Variety is one of the chief factors that makes any period popular in wargaming. Whether it's a vast variety of army types, as in ancients, or a variety of color, as in the 18th century and Napoleonics, wargaming is one place where variety is more than the spice of things, it is the meat and potatoes. World War Two, as a period, has less color to it than other periods, since on a battlefield dominated by automatic weapons being colorful means being seen and being seen means being dead. When It comes to variety of scenarios and battles, however, it's hard to beat the sheer scope of possible actions between 1939 and 1945.

Aside from the exotic actions involving midget submarines, jet fighters, remote-controlled miniature tanks and mine-carrying dogs, even the "regular' land battles can involve a bewildering blend of men and equipment. Horse cavalry, tanks, air power, bayonet charges, and rocket artillery can all appear on the same battlefield. 'troops can arrive by parachute, armored vehicle, rubber boat, or reindeer-pulled sled.

The problem is, many normal actions in world war two make lousy scenarios for a game. Most strictly historical actions are inherently unbalanced: if one side didn't feel they had a good chance of winning, after all, they wouldn't have started the fight in the first place! Let's take a look at some basic considerations in selecting a scenario, and then some 'tricks" for balancing an otherwise one-sided battle.

First, unless you are teaching a class of masochists, the game should be FUN for all sides. This means that each player should have a reasonable chance of victory - or at least, something they can think of as a victory. The Malmedy Massacre, aside from being In questionable taste, is hard to turn into a victory for the Americans no matter how you tinker with the "victory conditions". Aside from a chance of victory, each player should have some variety of actions available to him. Playing the opening barrage of a Soviet 1944 offensive gives one side a chance to throw several hundred firing dice and the other side a chance to remove models from the table: not a lot of options for either player.

Bad Scenario Situations

This brings up the point that some situations are inherently bad scenarios. Here are my candidates for Not For Fun Games:

1. Any "set piece" offensive. When one side starts dug in to the max and the other side starts with all the offensive firepower already massed against it, the game loses from the beginning: either the defense is adequate, in which case the attack turns into a grinding battle of attrition, or the attacker is overwhelming, in which case you move off the board into a breakthrough right away. A fixed defense always will restrict mobility, so attacks on such a position tend to lack maneuver in any case, so that all the attacks turn into attritional dice contests. Prime nasty examples: the beginning attacks at El Alamein or the start to the Battle of Kursk. In both cases you get to creep forward through masses of minefields while off-board artillery pounds everything in sight. Whoopee.

2. Any situation where the terrain overwhelm the troops. In other words, don't put a panzer division in a swamp, unless you have a peculiar set of objectives in mind. Likewise, don't make it impossible for the two sides to get at each other. I once saw a scenario set in the hedgerow country of Normandy in 1944. The hedgerows were, basically, completely impassable to vehicles, which meant that it was strictly an infantry fight. Fine so far, but the game designer had provided both sides with units of heavy tanks and self-propelled guns! None of these weapons had any chance at all of firing a shot - looked pretty impressive, but they might as well have been labeled 'For Display Only" as far as the game was concerned.

3. A corollary to the situation above is one in which one side doesn't get to use most of its troops. You can make a balanced scenario in which one side fields a regiment and the other side a squad: just make it impossible for the regiment to deploy more than a platoon at a time in attacking the squad. Trouble is, this either makes for a long, dull fight in which platoon after platoon is thrown against the squad. or a frustrating game in which one side's figures and models sit largely unused throughout the day.

4. Any situation where one side's chance of success depends on a single event. This is a subtle thing that isn't always obvious at first glance. One example: a "commando" 1:1 skirmish scenario, in which the raiders had to surprise a sentry and seize a bridge before the enemy could blow it up. The success of the entire operation depended on a single "surprise' die roll by the defender. We could have saved a lot of set-up time by just rolling that die first and moving on to something else.

Good Scenario Situations

On the other hand, there are some situations that almost inherently provide good "game designs". They share the characteristics of allowing several options of maneuver and Victory Conditions (objectives) to both sides.

1. The meeting engagement. If both sides are advancing or moving and run into each other, you have a situation with a maximum of maneuver on both sides. This also allows for a huge variety of objectives: one side could be scouting only, while another side has orders to attack at all costs. One side could be an advance guard with orders to merely delay the other, while another situation could have two aggressive forces, both with orders to brush the opposition aside. In other words, depending on the objectives given to each side, the same Meeting Engagement with the same forces on the same terrain could produce several very different games.

2.The hasty defense. Many of the most interesting and critical small unit battles in world war two occurred when one side had broken through and was attempting to exploit success, and the other side threw units in front of the advance to slow, stop, or counter-attack the spearheads. This is really a variation of the meeting engagement, in that one side generally does not have an attack objective. However, If the initial defense is successful, the objective of that side could change, becoming a Counterattack: the old "seesaw battle."

The easiest way to balance a game is to provide equal forces for each side. This is also the least realistic: good for chess or checkers, lousy for most historical situations. The usual rule of thumb was that the attacker required a 3:1 advantage to advance. Even forces only makes a reasonable game in a true meeting engagement, when neither side is (initially) on the defensive. Even-up meeting engagements make for pretty dull games after the first 20 or 30 repetitions, so here are a few other ways to balance a scenario, almost regardless of the number of troops or models on the table.

Mess with the equipment on each side based on perceptions rather than realities. My thanks to John Fernandes for this idea, which is based on the front line grunt's view of the war. Instead of a normal force, every enemy tank becomes the most dangerous type available. For example, the initial German armored attack is all Tigers! As the tanks come under fire, and fire back, the Tiger models are replaced with the actual vehicles - which can be anything from Pz I to real Tigers, because the front line troops did some truly amazing misidentification when under fire. This sort of thing works for any army in any theater in world war two. Germans on the eastern front in 1941 identified every enemy tank as a KV-1, and later everything was a T-34, even when they were actually little T-60s, British Valentines, or US M-3 light tanks. US and British infantry in Normandy identified every German tank as a Panther Tiger. Soviet infantry identified every sturmgeschutz as a 'Ferdinand'. I figured out several years ago that according to the Soviet campaign histories and memoirs, the 90 Ferdinands actually built were all knocked out on the Eastern Front about 20 times each!

This does not just apply to tanks. Every German antitank gun was an '88', regardless of actual caliber, and every Soviet gun was a 76mm'crash-boom'. You can take the perceptions down instead of up, also: let the German player see nothing but M4 Sherrnans in front of him, and find out the hard way that some of them are Fireflies or Jumbos.

The numbers of vehicles are usually too regular on our miniatures battlefields. I have seen it more than once: a player sees 22 tanks across the board, and says to himself. -Aha, a German tank company". In fact, no one ever identified tanks by unit. Read the actual wartime reports, and they always refer to 'a company of infantry with 7-8 tanks in support", or '50 tanks and some panzer grenadiers". Using exact numbers gives too much information, and it's not accurate: no unit ever went into battle with exactly authorized strengths.

Here's an easy modification: whatever size of unit given in the scenario, modify it from 'official' to 'actual' strength before the battle. Unless it is a precise historical scenario with 1:1 depiction of unit strengths, let some realistic wear and tear, or prebattle "attrition" take place. For each unit or different type of vehicle/equipment, roll one 10-sided die. The result x 5 is the percentage of those vehicles that 'broke down' before they got to the battlefield. Add +10% to the rolls for particularly vulnerable units and armies: like the Tigers and Panthers in 1943, or the Soviet armor in 1941. Subtract 10% for US armor, which had massive maintenance support and better reliability overall.

DON'T show the other side the result. Let your opponent wonder where the other 4 Tigers are in that company...

Next, mess with the terrain. The easiest way to balance an attack-defense scenario is simply not to give any terrain information to the attacker. Is the stream fordable? How fast ran infantry go through the woods? Go find out. As part of that, the occasional minefield is the fastest way I know to balance defense versus attack, and has the advantage that iIt doesn't require any more figures. Woods, ravines, or streams that are impassable can reduce the size of a battlefield so that an apparently outmatched defending force is actually just big enough to defend the area. 

One point: if too much of the terrain is impassable or nearly so, then the battle may be reduced to a head-to-head slugging match or a tedious engineering battle: always leave room for maneuver, even if you make it difficult for one side or the other to use it effectively!

Balancing Factors

Use invisible balancing when you can. Visible balancing factors are simply, more forces. An extra tank battalion certainly tips the action towards that side, but it may be both unhistorical and too obvious. Invisible balancing can be introduced at any time, for either side, as required by the scenario. Some examples:

1. Command Slowdown or Paralysis: Be honest: tell one or both sides that this Is possible before the fight starts, and don't make it too common or drastic. Fact is, though, that communications were notoriously unreliable in world war two (and they ain't as reliable as they'd have you believe even today) and some armies were very dependent on communication with higher HQ or their support. Drop in a turn with no support artillery because of commo failure, or a turn of 1/2 movement by a unit because the commander's radio went out and nobody is certain what they're supposed to be doing. Calling up reserves should almost always be chancy: wire lines get broken by accident or on purpose, or somebody is always on the wrong radio frequency. Virtually anything you can think of has happened to one military unit or the other, and usually at the most inopportune times.

2. Off-Board Support. Most world war two scenarios involve only those units in direct contact we haven't got enough table space to show a battlefield 10-30 km deep in any ordinary scale! Therefore, one or both sides will have artillery that's not on the battlefield. Whether this artillery can intervene effectively may depend on a number of factors that can be manipulated by the umpire for the scenario: commo failures, as mentioned above, or other commitments for the guns. Pre-planned artillery barrages were a common feature of defense and attack plans, and, although frequently cumbersome to include, have the advantage that they may work for or against the side that planned them: more than once artillery landed on friendly troops because the planned 'shoot' came down at the wrong time or off target.

3. Air support is another great balancing act. The umpire can use air power the way it was actually used: as a quick fix to an ailing battle. Tell one or both sides that air support 'may be' or is available, and then remind them that the air force has other priorities, weather may turn bad at the air base, etc. If the scenario is getting dull or turning into a romp for one side (and you still have 3 hours' playing time you want to use) drop air support in for a turn to balance things. The amount and type of support, and who gets it, can vary according to the need of the battle: a runaway Tiger can always be trumped by a Typhoon, and the best laid Allied plans come unstuck if Stuka-ed.

4. Reserves. The ability of higher headquarters to intervene in the battle is an easy thing to manipulate, since, usually, the umpire Is playing such a HQ anyway. One trick is to give one or both sides a reserve, reaction, or exploiting force, and then tell them that if they commit it, their level of victory goes down one level. In other words, even if they win with the reserve, It may only be a tactical victory because somewhere else that unavailable reserve force led to nasty results. If they merely break even but commit the reserves, than actually their opponent has a tactical victory, because at least he tied up the reserve. This can give the players the classic Commander's Dilemma: when to commit reserves to save or enlarge a victory or stave off defeat.

Finally, there is a method of balancing a scenario that isn't really a balancing act as much as it's a "slight of mind" magic trick: give both sides a set of victory conditions that are not mutually exclusive. In other words, by the way the victory conditions, or objectives, for each side are written, they may both win -- or both lose. For example, an attacking force could have as victory condition the taking of a crossroads regardless of casualties. The defender's victory conditions would be to inflict maximum casualties while trading space for time. In the resulting battle, if the defender makes a fight for the crossroads, he may feel he's won by inflicting casualties on the attacker, while the attacker claims a victory by taking the crossroads -- which terrain wasn't considered critical by the defenders conditions at all!

This kind of result is actually much closer to reality than the usual clear-cut win-loss scenario: very few tactical results are obvious, unless there was a dramatic superiority by one side over the other from the start. More often, both sides are somewhat satisfied and somewhat disgruntled by partial fulfillment of their objectives. This, among other things, results in a new set of objectives being issued and sets the stage for another battle...