Mr. Battle Cry is hot right now, so what better time to push his designs? I will say I was shocked to hear he had developed a "Pig" card game for kids (complete with 40 plastic pigs). I was given a quick overview by Pig Pile, the company that brought it out. It is a collect the trump style game with pig tokens. It's not terribly complicated, but if you like pigs, this one's for you.
Naturally, once one game system like Battle Cry gets hot, you can expect multiple variants. Hasbro/Avalon Hill has a WWII version he designed for consideration, but he doesn't expect it to be made by H/AH because they have the Axis and Allies WWII system in house that they'll push plus a skirmish-level system from WOTC in development.
A Napoleonic version is under consideration by another company. We'll see about that one, too.
Ancients
However, I did play a game and a half of an ancients variant that will be published by GMT, the boardgame company, as a miniature-style set with hex map, terrain tiles, command cards, and plastic pieces like Battle Cry. It is meant to introduce 10 year olds to ancients the way Battle Cry introduced 10 year olds to the Amercian Civil War. Of course, I see a lot of "10 year olds" with grey hair playing Battle Cry, so it obviously has wide appeal (and distribution--a key element in success).
Now, ancients buffs, and especially the WRG tournament players, will absolutely hate this game if, and that's a big if, it remains in its present form. If you are one of those gamers who thought DBA was heresy, this as yet tentatively named game will no doubt make you find a stake and self immolate. As a game, it has its points. As a simulation, it has very little basis in reality...but read on. I'm going to bounce between reality and gaming and design effects from my "lofty" experience as playing only two games. The scenario I first watched, then took over playing, had Alexander the Great forcing the Granicus River.
The forces are arrayed in suitable fashion, roughly historical groupings although there is no scale per se in the game system. Each army has 10 units, period, regardless of the battle or numbers involved. The deck of command cards is shuffled, with the number of cards dealt to each player based upon his rating. Alex is a 6 card commander, the Persians only 4.
Alex goes first and plays one of his six command cards. Here's the first breakdown in history--both sides gain access to all command cards, so there is no tailored deck for each army. Indeed, at one point, the Persians drew better cards that allowed coordinated attacks and line advances while Alex was left to playing "move two units on one flank" cards. This works well in the Amerian Civil War, where command and control was a mess and history is replete with incompetence and intrangience on a per-unit basis. Ancients, I believe, boasts far fewer instances of, say, the phalanx center of the army refusing to move. Indeed, Alex's oblique attacks depend on units moving together.
Anyway, units move and attack with the special dice--different colored sides and symbols depending on the type of unit attacking and defending. Here is a design concept developed for the period...and the ancients period is far more complex than the ACW.
Let me explain. In the ACW, you have cavalry, infantry, and artillery. That's it. Both sides used roughly the same weapons. You can argue that the Union artillery was better equipped with rifled guns than smoothbore and should have greater range, or that repeater carbines should give more dice, but by and large, there was no great differential. In the ancients period, there are far more types of infantry, and used in far more tactical ways, than ACW. Borg reduced all those types to light, medium, and heavy infantry with auxilia and warband variants. There is a difference between light infantry armed with bows and "not bows." That nicely encapsulates the differences--remember, this is for a 10 year old.
Likewise, cavalry is light, medium, and heavy. There are other types like chariots, camelry, and war machines, but those are pretty certain to be dropped from the initial release. Elephants will be included, but I didn't play with them at the Granicus. One Battle Cry veteran but ancients neophyte couldn't keep the infantry types straight, whereas I could keep them all straight and just had to learn the nuances between them.
There aren't a lot: number of dice mostly. All infantry take four hits to be destroyed, all cavalry three. If I recall correctly, and give me a little leeway here as I wasn't taking notes, lights roll two dice, mediums three, heavies four, and a general adds one die if stacked with the unit. I know I rolled five dice for Alexander and the Companion cavalry. Dice and units are color coded, so if you fight light infantry, you want green sides for hits. If in melee, the die has "neutral" crossed swords that will hit as well. If a leader is attached, purple leader sides hit too. Units always fight at full strength, regardless of previous losses. Bow and javelin armed units get more "missile" dice if they stay still, fewer if them move. Lights can evade but the attacker gets a parting shot at reduced effectiveness, etc.
This is simple stuff and clever design. Where it starts to bend history is in the movement and the idea of flanks. Let's just say that movement is appropriate: 1 hex for medium and heavy infantry, two for lights, three for cavalry, four for light cavalry. What happens is that there are no flanks (as us miniature players are used to) or zones of control (as us boardgamers are used to), so units can pretty much do what they want, including cavalry waltzing around lines and inbetween units, etc. Since movement is often done based on units, not lines, you get a rather fractured front quickly, and you tend to play cards where the most action is rather than advancing the entire front line a most ancients battles developed.
There are "rear" hexes through which a unit must retreat if a "flag" result show up on the die, and if you cut him off with two of your units, the defender cannot retreat (even if the front-facing and side-facing hexes are empty) and so is eliminated.
Since movement is via cards, and cards are not tailored to an army, this means that all armies have pretty much the same capabilities. As I said before, this works in an ACW era where armies used the same weapons and tactics, and individualism in command and control might have sections of a battleline go out of kilter: Sickles at Gettysburg for example, sticking his nose out.
Now, I'm carping. I know I'm carping. I'm purposely carping. And that first game developed like no other ancients game or battle I've seen. So after a considerable design pow-wow between Borg and GMT's Gene Billingsly about various aspects described above, I got Borg alone and asked if he would mind a second game where I could control Alex from start to finish.
Second Game
This time, there was no river. So terrain effects were non-existent. And this time, I tried not to play with a knowledge of ancient warfare, but as a 10-year-old gamer. It didn't work--we mini players drool when we see open flanks, but I tried.
Having seen Alex die time and time again, I kept the Companion cavalry back, and sent out the skirmishers first while I tried to push the phalanx and auxiliaries forward. I tried to strike and strike hard, sending light cav to cut off the enemy heavy cav. All that did was isolate them and they died. There's a "support" part of the rules that allows units to ignore one "retreat flag" on the die. Oh well.
Then I found out about another nuance--"purple" results kill enemy if you have a good enough general (like Alex) if Alex is adjacent. I had left him in the back in reserve. The idea, by the way, was to let the light skirmisher units whittle down the enemy cavalry, then send in Alex with the tanks (er, companion cav) and take advantage of another nuance called momentum that acts like British horse in Napoleon's Battles--kill and keep moving to kill some more. All that happened was that I lost most of the lights. I also found out that trying to coordinate units for an attack is virtually impossible without a special card. The game's deck forces you to go in piecemeal.
In any case, I brought up Alex, chewed through the front line and went after cavalry in the flank. Dang, I forgot that there are no flanks in his game, and ultimately lost the Companions and Alex. There's no morale either--first one to eliminate 6 units wins. I had lost five units and had killed only two!
With the right flank gone, I concentrated on the center and left, trying to hump the heavy infantry forward while peppering the enemy with arrows and javelins. And here I fared better, picking off three units without loss. So it was five to five and I finally got the pike stuck in, tossed a "nasty melee" card or whatever it is really called to get the additional dice, and stomped the medium infantry to win the game.
Now, if you view this as a history lesson, forget it. This is not how ancient armies fought at the Granicus or anywhere else. As a game, however, it can be exciting if you get over the ahistorical aspects. I played two down-to-the-wire games and each one took about an hour.
Plastic Figures
I don't know how the plastic figures will look--Roman legionnaires, Greek hoplites, Persian Kardakes, Carthaginian spearmen, and Gallic Warbands all look different. Borg wants the figure scale at 15mm so purists can create their own armies from metal miniatures. He also wants the figures to reflect the number of dice--three for medium infantry and two for lights for example. That's all presentation and in the future--nothing has been settled.
I made a couple suggestions in keeping with simple design. Make an optional rule for flank attacks: add one die if attacking the flank, or two dice if attacking the rear. Units always face a vertice, meaning two hexes are front, two are side, and two are rear. Units defending against flank toss half the number of dice (round up). I think prepping 10-year-olds to look for flanks is not that bad an idea.
A further option: Units always attack through their front (units may always spin their facing at the end of their move). They might get only 1 die (instead of half dice as above) if they attack through their flank or rear.
I'm not quite sure how to address the common command cards without buying multiple sets (something Gene would probably endorse) and creating a custom deck ala Piquet. Macedonians and Romans didn't fight the same way. I suppose only us big 10-year-olds might care.
With these couple suggestions--optional rules only so that 10 year olds and non-ancients gamers can just play Ancients BC--you'll get a better grasp on history. And you have to remember, DBA started out as a 12-element army across 2x2 foot battlefield, then as acceptance occurred, expanded into DBM (not necessarily all for the better, but wargamers can always pick and choose what they want to include). And no doubt, we'll see a number of optional rules once whatever this will be called appears.
And that's probably the biggest challenge, at least among miniatures players: DBA has about the same level of complexity, and also takes liberties with flanks and rears (units spin to face for example). It many ways, it's a better game/simulation of ancients battles. But it doesn't come in a box with plastic figures, and thanks to Hasbro and Battle Cry (which started life as a self-published Napoleonics game), it doesn't come with Richard Borg's name. This Ancients game has been around for five or six years. I don't know why Hasbro isn't publishing it--perhaps ancients is too esoteric a topic whereas GMT already has a successful ancients boardgame line. We'll see how this develops.
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© Copyright 2002 Hal Thinglum
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