Southern Front

Race for the Turkish Straits

Review by Wayne Close, Captain, Illinois Air National Guard

Designed by Frank Chadwick with John Harshman
Game Designers' Workshop PO Box 1646, Bloomington, IL 61702
Released: July, 1984
Catalog No: 476
Price: $16.00
Complexity: Experienced
Solitaire Suitability: High

Southern Front is a simulation of a theoretical Warsaw Pact assault on the members of NATO in the Balkans. The major objective for the Pact is to take Istanbul and the Turkish Straits, allowing the Soviet Black Sea Fleet to sortie into the Mediterranean. Greece and Turkey are the primary NATO combatants, with a little help from the U.S. and France. Options include Jugoslav intervention and Romanian defection. The options are a nice touch because they keep the Pact player guessing. Another nice detail is the Jugoslav partisan rule, though it is a little weak.

Game component quality is very high and includes 360 die-cut counters (back-printed for ease of set-up), a 16-page rules book, two aircraft status charts, terrain effects and combat results sheets, a small errata sheet, and three five-color mapsheets that can be put together to mesh with the other games in GDWs Third World War series. The only thing I really missed was something in which to store all those counters. However, counter trays can he purchased separately, or you can always use those old stand-bys: self-locking plastic sandwich hags.

This game is one of hard-driving kicks for the Pact and desperate defenses for NATO. Though Pact forces seem dispersed and relatively weak at the outset, they get to move and attack twice before NATO gets to react, and then only units in reserve may move before the Pact gets another two movement and combat phases. True, the second phase is for reserve units only; however, a wily Pact player can use this to his advantage by using only small units, i.e. single brigades, for advance after combat in the first phase, so that larger units may stack on top and attack in the second phase. in this fashion, the Pact can make huge gains in the initial stages of the game.

In the three games we played, the Pact was able to inflict enough losses on the poor Greeks to "shake" their morale and to take all of northern Greece in the first turn. Speaking of morale, it plays a very important role in this game. Every country, except the Soviet Union and Albania, has levels of damage its forces can take that result first in "Shaken," and at higher levels "Demoralized" status. Countries that become shaken are basically limited to operations within their own country. This severely hampers the owning player, especially in the area of air support, which also plays an important role. Missing from the game is a chart to keep track of the current morale status of a country players are forced to constantly count the stacks of destroyed Greek, Jugoslav, and Turkish units and this slows the game a bit.

Air power is critical in modern warfare and this is the best simulation of it on this scale I have ever seen. In fact, if you have any modern operational games at home that are in need of a good set of air rules, I would recommend these. Units are rated hy types of missions they can fly and certain units must be allocated to the Air Superiority role for the entire turn in order for other missions to be flown. The Pact player always allocates his aircraft missions first with the NATO player reacting. This gives the NATO player considerable tactical flexibility. It's a good simulation of the NATO capability. One recommendation on NATO strategy: try to knock out the enemy air force through runway cratering and advantageous air-to-air combat as soon as possible. The NATO player starts with higher quality aircraft, but loses flexibility through likely shaken Greek morale. This, coupled with Pact replacements, makes it difficult for NATO to maintain air superiority. It is extremely important that air superiority be maintained so airborne operations and ground support missions can be conducted unmolested.

Ground combat is somewhat unique because units are rated for proficiency as well as for standard attack and defense. Initial ratings range from four to eight and units suffer proficiency step losses as a result of combat. When proficiency reaches zero, the unit is destroyed. Proficiency is also figured in for every combat situation and this can become cumbersome.

In combats involving a large number of units, it was literally necessary to use a calculator to figure the average proficiencies to the second decimal place. Differentials in proficiency lijve profound effects on combat odds, and the difference of only a hundredth shifts the odds column one level. This helped contribute to the average playing time of two hours per turn and there are eight turns!

Unit integrity is important; units of different nationahties and/or army groups suffer a stacking limitation. This was easy to obev with NATO units as they're different colors. However, mistakes were often made with the Pact units owing to the extremely small numbers of units in an army. Different Pact armies of the same nationality should have been slightly different shades of the same color to ease this problem.

The victory conditions in the rules are erroneous. They should have read as follows:

Victory PointsResults
21 or lessNATO Overwhelming Victory
22-26NATO Substantial Victory
27-30NATO Marginal Victory
31-34Pact Marginal Victory
35-48Pact Substantial Victory
49 or morePact Overwhelming Victory

One additional erratum: hex D-0409 should contain a port.

This a real gem of a game and it is a must for those interested in contemporary warfare on the operational level. With an endless number of strategic and tactical options, victory is in doubt up to the last turn.

Although the full game can take up to 16 hours to play, this is offset by the extreme realism of the system, especially the air rules. Though rated for experienced players, intermediate players should have no trouble, as the rules are very well organized.

Capt. Close's design and development credits include Close Simulations' The Falklands War, Alert Force, and Operation Konrad.

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