Tag Archives: WW2

British troops for my 1943 project

It’s been a long absence since my last post. I don’t tend to post until a project is complete, and my most recent project has been a big one. As usual lots of life has intervened to slow things down. But I also have a lot of half-finished projects lying around, especially on the rules-writing side, which is not conducive to regular posting. Still, I now have something definite to report.

Following my last post for Rapid Fire! for hexes in December, my focus has stayed on WW2. We played two games, loosely based on episodes at Salerno. They weren’t particularly interesting. Much depended on encounters between tanks and antitank guns, turning on a small number of D6 throws. Infantry proved pretty useless. The first game at least had a close finish, but the second was an overwhelming British victory as the Germans failed to make any impression on the British Shermans, while the British scored hits pretty much every time. Scenario design was partly at fault, I’m sure – but the whole thing reinforced my dislike of the bathtubbing aspect of the rules. Too much hinged on too few dice throws. But I like scaling of RF, allowing bigger battles using 20mm figures. So I have embarked on writing my own rules – which will be part of a rules family stretching from Great Northern War to Napoloenics to the 1859-71 wars and on to WW2. It is surprising how much the game structure and mechanisms can overlap. That’s the idea anyway.

But I needed a scenario to focus on. Salerno is tricky at this level, especially if you leave the Americans out (they had more tanks, which makes it easier to design good games), and I think I need more experience with the system to work out how to design decent scenarios. Similar things can be said for Sicily. But Tunisia is another matter – there are more tanks!. As it happens the Rapid Fire crew have two Tunisia scenarios (or scenario groups): Medenine and Tebaga Gap. These are among the last desert battles, as the 8th Army fought their way into Tunisia – and so fit into the desert battle series that has been designed for Rapid Fire. I picked Medenine – the last major German tank attack in Africa- though allied tanks were only marginally involved. The scenario is based on the central of the three principal thrusts, with the 15th Panzer Division’s attack on 131 (Queen’s) Infantry Brigade of the 7th Armoured. I decided to set out on two large batches of model-making and painting, first for the British and secondly for the Germans. I started with the British.

For the British I needed two four-company battalions (actually this was more than I needed for this scenario – but I’d need more troops for Tebaga Gap), each with a 3in mortar (with carrier), a 6-pdr and a 2-pdr AT gun, and a carrier platoon. In addition I needed Royal Artillery support with a further two 6-pdrs and a battery of two 25-pdrs – and brigade command, for which I wanted a Dorchester ACV. Mostly field artillery at this scale is off the table, but I wanted the 25-pdrs on the table as a last line of defence should the panzers (eight panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs) push their way through the four 6-pdrs and two 2-pdrs – although historically they didn’t. I already had all I needed for one battalion except the 2-pdr. For the second battalion I bought in AB Tropical infantry (four packs of 10 plus support weapons). These are a recent release, and work pretty well 1943 British infantry in this theatre (unlike my earlier British infantry, which are more appropriate to Normandy 1944). In addition I had PSC 25-pdrs with Morris Quads in stock. I bought in two extra 6-pdrs from Valiant, to use with an old Airfix one I had in stock, and an AB desert crew. On top of this I decided to bring into service an old Pheasant 17-pdr I had made up in the late 1970s from an Airfix 25-pdr and a Panther gun barrel; I compared it to the parts in the PSC 25-pdr kit (which can be made up into a Pheasant), and it didn’t look too far off. I had some crew available bought a number of years ago from SHQ. I needed more carriers – I still have three of my old Airfix ones (three are already in service with AB crews and look jolly nice too) – but I decided these didn’t come up to snuff. I needed crews. The AB ones look fantastic, lifting my rather ropey old Airfix models to the heights, but they took a lot of work to fit, as well as being pricey. Also I needed one as a 3in mortar transport and, more complicated, as the all-important OP for the 25-pdrs. I decided to go for the PSC variants set, which has seven models which include an OP and 3in mortar transport – as well as one with a 2in mortar in firing position, which I can use for a carrier platoon. Finally there was the question of transport. Strictly this wasn’t needed. The British positions were essentially prepared and static – the lorries would have been well to the rear. The antitank guns were carried on portees, but they were lifted off these into dug-in positions – keeping these weapons concealed was tactically critical. Still, I had three Bedford QL lorries in stock, and I thought it was time to bring these into the picture, together with one of my PSC 15cwt CMP light trucks.

So for this project I assembled some 50+ infantry and artillery crew figures, three 6-pdrs, three carriers, three Bedford lorries, two 25-pdrs plus quads, a CMP light truck, and 17-pdr Pheasant. For this post I will stick to the infantry. Here’s a different perspective on my group photo:

And another, closer up…In the background you can also see a battery command element for the 25-pdrs, which got swept into this photo:

And this one catches the Vickers gun on the end. Loyal readers may notice I have been trying to improve my photography. This now includes a backdrop photo bought from a model railway shop (online). This depicts a a very English looking winter or early spring scene – and I need to pay attention to the join! But it does make the picture look a lot better.

As I already said, these are from the recently introduced AB 20mm British “tropical infantry” range, designed to cover the Med and Far East theatres, when troops weren’t wearing shorts (North Africa) or Burma hats. This works pretty well for my 1943 project – they are wearing the earlier version of the helmet, without scrim, and they are using Tommy guns rather than Stens. In Tunisia it was pretty cold, so even the Eighth Army had abandoned their shorts (though they don’t seem to have bothered with the gaiters, and their helmets were still painted sand) – but their sleeves weren’t rolled up. In Sicily it was pretty hot, and many troops adopted shorts, though not as consistently as in the Western Desert. For Salerno, these figures are just right; later in Italy it tuned cold and wet. I’m making no attempt to get the figures, vehicles and guns to look exactly right for each scenario – and if there is one episode that I’m focusing on, it is indeed Salerno, in spite of my struggles with scenarios. So this range was perfect. I had three packs of advancing infantry, one prone infantry, and a Support 2 pack, with a 3in mortar and Vickers gun. The Support 1 pack has a flamethrower, 2in mortar, AT rifle and a PIAT – and I will doubtless get these later – but I have plenty of 2in mortars and PIATs in the later uniform. (PIATs were not in use in Tunisia – so I could probably have use the AT rifle).

The bases are mainly metal washers, but the prone figures and support weapons required bases cut out from mount board. I decided to have only two crew for the mortar and Vickers (three were provided in the pack) to keep the bees size down. These were plastered with the usual mix of acrylic medium, sand and paint (a mix of white and raw umber) to integrate the figure bases. Once mounted the figures were given an undercoat of artists’ gesso (which is white) mixed with some raw umber. The raw umber and white mix gives a nice neutral grey-brown colour, which is now my go-to base colour for figure paining across all eras. It means that any gaps in painting don’t show up. Then came the usual paint job in various mixes of Liquitex artists’ acrylics. For the uniforms this comprised Raw Sienna (orange-brown), Titanium White and Prussian Blue (not much of the last of these, but it’s needed to get khaki), plus a little green for the helmets. The flesh was based on white and Burnt Sienna (red-brown), but once I get the palette going I keep throwing in bits of this and that. This came out a bit on the dark side, but I did want to get tanned flesh, but with a slight pinkish hue. I’m not entirely convinced, but it probably roughly simulates how my own fair flesh would look in those conditions. I’m painting less detail on the figures these days, so the water bottles and bayonet sheathes did not get more than cursory attention, for example. One innovation for this batch was the use of a light/magnifier. My short-range eyesight is pretty decent, but this in fact proved a big help.

Once the basic paint was laid down I was left with the vexed question of how to finish. With my previous WW2 figures I have used ink washes or oil medium glazes, followed by matt varnish spray. This leaves a very harsh matt finish which I don’t really like – though it’s quite fashionable these days. I have recently tried to moderate this by applying a little not-so-matt varnish with a brush – on flesh, weapons and helmets, but I have been rather underwhelmed by the result. As an experiment this time I mixed some black and brown ink into some Liquitex matt varnish (which is very fluid and dries off-matt). Alas I overdid the black ink and the effect was too dark. I had to go back to the figures highlighting the paler bits, including the flesh. This took me to the margins of the level of shine I can tolerate on WW2 figures (I have a much higher tolerance for earlier eras), but brought out the wonderful AB castings very nicely. I need to go a bit easier on the black ink (the stuff I have is extremely powerful), but otherwise I think I’ve found a good technique.

For my rules system I will need to mount these men in pairs on temporary bases – as I have already done with my other infantry using lower-adhesion Copydex. I still want to be able to use as singles if I want to try platoon level games. Next time: the artillery.

Sam Mustafa’s Rommel: first look

This game has been out for a few years now, and I’ve had my eye on it. It’s by Sam Mustafa, one of the world’s top wargames designers, for whom I have had a huge respect since the days of Grande Armée. Here he goes into a whole new era: WW2, and he has produced a game at operational level, to use the US military terminology (which I would otherwise call grand tactical). Each player has one or more divisions, and the playing area represents 72 square kilometres (or more…). Such games are commonplace as board games, but not on the tabletop, where games tend to have the flavour one-to-one representations, even when (for example Rapid Fire!) each piece actually represents a platoon or more. Now that I want to bring in such elements as artillery and air power to the tabletop, this is the sort of game I’m looking for. So at long last I splashed out on a copy.

I was rather underwhelmed at first. It’s quite a small book, like the Napoleonic Blucher from the same stable. The typesetting and visual appearance is similar to Blucher too, and overworked to my taste. The scantily clad 1940s girls adorning the chapter numbers may be very evocative of servicemen’s pin-ups, but it is just annoying to me, I’m afraid. The photos are a bit underwhelming too, and there aren’t many of them (though I don’t mind that so much). More seriously, as I got into the rules there seemed to be a lot missing: antitank guns, infantry guns (except when they aren’t), heavy mortars, recce units, AA units. Air power is dealt with in a very abstract way. Worse, the game structure seems very “gamey”, with each player having a “Command Post” sheet that reminds me of something similar in Saga, the very gamey Dark Ages game. The worry here is that you spend too much time playing the rules, rather than making decisions that resemble those of the historical counterparts. Sam badly overdid this in my view with his 18th century Maurice game, where players were playing hands of cards as well as troops on the table in a way that bore no resemblance to how actual generals went about their work.

But it quickly got better, though I still can’t reconcile myself to the visuals. Producing a game at this level is a tough gig if you are used to traditional style rules. You have to leave a lot out or else the whole thing gets overwhelming. This is the sort of thing that Sam is so good at. The game went through a lot of testing during which a lot of extraneous stuff was thrown out. I suppose if I want 120mm mortars, Bofors guns or Grille SP guns on the table then I need to go for a system like Rapid Fire. Likewise for model aircraft, though these could be brought in at a pinch as markers or tokens for “Events” or “Tactics”. The Command Post is much simpler than the Saga equivalent, and it is just a more sophisticated Command Point system. That may be too gamey in the end, but it’s not like playing a hand of cards.

So, what about the game? The first thing to say is that it is played on a grid of 1km squares. Practically these can’t be more than 6in (15cm) across, or else the table gets too big. That brings some challenges that I will come to. If you don’t like squares it is easy enough to adapt to hexes. The advantage of squares is twofold. Most important, they are very easy to mark out on the table using very discrete dots for the corners or the centres (the recommended method). Second is cosmetic; modern maps are marked up in a square grid, and maps played a critical part in the conduct of war at this level. Hexes make it look more like a board game. The use of squares to regulate movement, combat and artillery ranges feels like an excellent compromise for this sort of game. But it does mean that a lot geographical features get lost, like those support units: villages, roads, streams and so on.

Beyond that it really is quite hard to explain, especially since I haven’t tried playing it yet. It has an IgoUgo turn system. The player has a very limited budget of “Ops” (Command Points to you and me – I’m afraid I dislike Sam’s game terminology almost as much as his graphic design), which can be spent on movement, “Events” or “Tactics”. Doing well in combat looks expensive in points, while moving around is not so much. The combat resolution system is quite basic, but looks pretty appropriate. The whole thing is so unlike conventional games, though, it will take a little learning. As ever, Sam has thought of that, with basic rules and advanced rules, and a simple introductory scenario.

So what are my concerns? The first concerns my toys. For WW2 they are mainly 20mm, which is undoubtedly on the big side. It should be possible to get three Shermans into a 6in square (three is the stacking limit), but it would be a squeeze. There aren’t many photos of games in progress, but these mainly seem to be 6mm models on a 4in grid, with occasional 15mm or 2mm models. Undoubtedly the smaller models look better, though often I find their bases to be distracting. But 20mm models on a 6in grid will be not unlike 15mm ones on a 4in grid. Of course the missing toys grate, especially the anti-tank guns, which played such an important part in tactics of the time. The advanced rules allow what they call “tank hunters”, lightly armoured SP AT guns like the German Marder or Russian Su-76. That looked a bit of a cop-out to me – a bit of warmgamer’s bias to anything with tracks. These really are just mobile AT guns with almost no attack value. This clearly grated on early gamers too – as the downloadable optional rules contain an extra rule on massed AT guns. This is meant to represent such tactics as German Pakfronts, used by German, Soviet and British armies from mid-war on. There is also a “Tactic” to represent the presence of 88s and British 17pdrs (“Pheasants” – though I think that term only applied to the early improvised weapons on 25pdr carriages, of which I actually have a rather crude model). If you wanted to, it would be quite easy to put on heavy mortars or infantry guns, as after all the rules make occasional provision for 75mm howitzers. The issue is how concentrated these units were in practice – as an artillery unit needs to be quite beefy to get onto the table. Indeed it is quite hard for me to reconcile the presence of German 75mm guns in the early and late periods, and US pack howitzers for paras, but not American Chemical Mortar units, which played quite a significant role at Salerno, for example. Of course this game is doubtless plagued by dozens of issues like this, and you have to draw the line somewhere.

After the toys issue, I thought there was something else missing. There is no recognition of the significance of vantage points and commanding heights. That shows the influence of the Tunisian and Italian campaigns on my thinking, for my Project 1943. Commanding heights were critical objectives, and their possession influenced the direction of battles in these theatres. It was also a big deal on the Western Front in WW1, even around Ypres were on first impression the ground is pretty flat. On reflection I am feeling this is not such a big problem, as I don’t think it was such an issue in the relatively fluid battles fought across relatively flat terrain for much of the war. There are ways it can be dealt with too in the exceptional places, perhaps with the use of the Recce tactic, or other parts of the Command Post; exploiting a vantage point should surely require CPs. But that brings on another issue: the game has a fairly easy to understand open architecture when designing units, but the design of the Command Posts is less transparent. Each country (with the US and Britain treated as integrated allies) has a standard CP for each of the early, mid and late war periods. This looks as if it should work well enough for most of the time, but there will always be a case for tinkering with it, and the design aspects of this are not transparent.

Still, I feel I must give this a try. This means I must give some thought as to table design. I am not inspired by the photos of games In action. Firstly, with my 20mm models I think I need to go for an abstract look, bringing to mind maps rather than real terrain. That would men no physical terrain pieces on the table. There just isn’t room, and they look wrong. A tree is not a forest. A lone building is not a street. The terrain markings need to be flat, so that the models can go on top as glorified counters. Features can be named, including ones that have no game significance (like villages and major roads), but would have been important geographical markers. It might be a bit ambitious to give every square a name (72 squares!), but there should be enough to help navigation. I think that would do a lot to give the game atmosphere . I do have some 6mm models too, though only a US army that is ready for the table top. I was thinking of using these to try out Battlefront rules, based on the late war (perhaps the Lorraine battles in September 1944). Some thought needs to be given about these as well. It is more practical for these to have more representational terrain though the temptation is to have smaller (4in) squares, which make this harder. This is worth thinking about. I have a feeling that a weak visual appearance on the tabletop is one of the reasons these rules haven’t caught on as much as they might have done.

A final issue for me is to think about ways to make the use air power less abstract. I totally understand why Sam never attempted this – it entails a whole new layer of the game. It is purely something I need to get off my chest. Air power did have an important part to play at this level, though it was often away from the main battle front. I would like players to have air assets which they then choose to deploy to influence the battle as best they can, through front line support, air superiority, interdiction or medium level bombing. I think space could be made for this in a game like this. But a while down the track on that one!

But overall Sam Mustafa is to be congratulated in taking on a very challenging project, and coming up with solutions I would never have thought of, and giving insights into the sorts of compromises that have to be made. I am looking forward to trying these rules out. One day.

WW2 – I Ain’t Been Shot Mum

Domestic circumstances mean I can’t go back to painting miniatures (we’re about to put the house onto the market), so my hobby time at home is largely devoted to pondering rules. After spending quite a bit of time (successfully) on Napoleonics, I switched to WW2, where my group at the club has failed to find anything satisfactory for our club games.

So far I have been trying to create a mash up of Battlefront WW2, Battlegroup, and Iron Cross. This uses the (largely) the IC game scales (units, distances, etc.), the BF turn system and BG armour and gun ratings, with quite a lot of other ideas thrown in. It’s a struggle, though the sort of challenge I enjoy. It is much harder doing WW2 rules than Napoleonic! While making some progress I thought I was missing a certain something, and decided to acquire yet another set of rules for inspiration. This was I Ain’t Been Shot Mum (IABSM) from Too Fat Lardies. These are used by other players at the club, and TFL are an interesting publisher, whose motto “play the period, not the rules” I wholeheartedly agree with. This post is my reaction from a read-through. I haven’t tried them out.

Trying them out would in fact be less than straightforward. They are card-driven, and a set of cards would have to be created first, or bought; the current logistics at home would make it even harder for a solo trial game (though the system is an excellent solo system). In terms of game scale they fit my brief quite nicely: company level actions with mixed infantry and armour, with a 1to1 scaling of vehicles. Ground scale is 12in to 80 yards, probably not far from Iron Cross (which does offer a scale) – and a bit higher than my current working model (1in to 10m). But game play is not such a good fit.

IABSM follows the current trend of individual unit activation, with units from both sides being mixed up. In this case it is driven by cards. Each unit (platoon) has a card, which is shuffled up and then drawn, together with a “tea break” card which ends the turn, usually before all units are activated. A lot of other cards are added to the pack, including for “Big Men” – leaders. This is a very TFL feature – they love to represent the way that individual leaders can shape a battle. This is a very interesting and flexible system, and it would be fun to see how it works. Once activated each unit has a number of actions (up to four), which be used to move, fire, etc. I find this problematic on a number of levels, though these issues plague other rules systems too. You can loose off several rounds while the other guy just sits there; you can do a “moving ambush” – moving into view of the enemy and then firing before he can react; the highly sequential way in which things are played potentially slows things down, especially for multiplayer games. I may well have exaggerated all these concerns. You can put troops on overwatch, which allows them to react to enemy movement in the enemy turn (though your unit must have been activated earlier in the sequence). A lot of the firing actually takes place at the end of a turn, which is simultaneous (as far as I can tell, I haven’t found that bit of the rules).

A second issue is that the rules are actually quite complicated, though making the usual claims about fast play and simplicity. Infantry sections are made up of men 1to1, with individual casualties; “shock” is tracked for all units as an accounting for morale; AFVs can acquire several varieties of damage. Firing looks quite involved with quite a few dice, because of the number of different effects a hit can have (killing figures, shock, two levels of suppression, and vehicle damage), with different processes for infantry fire, fire on vehicles and HE fire, not to mention indirect fire and air strikes. This makes it much more complicated than any of the systems I am familiar with (Iron Cross, Battlefront, Battlegroup in particular). Now this is probably all quite easy to pick up and play, and overall the rules seem less complicated than Battlefront, though not the other systems, which partly because these other systems have gaps. You would definitely want to play your first game with somebody that knows them, though that is true of most systems.

I won’t be trying them out on my usual gaming partners at the club, but these look very interesting rules, put together by experts in game design. I will find myself filching a number of ideas. I especially like the blinds system, which is particularly flexible. This is part of a spotting system, which looks like an elegant compromise, though I am confused about one or two aspects. (Why is there +1 to the dice for spotting a target that is firing, when blinds can only fire if they reveal themselves?).

I did not find the answer to my missing “certain something” on my current project. I am working on a more traditional IgoUgo turn system, where all units on the same side fire at once, if eligible, but units react faster to each other. This system is based on the Fire and Fury one (and used by Battlefront), but with a twist. A static unit can fire at the beginning and end of its turn, with the enemy eligible for defensive fire in between. This means the fire sequence across a pair of turns for static units is ABABAB, and not BAAB as with the classic system. What I am missing is an idea of what I call “game narrative”. This game is played across a relatively small area (500 to 600m across) with powerful and very noisy weapons. This means that the action should not be too complex – as implied by the activation systems of IABSM, IC and even BF. Events should evolve as a single battle rather than a complex multiple interaction between individual units. For example, when an artillery bombardment is going on (or an airstrike), nothing much else should happen – it is an interruption to the flow of events. This leads me to the idea that one side or the other holds the initiative, for example when conducting an assault, with the other hunkering down and firing like mad. The initiative idea doesn’t have to be baked into a game system, as players should respond to the tabletop situation in that way without special rules. But the idea of one side having the initiative and the other having fewer options might be a way to speed the game along.

But how do you determine who has the initiative, and integrate into this a system for bringing on off-table resources, such as bombardments and reinforcements? I’m still pondering on that one. But I’m hoping to get a fast, highly interactive game that is suitable for a club night, while retaining something of the feel of WW2 warfare.