Arty's "Stand Games" Review

Introduction

by Steve Phenow

In the '70s while a young sprout in college I played board games. You kwow those 2-D hex boards with cardboard counters on them. 1 had been boardgaming since I was thirteen, starting with Blitzkrieg. As for miniatures, 1 had the usual, many ROKO minitanks, and Airfix soldiers. No way to play with them, miniature wargame rules were unknown to me. Strategy Publications had just released its "Tactical Series" of games starting with Tactical Game 13 that covered the Battles of The Late Rebublic & Imperial Rome. Ten scenarios were included, two that covered early battles by the Byzantines against the Goths and Sassand Persians.

I had just fnished L. Sprague de Camp.'s Least Darkness Fall and Harold Lambs Theodora and the Emperor and I was a big Byzantine militan' fan. (This love sustains me to this day I have a degree in the subject and have built 6 Byzantine armies.) Fellow friend John Erickson and myself decided to add 3-D to our Tae games. I would do the Byzantines, John would do the Goths. I only, had Oman's "History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages" to go by, (UCSD's Library was reasonably new) but I bashed together some acceptable Cataphracis from the Airfix Roman and ACW Cav. sets. I used the Levenline archer; cut /rim in half and joined him to an ACW cavalry lower body half by use of a straight pin. The whole figure was then mounted on a horse and three figures were set on a cardboard stand and painted. This was the equivalent of one cardboard counter on the "Tac" hoard. John did the same making Goths from the Robin Hood,ACW- Cav sets and away we went. We still played on large Hexes, I think 2"wide, that my art major girlfriend drew and we duplicated.

It changed my life.

Looking at those figures gave a sense of realism to the game. Of course we still played with Tac-13 rules, whole stands replaced counters and here removed as casualties, but we made the first struggling steps into the world of miniatures.

So what does this have to with Stand Unit games:' I will tell you.. Arty Conliffe has reinvented the wheel (no pun intended). He has reverted to the Tac idea for miniatures. One of the good things about boardgames is its simplicity in concept. Units are destroyed in combat; morale, becomes a secondary consideration. A boardgame designer I know tells me that morale results are already figured into his CRTs.

Rules may be written with little ambiguity, and how many miniatures' games can say that. Also armies can be.small--not real small like DBA, but affords-1e, compared to most miniature rules. My Ancient set of rules, Sarissa and Elephant , for example has 16 figures to Macedonian Taxis. Considering the Phalanx had 9 Taxi when full strength, that's 144 figures. In Cortliffe and Barker's sets of rules, 144 figures are the whole Macedonian army.

John Curran reviews Shako while I take a swipe at Armati.

Arty's "Stand Games" Reviews

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