I haven’t posted for three months. In that time I have mainly been participating in other people’s games, using other people’s toys. And a lot of fun it has been too. Notably, I took on the role of Napoleon at Waterloo (using Horse, Foot, Guns) and Würmser at Castaglione, in a huge game of Général d’Armée 2. Unfortunately I haven’t had much opportunity to expand my collections. I have bought the miniatures for six battalions of late period Napoleonic French, but I’m a long way from starting the painting.
My big focus has been on rules. I have been working on WW2 rules for brigade sized encounters, using a hex board. The forces are roughly those for Rapid Fire! but the mechanisms are very different. I was developing some ideas that I could use in other periods. I have now played these out in a game with one of my groups of playing buddies. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take pictures. Overall, I thought the game was more failure than success, and it is prompting a big soul-searching rethink. Still, I thought it would be interesting to share some of the ideas that I road-tested. These involved the use of cards. Dice had a minor role in the system.
The first, and most successful, was the Turn Deck. This drove the order of play. Each Turn was divided into a number of moves, where, for the most part, players could move one hex for eligible units, or fire. Units that had not moved could reaction fire on those that did. Both sides moved, but the cards dictated which side moved first. Four of these cards were General Moves, where all units could move (though for two of these, not in difficult terrain); in these moves players could also change orders and enter close combat. There were then six vehicle move cards, where only vehicles could move, but could not initiate fire; fast vehicles could move on all six of these, slow ones on only two. In addition there were four Area fire cards, where area fire was evaluated (the targets having been previously selected). There were two “Pause” cards. When the second of these was drawn, the Turn was concluded. On the first one I allowed some stealth movement, where elements could move without attracting reaction fire. There were also a pair of cards for road movement, and another pair for recce movement.
The big idea was to do away with the complexity of movement allowances and terrain effects. Faster units can move more often; and that was built into the cards. You still needed to know whether vehicles were slow, medium (the bulk of them) or fast, or had strong all-terrain ability – and even then that only mattered when certain cards where drawn. No tables of movement rates! A further aim was to randomise the timing of area fire (typically indirect). Separate area fire moves meant that by the time the fire arrived the target might have moved on. One experienced British infantry officer said that the trick for attackers was to keep moving so that the enemy artillery never caught up. The whole thing worked very much as I hoped, with the mixed order of the card draw making things very unpredictable. You could easily get three Area Fire cards in a row, which might really mess things up – or you might be forced to move before your hoped-for suppression fire had materialised. The variable Turn length added another dimension of unpredictability. Each Turn was meant to represent a distinct episode – the scope of a game of O Group perhaps – after which there would be regrouping.
My main criticism of the system is that the General Moves were overloaded, and I had to devise a move sequence to handle this – which went against the simplicity. The stealth moves should probably get a card of their own, with the first pause card being a short breathing space to recover suppression and pull back if desired. Should both sides be able to move each turn, or follow the more modern idea of only one side, randomising things yet further? As yet I see no reason to change it.
The next most successful idea was the “Hit Deck”. This had two functions. The main one was to resolve antitank fire quickly. It was also used to resolve communications for orders and area fire. AT fire has been something of a frustration for me with WW2 rules. You have to balance three main things: the weapon capability, the armour strength and the range. You then factor in things like target size and cover. This usually involves a couple of dice and a table. Rapid Fire! has a simple table and a single die – which for my taste takes things too far the other way. The Hit deck has 50 cards. These are divided into 13 groups of 3 or 4 cards; one group misses at all ranges, the next hits at one hex only, and so on to the last group which hits all the way up to 12 hexes. The cards also vary the AP value of the gun; the earlier ones in the above sequence with more positive variations, the later with more negative. If the AP value equals or exceeds the armour value (both based on the Rapid Fire! system but reverse sequence), then you have a damage hit. This is very quick and simple; all you need is the attack and defence values.
The comms test is much less interesting, except the one SNAFU card, which takes any area fire into a randomly chosen neighbouring hex.
This system further reduces the need for tables and quick reference sheets. The only real difficulty is that it isn’t intuitive to people newer to it. With a target dice score you instantly understand the odds – the cards feel more like firing blind, until you have properly internalised the pack structure.
That is probably an even bigger problem with the third deck, the Cohesion Deck. This is a morale test system: each card (again there are 50) gives one of three results, depending on three variables: fail, pass or elan. As currently designed there are only ever two possible outcomes on each card (pass/fail or pass/elan). The variables are troop quality (A, B, C or D), risk factor (Green, Yellow, Amber and Red) and density (dense or dispersed). Each increase in troop grade improves odds by about 20%; each increase risk factor roughly doubles the odds of failure; the difference in odds for density is about a third. The odds of failure for a dense B class unit at red is 50%, and of an elan result are 6%. There are two special cards – Apocalypse (everything fails) and Fortuna (always elan) which on drawing the pack is reshuffled.
A further variable is to be the number of cards drawn. So that a rifle group firing at one hex range would cause two cards to be drawn, but one card at two hexes (red risk if moving in the open, amber if gone to ground, and yellow if dug in). Very simple and easy to remember, but my gaming friends found it all a bit of a black box. The risk categories were hardly fine grained either, though that suited this system.
I have designed the Cohesion Deck to work in any period. My next project is rules for 1866 wars with Austria. I’m not sure whether I will use it, or go back to a dice-based method.
I created the cards on PowerPoint, and printed them off as handouts four to a sheet. I then cut these out and put them into card sleeves (from Titanshield), with a different colour for each pack. These played and shuffled well enough. I think that I could probably work out a way of printing them off with less wasted paper though (you should be able to get at least 12 to a sheet of A4, not 4).
As for the WW2 game, the issues go much deeper than the working of the three card decks. It needs a major rethink. This starts with what I think the game is actually about, and what is meant to be the source of tension. Most WW2 systems are designed with tank battles in mind. There is an important exception for O Group and Chain of Command, which are infantry-based, but on a smaller unit of command. For the theatre that I am concentrating on (Mediterranean 1943), there are no big tank battles, like there were in the desert war or Russia. Those infantry games start with a clear idea of what the game is about, beyond playing with your toy soldiers. That needs be the case with my system too. On the brighter side 1943 brigade battles were often quite slow burn – and that is a good fit with the episodic turn-move system – but I need to think more about the deployment of forces and reinforcements.
The Medenine scenario was quite interesting. I based in on the Rapid Fire! scenario. But I soon realised that this was based on extremely limited information on the battle (practically none from German sources that I could see), all from sources that I have traced; the armies were chosen with the help of a points system. The terrain was then made to fit the standard terrain pieces designed for their desert war scenario book. I tried tracking the terrain shape more faithfully, but found that the German forces were highly congested at the start line – and this encouraged a broad front attack, rather than carefully selecting lines of advance, which the Germans actually did. It occurred to me that the issue was that the German forces were not fully available at the start of the attack. I have often found that trying to war-game a scenario helps develop an understanding of historical events. This is true here too.
My battlefield terrain was another failure – but I won’t dwell on that here. I will come back to this with a different approach! Meanwhile I will go back to other periods…
But to return to original topic – the cards were a good way of reducing complexity of play. The QR sheet could quickly be reduced to one side of A4. But it is a bit of a black box, and many wargamers are addicted to the D6. I think I need to keep going though.
17 July 2025