action cards, marked in blue, which allow you to perform the action listed on the card such as draw more cards or trade hands with an opponent.


At the start of the game you don't even know what you have to do to win. You find out when someone plays a Goal card, marked in red, which might say that whoever had 10 cards in their hand wins. Most, however, center on having certain Keepers, marked in green, the fourth type of card in the game, played on the table in front of you.

Zombie Fluxx introduced a new type of card called the Creeper, marked in black, which is basically an anti-keeper. If you have a Creeper in play in front of you you can't win, even if you otherwise meet the conditions of the Goal currently in play. Unlike most other cards, if you have a Creeper you must put it in play instantly in front of you. It's not all bad news, though, because occasionally a Goal may actually require a certain Creeper to win. The Creeper idea has been popular and shown up in every version of Fluxx published since Zombie Fluxx came out and was even retrofitted back to the basic Fluxx game when its 4th Edition came out, so it can be considered a core element of the game

Martian Fluxx brings the role of the Creepers to a whole new level. In previous versions Creepers were pretty uncommon -- just four cards in Fluxx and seven cards in Monty Python Fluxx, for example. But Martian Fluxx has 14 Creepers, most of which are Pathetic Humans. Yes, in Martian Fluxx the players are the Martians, out to invade the earth with flying saucers, ray guns, mother ships and abduction chambers, with just the Pathetic Humans, their Army and the Germs standing in the way. There's even a small chance the humans will win. One of the cards is an Anti-Goal card called Retreat and if its stiff conditions are met the Invasion is called off the Martians retreat in defeat!

It's all good fun and demonstrates the flexibility of the Fluxx game engine, which seems adaptable to any theme so long as there's some silliness involved.

Like all versions of Fluxx the game is very easy to teach (although so chaotic that some folks will need a game or two to wrap their minds around it), very quick (half an hour or less), and very scalable (the box says up to 6, but I've managed 7 OK). It's one of the very few games that someone can join in-progress (just deal them 3 cards and they are in).

While all Fluxx-series games have the same art on the back, and could theoretically be mixed together, the trend with the latest themed versions has been to discourage that. Martian Fluxx explicitly says that the theme of Martian invasion doesn't fit in well with the other themes, and shouldn't be mixed with other decks.

I haven't played every version of Fluxx (others are Eco-Fluxx and Zombie Fluxx), but every version I've played has been a hoot, so it's highly recommended.

Axis & Allies Game Day and Meetup

We will be having an Axis & Allies game day and Meetup at the Arkham Asylum's new store location here in Norwich at 276 West Main St. on Dec. 12 starting at noon.

We will have at least the following Axis & Allies series games available for play: Anniversary. 1942, Europe, Battle of the Bulge, D-Day and Guadalcanal. We will also have Axis & Allies miniatures and War at Sea naval miniatures.

Interesting link on game knock-offs

This blogger reports on a trip in China that brought him to a warehouse full of high-quality copies of "German" games, which is interesting in light of the whole Games Workshop intellectual property brouhaha we saw on Boardgame Geek last week.

The blogger wonders if the move to save a buck by sending production to China didn't have the unintended consequence of making it easier for the counterfeiters to do the deed by providing expertise.

Knowledge is a funny thing. In one sense it's priceless but time-consuming and hard to get. so countries and communities can make quite a success of themselves by exploiting an edge in knowledge. Think of Swiss watches and Silicon Valley, for example, which are based on a concentration of knowledge. But on the other hand knowledge, unlike other resources, is not fixed in space or time and it's possible to spread it. During the Industrial Revolution the British tried very hard to prevent the spread of their techniques, but factory workers and managers with British experience still managed to make their way to America and elsewhere and bring their knowledge with them.

Chinese products today have many quality control issues, which is to be expected given the societal limitations of China -- right now. But I'm old enough to remember when Made in Japan once signaled that aproduct was cheap and ill-made. Now Made in Japan means Lexus. Long after the contract for making the high-quality product has ended the knowledge of how to meet those standards wil remain and sooner or later entrepreneurs will act. China, unlike Japan, but like the United States, is big enough all-by-itself to form a complete market for any good or service. I would imagine that the numbers of players of Settlers of Catan in China is extremely tiny as a percentage of the population -- but with a billion potential customers you don't need much of a percentage to have a worthwhile market for a product.

Plausible war? Red Dragon Rising

Speculative wargames have been a staple since SPI published Red Star/White Star, and in particular speculation about how a possible confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact as so fertile a topic for wargame designers that games on that topic were virtually a hobby within the hobby and contemporary combat generally ranked among the top two or three most popular wargame topics in SPI polls for years.

Of course that confrontation never came to be and the bottom sort of dropped out of the genre after the Fall of Communism in 1989. Oh sure, there's still an occasional game published on the topic, but it's dropped down somewhere between the Spanish-American War and the War of Austrian Succession in wargamer interest.

Even during the heyday of NATO-Warsaw Pact interest there were a few other stabs at treating other prospective wars -- and some of those even happened. The SPI game Sinai was famously redesigned in 1973 just before publication to account for the actual October War.

Still, I think it's fair to say that most of the major conflicts of the Cold War era that actually broke out were unanticipated by wargame designers. And who could blame them? There's a considerable amount of implausibility of Britain and Argentina coming to blows, Iraq invading Iran or even the Soviets invading Afghanistan. Implicit in making the case for a plausible future-history wargame is making a case that one side or the other has something to gain. The unpleasant outcome for the aggressor in those three wars suggest it really wasn't a good idea. (Yes, I am aware that Iraq supposedly "won" it's war with Iran, but I don't think there's any doubt it was a very hollow victory).

The post-Berlin Wall world has seen a steadily decreasing number of international state-on-state conflicts of the sort wargames handle best and wargamers find interesting. Most conflicts these days are low-level guerilla wars, insurgencies and terror campaigns.

Advances in printing technology have made it possible to rush into print with a wargame if there's sufficient lead-time in the crisis. Both the first Gulf War and the more recent Iraq War saw pre-conflict wargames hit the market, but they were hardly great examples of prognostication. The very title of Back to Iraq (which appeared in various editions in Command and then Strategy & Tactics magazine suggests how predictable the occurrence of that war would be. But even the Iraq War games that did appear missed the real nature of the war that would be fought -- stopping after a month or so of fighting in the belief that the issue would be decided. We now know that the "Mission Accomplished" moment was really just the beginning of the story. And I don't think anybody designed a wargame involving an American intervention in Afghanistan beforehand.

So how many plausible situations exist for a major state-to-state war in the current international climate? In the post-Cold War world there were brief fads of looking at potential wars between the United States and Japan, some kind of resurrected Russian state or even the "World" banding together to take down the remaining superpower USA. All of these had more of the aura of some kind of "Sci Fi" treatment than an examination of a real possibility.

There seem to be five possible international flash points that could boil over into some sort of major state-on-state war. Some of these have had wargames designed about them, a few have not.

1. Korea -- For more than 50 years the threat of war has hung over the Korean peninsula, but despite the weird reclusive nature of the North Korean regime, the chances of war breaking out there seem to recede each year. The fact is that any chance the North Koreas had of overrunning the South dissipated years ago -- a fact that even a madman can see. There have been a few of wargames looking at this, including some in detail -- but the last one was almost a decade ago.

2. Israel -- Another area that has seen more than a half-century of conflict and will undoubtedly see more, but not state-on-state. There gulf in military might between the Palestinians and the Israelis resembles late Nineteenth Century colonial warfare. No one has bothered to design a game on this topic.

3. Iran -- Possibly the single most likely war -- with both Israel and the United States has plausible foes to Iran, and yet no one has tried to design a wargame on how this could play out. Is it too politically fraught, hard to research or what?

4. Pakistan -- This resembles a NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation in miniature -- two large, conventional armies with nuclear weapons facing off along a long border in a shallow theater. There were a couple of wargames on the topic around the beginning of the decade but nothing recently. The chances of this one happening seem to have receded for the moment, but it wouldn't take a lot for it to come to a boil again.

5. China -- This one has caught the fancy of recent designers for some reason. Red Dragon Rising was a big hit in S&T magazine and even had some expansion counters in a recent issue. The last issue of Command Magazine featured a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And Taiwan remains a potential flash point, but like many of the other long-simmering conflicts around the world, the passage of time seems to be lessening the chances of war. The potential costs are high and the stakes seem relatively low, especially because everyone concerned seems to have an interest in kicking the ball down the field.

Most of the anticipated conflicts seem unlikely to erupt into anything wargame-worthy. Are there any out-of-left field Falklands War situations out there?

There don't seem to be many candidates. Neither North America nor Western Europe seem to have any. The EU integration of economies and distaste for military spending make a state-on-state war unthinkable in Western Europe (which is an astounding break with the past, BTW).

Hardly any African states have the wherewithal to consider meaningful state-on-state fighting. South America has some countries with the potential for military power, but a lack of state-vs.-state disputes that anybody would want to fight over, the antics of Venezuela notwithstanding.

That leaves Asia and the Middle East where most of the potential wars have already been discussed. Could Thailand and Burma battle? What about Russian and the Ukraine? Australia and New Zealand? Well, I guess the last one would be quite a stretch. The Russia-Ukraine possibility was been touched on in one game, but that's it.

Of course, the lack of suitable topics for plausible future wars is not a bad thing. And our forbears have provided us with no shortage of historical wars to refight, so this is no crisis.

Austerlitz +204

Scenario set-up from Napoleon's Battles Module Two
copyright 1994, The Avalon Hill Game Co.

Despite the fact that a half-dozen or so of my favorite games are set in the Napoleonic era, I'm not really a Napoleonics fan. It's juts that the man is just about unavoidable if you're going to be an avid wargamer or serious student of history. He may have been a man of short stature, but he strides like a colossus through European History. Few individuals have had such an outsize influence in history that an entire era is named after them. His Maxims have been studied by aspiring generals since the 1820s and the attempt to understand and communicate his genius inspired two of the most influential treatises on military strategy ever written, The Art of War by Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini, and On War, by Carl von Clausewitz.

Napoleon personally commanded on at least 65 battlefields from Montenotte on Apr. 12, 1796 to Waterloo on June 18, 1815, but he reportedly considered the Battle of Austerlitz, fought on Dec. 2, 1805, as his masterpiece. It was definitely a battle won by superior generalship. Napoleon set a trap for his opponents and they walked right into it, allowing him to wreck a great army.

Yet it was not, despite its cleverness and lopsided casualty count, a decisive battle. As a matter of fact, Austerlitz merely inaugurated an intense period of fighting that lasted four more years and involved a dozen more battles including Jena, Eylau, Freidland, Aspern-Essling and Wagram.

And despite its lopsided outcome, that outcome was hardly a foregone conclusion. While the French Army was at its peak of effectiveness, having undergone intensive training for the planned invasion of Britain, was buoyed by a victory at Ulm and fresh from several years of peace, it was outnumbered by a substantial amount. And while the Allies were hobbled by antiquated organizations and a confused command structure, they had good troops on the field.

So the situation is perfect for a good wargame -- two evenly matched, but not identical, armies, facing each other on the field of battle.

Map detail from Austerlitz, Battle of Three Emperors
copyright 1973 Simulations Publications, Inc.

As I said, I'm not a big Napoleonics fan, despite appearances. There have been many good Austerlitz games published, but I only have a few. Austerlitz is a scenario in the Napoleon's Battles miniatures game system, but its not a scenario I've ever played. I have played the old SPI quad game Austerlitz -- Battle of Three Emperors, but that's merely because it's one of the games offered on Hexwar.com. The game is your typical quad game, which mean that it's not much of a simulation, really, but it is a pretty decent hex-and-counter wargame from that era. It's one of the more popular games offered on Hexwar and is reasonable well-balanced.

Map detail from Napoleon's Triumph
copyright 2006 Simmons Games

My third Austerlitz title is Napoleon's Triumph by Bowen Simmons, which I definitely bought based on the reputation of the designer. I was extremely impressed by his Bonaparte at Marengo game and I knew that the NT game system was inspired by the earlier game. It's not accurate to describe the two as being in the same system, as there are bigger differences between them than there are between, for example, the SPI quad games on Marengo and Austerlitz. It's an interesting bit of trivia that Marengo was the last battle Napoleon fought as General Bonaparte and Austerlitz was the first full-scale field battle he fought as Emperor-- and it was fought on the anniversary of his ascension to the throne.

Napoleon's Triumph is my current top wargame, even though I haven't played it anywhere near enough times to suit me. As important as I believe theme to be in wargames, I'm primarily a fan of NT for it's virtues as a game. A legitimate criticism of Bonaparte of Marengo is that it's a bit stereotyped in play and isn't good at replicating the historical battle. Napoleon's Triumph, on the other hand, manages to be much more free-wheeling while at the same time holding out the real possibility of replicating the general course of the battle.

It's also, of course, a handsomely produced game, but the best feature is the game play. Having the game has prompted me to look more closely at the Battle of Austerlitz, which I think is the hallmark of a good wargame -- it inspires a deeper appreciation of history.

Lessons Learned from the Games Workshop/BoardGame Geek controversy

I think there are three different, but related, aspects of this whole brouhaha on Boardgame Geek that everybody can take away as lessons learned if they choose -- although some may not.

The first is Games Workshop's aggressive defense of its intellectual property. I was unaware of the Warhammer/World of Warcraft connection and I can understand how GW may feel quite burned by that experience. I think they were within their legal rights on 90% of what they claim, although on some specific points their IP policies make claims unsupported by the actual state of the law. The reality is that those assertions will probably stand until they tangle with someone with the economic resource sand interests to contest it. On the other hand, there's serious grounds for doubting the wisdom of their approach. Making a significant portion of your most dedicated fans angry with you seems like a very bad business idea. While most of GW's customers are not on BGG or members of GW fan sites, those who are tend to be the opinion leaders in their groups and probably have an influence outside of mere numbers,

The second lesson is BGG's response to GW's demands. Here I think there are some legitimate ground for criticizing some details of how BGG responded, but BGG's overall response was a prudent one given the magnitude of the legal threat and the relative peripheral nature of the possible benefit. Games Workshop is just one company whose products are on the site and it doesn't make sense to risk all the other valuable content here related to more consumer-friendly companies for the sake of the products of a company that doesn't appreciate the free advertising. BGG is a growing site and becoming the premiere game-related site in the world devoted to all games. GW benefits more from BGG than BGG needs GW. It's unfortunate that the controversy broke out while Aldie was unavailable to address it quickly, but it appears to me that BGG is taking lessons learned from the experience and implementing policies and procedures that will reduce future problems.

The third lesson is for us, the users of BGG. One thing many of us could do a better job of is respecting the legitimate intellectual property rights of game publishers. I see an awful lot of stuff posted on BGG that really is egregious copyright and trademark infringement. We have open advocacy by some of making your own copies of games so you don't have to buy it We have users scanning high-resolution images of the complete components of some games. In many cases users are posting clearly derivative works without bothering to ask permission (which many companies would probably grant -- see the nice alternative map available as a download for Bonaparte at Marengo. For example, I often like to post examples of components when I am writing a game review. I am always careful never to scan in complete copies of the component in question -- a part of a map, a few examples of the counters, an extract of a play aid, one or two cards. This is fair use. Scanning in all 108 cards at full-size for a card game is not. Lastly, fans of a game should realize that the content they generate (let's say a really nice, upgraded player aid with snazzy logos and photos of miniatures) may not be theirs, even if they did a lot of work on it. Spend your effort on companies that appreciate and encourage that kind of work. Don't waste your time supporting a company that doesn't.

A Wargamer's review of Small World

Some special tokens: Dragon, Hero, Halfling Holes-in-the-Ground.

Small World is the wildly popular fantasy conquest game designed by Philippe Keyaerts and published by Days of Wonder.

There's quite a bit of divergence of opinion on whether Small World and similar conquest games such as Risk, History of the World, Britannia or Small World's predecessor Vinci ,are properly termed "wargames." They're certainly not "simulations" in any real sense of that term, but it's hard for me to see how any game whose theme involves conquering territory and exterminating the inhabitants isn't a wargame of some sort. In any case, these sort of games definitely come out of the wargame hobby and are often played by wargamers.

In Small World's case, the potentially grim theme is lightened up considerably by a number of aspects of the game. One is the fantasy setting itself, which, like a cartoon, removes some of the emotional impact that would otherwise accrue to the theme. Many of the "races" in the game are not human and some, like the skeletons and ghouls, are arguably not even alive. Also contributing to the light-hearted nature of the game are the various special powers, which include some that are rather non-violent (Diplomat, Merchant), amusing (Alchemist, Stout) or neutral (Hill, Flying) alongside the more brutal (Beserk, Pillaging). Finally, and probably most importantly, the brilliant illustration by Miguel Coimbra creates a light tone that permeates the entire game's presentation. It's one thing to have Commando Skeletons, Forest Elves, or Seafaring Amazons in a game, but Commando Skeletons wearing Cowboy hats, Forest Elves smelling flowers or Seafaring Amazons attired in little more than makeup and some strategically-placed leaves is another thing entirely.

Like all Days of Wonder products, the physical presentation of the game is first-rate and quite opulent compared to the typical wargame. There are two full-color, double-sided and lavish;y illustrated maps, all the various counters and chits are thick, colorful and durable. The rule sand play aids are printed on slick, high-quality paper and there are plenty to go around. All are packed snugly inside a box with an insert carefully designed to hold and organize all the components . Indeed, the tray holding the race tokens is a little too precisely engineered -- it can be hard to pull out the tokens you need.

Map detail from the 2-player map

Special notice is due of the maps. There are four provided, which one is used depends on the number of players -- 2, 3, 4 or 5. This makes the game very scalable within its range of players without changing the character of the game or using large swaths of unused map space on the table.

The game play is very straightforward. At the start of a player's turn, if he or she doesn't already have a race. they select a race and special power from among a column of race/special power combos. They can pick the top one in the column for free, or pay one gold coin each for every race they skip, placing the coin atop the skipped race. This allows players to exercise some strategy in the selection of the race while providing an incentive to eventually pick one of the less-favored combos because of the bonus in gold coins they accumulate.

Victory coins: Reverse; Obverse 10, 5, 3 and 1

This brings up an important point -- how to win. While the game seems to be about conquest, it's really about accumulating gold coins. Although called "Victory Coins," experienced wargamers will recognize these are just victory points in the form of money -- as there are no economic or trade aspects in the game. There are various ways to get Victory Coins, but the basic and fundamental method is by occupying territory at a base of 1 coin per space.

An Active Special Power/Race combo - Hill Amazons and token

The player collects the number of tokens granted by the special power/race combo and then conquers territories. For example, the Hill Amazons combo gives 6 tokens for the Amazons and 4 for the Hill special power, for a total of 10. The Amazons get four extra tokens for use when attacking, only, that can't be used to occupy territories . The Hill Special Power also gives a bonus of one Victory Coin for each Hill territory occupied. The basic combat mechanic is majority rules. So long as the attacking force outnumbers the defending tokens by 2, the attacker wins. Some combos enhance the attackers or reduce the winning margin but in every case the attacker needs at least one token to capture an area. The defenders count the number of defending tokens, which can include race tokens, mountain tokens or tokens for defensive positions such as forts, bivouacs or troll lairs. Often the active race will end up without enough tokens to win automatically and for their last conquest the attackers can roll a special die which adds 0, 1, 2 or 3 to the attackers notional strength. Three faces on the die are blank, and one each bear 1, 2 or 3 pips, so success is far from guaranteed.

After conquests the player score victory coins for the regions occupied and any special conditions they have met.

A Declined Race - Skeletons and token, Note that most special powers are lost when a race declines.

Instead of conquering territory a player can decline their race, which is one of the key mechanics of the game. On the turn they decline their race the player can do no actions and just collects victory points for the areas they already occupy. In every occupied area they flip one race token over to its "decline: side and remove any extras. The area will defend with just the one token from that point. But as long as the player's declined races are on the map, the player continues to score victory coins for the areas they occupied. Deciding when to decline a race is one of the major strategic decisions of the game. And this is another wargame-like aspect of the game, because there is a lot of strategy involved in the game. Which territories to conquer, who to take them from and when to decline your races are all vitally important.

Typically a player will go through at least two and probably three races over the course of a game. Timing them properly will often mean the difference between being competitive or not.

The game scales well from 2-5 players, but like many multiplayer games it really shines when you have at least four involved. There's enough strategy involved to keep players engrossed in the action, but not so much that players are deterred from table chatter. Turns move right along and the game box promise of finishing in 40-80 minutes will be kept.

Can it be recommended for wargamers? I think so, so long as your sole reason fo playing isn't recreating history or analyzing military events. Small World is, by no stretch of the imagination, a simulation. But is it a lot of fun. There's every indication it will be played for a long time to come. The ever-changing combos, the different maps and the inherent dynamics of multiplayer interactions will mean that there's a lot of replay value.

The game also can serve as a true gateway game with your non-wargaming friends and family. The box rates the game at 8 and over and so it's a good dad's game for cuiltivating budding gamers.