Those of you who were there or who read about it in Operations may know about Perry Andrus evangelizing the TCS at Origins and HomerCon last year by teaching Semper Fi! to all comers, including at least one youngster. The experience of teaching a TCS game to a young person shows not only that it can be done, but that the conventional wisdom about complexity and difficulty may be unwise.
My contention has long been that it's not mechanical complexity as much as abstraction that can make a wargame opaque for a novice (see Ops 5, p. 15). If what is being modeled is clear enough -- and if an experienced player is there to keep play flowing over all those unfamiliar rules details even a game with complex mechanics can be easy to learn. The scale, the maps, and the iconic counters in TCS make visualizing the action easier than, say, the more abstract Afrika, though the latter has the sort of systemic simplicity that makes us veterans assume it's a good "introductory" game. In comparing TCS and SCS remember that even though ZOCs and NATO symbols and overruns and odd-based combat seems terribly familiar to us, those mechanics are no more intuitive or familiar to a beginner than are overwatch triggers or mode change costs.
These reflections on introducing novices to the fine art of TCS arise from my experience playing Semper Fi! with my 8 year-old son. Just after peeling the shrink-wrap off my copy, I showed Eric one of the 8 1/2 x 11 maps. Seeing that and the countersheet were enough to make him want to play on the spot. My impression was that the small map strongly suggested to him that the game would be easy to get into; I felt the same way myself. Eric's previous wargaming experience includes Mustangs and London's Burning, both likely candidates for a kid who likes model planes. The question now was whether a TCS game would be fun or just too much work for the youngster -- and for me in the role of teacher, for that matter.
Drill Sergeant?
I selected scenario 5.1, Morning Assault (No-Name Ridge), because it's small, short even for Semper Fi! scenarios, and doesn't require night rules. Actually, playing a night scenario would have made LOS adjudication less work, but LOS did not turn out to be a problem. We set up the game and played several turns on a Saturday, then snuck in a turn now and then between dinner, homework, and bedtime, so that we ended up playing this "quick" scenario at a pace I usually expect for a campaign game. The kid's-life-specific reasons I just mentioned had something to do with the pace, but our main reason for moving slowly was the newness of the game to my son. So one lesson here is to select short scenarios for teaching games. Otherwise it will take a long while for the game's "story" to reach a conclusion.
Not surprisingly, my son chose to play the Marines. "We want the Americans to win, right?" Here's a temptation more mature players have felt also, especially playing solitaire. How hard you try against a beginner has a lot to do with his personality -- and your own. Do you enjoy an easy win so much you're willing to make your "friend" suffer? Or will your opponent resent it if you're too obvious about taking it easy? Is your friend the type who wants to jump right into a competitive situation and take some lumps, or will that sort of a first game be too frustrating to make a second game likely?
For this game, I took the "open hand" approach (like playing an open hand of bridge where the point is to show a new player an extended example of how the rules and strategies fit together in play). In practice, this approach means giving good advice at the proper moment, either to keep the other guy from making some blunder or to point out some opportunity. Some people might resent the implied condescension of too much advice, while others (my son included) appreciated seeing the "cool tricks" he could pull off. Although at times I gave good advice outright, when possible I used the Socratic method, asking leading questions to help Eric discover the best approach.
For example, a question like "Do you think one mortar will be enough firepower to get a hit on that guy?" was enough advice once several results rolled on the Area Fire Table.
Take it from someone who has taught in junior high, high school, college, and corporate America: discovery and hands-on learning have significant advantages over the lecture approach.
Ready . . .
I chose to play without Op Sheets, because Eric has no idea, before his first game, what a good plan might look like. In fact, I didn't even mention Op Sheets exist, just to avoid distracting him. With an older novice, or a novice with some military or military history background, I would not have omitted Op Sheets. For such players, the idea of writing orders and drawing on a map might well be a familiar point of departure. For my son, the fact that the counter art vaguely resembles MicroMachines ® was the familiar point of departure. (Of course, those little pictures hold no appeal to super-serious adult wargamers, right?)
Because he thought the counters for them looked cool, Eric wanted minefields. "You won't need those. You're going on the offense anyway, and I'm defending the ridge." "Well, you know. The defense could always go on offense." Clearly he has not yet accustomed to the way the overwatch rules model the advantage of the defense: to stand up and advance is to ask to get whacked. Nor could he understand yet why I would be reluctant to have my dug-in troops pick up and move. He is more used to chess, where a bishop may be defending a given square right now and simultaneously attacking another square clear across the board.
We used the "Better American Preparation" variant so that Eric could deploy some tanks. Again, the MicroMachine effect. Also, we needed a little play balance help here, as the historical set-up seem likely to get the Marines clobbered advancing against the ridge.
Truth is, we were not as interested in play balance as in having a fun time and trying out all the different toys in the toybox: smoke shoots from mortars, point fire, and artillery, along with the ubiquitous area fires. I did leave the "poor American artillery" rule in effect, though. After all, with that FAC my boy was able to bring in all of his Corsair sorties, much to his advantage.
Open Fire
The game started off fun for Eric. He had good rolls with the pre-game Corsairs, inflicting losses of 2 x MG sections, 2 x IG, 2 x AT, and 13 steps of infantry while suppressing 5 hexes. This sort of opening can hardly fail to amuse boys who like to blow things up (a good description for most wargamers). The NK loss rate remained high during the game, for reasons that will become clear.
Eric picked up quickly on the topographic map conventions, perhaps because of his interest in maps and globes and the time our Cub Scout den has spent looking at topo maps. Of course, having the high points marked as "Hill xxx" doesn't hurt.
Once when I said, "Let's check whether he can see that guy," Eric came back with, "He can. Look, my guy is up on this hilltop."
A quick check confirmed a clear line of sight. Here's more proof, if you need it, that you can usually judge LOS just fine if you understand the map symbology, forget about the calculations, and trust your eyeball.
Linking topography with tactics, I explained the advantage of placing mortars behind the hills. Even the company mortars are long-range weapons on this map. I also explained the effects of smoke and suppression on overwatch fire. This idea caught on so fast that Eric wanted to smoke the couple unsuppressed units on my front line and move out right away, at 0800.
The NK opened up early, forfeiting their hidden status for the sake of starting the fireworks. By doing so, did I violate Maneuver Warfare principles by giving up one of my advantages and playing into an enemy strength? Yup, but my reason for doing so was not tactics but an interest in keeping the action moving and interest high. Also, I can teach Eric a lesson about deploying those Marine platoons on the forward slope. He had them on Observation Hill and Hill 125 so they could shoot at my forward troops in the 7.xx hex column.
I put a three-step hit on a Dog Company platoon. During the 0820 turn he moved most of his area targets back behind the hills, leaving a few MGs and two platoons to spot the now-revealed NK units. His tanks took out one AT and moved into position to duel the three ATs in Tugak.
Easy Numbers
Of course, I handled all the tables and modifiers, but I didn't treat them as a black box. Instead, I talked my way through each dice roll, letting Eric actually throw the dice, so he could learn to read the tables. Most rolling happens on the Area Fire and Morale tables, and he easily learned to read the 11..66 tables. First I had Eric count up his firepower and find the raw column. Then I announced the final modifier (e.g. "back 2" ) and let him roll and read the results.
While I counted up the net modifiers on either of these tables, I included commentary like "It's back two columns because these guys are dug in, hiding in their foxholes," or "Artillery landing all around you is scary, so this morale roll is shifted up one."
Math Lessons
If you do teach the TCS to an early grade-schooler, you can actually include a few good math lessons. Adding up points, dividing and rounding, netting out positive and negative modifiers, and determining that a roll of 45 lands on the "31..51" row are all good number workouts for an 8-year-old. He hasn't started division in school yet, but theboy caught onto the rounding rule right away.
(Note: the author and The Gamers, Inc. are not responsible for the consequences if you attempt to introduce TCS into little Suzy's third-grade curriculum.)
Here's another math-lesson caveat. Back when my daughter was 2, she displayed an interest in numbers by reading the values from Guderian's Blitzkrieg counters. She was so fascinated, in fact, that during a few unsupervised moments, she swept all the counters on the map into a big pile, dumped in all the remaining counters from the trays, and built something that looked like Richard Dreyfus's mashed-potato Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So much for that OCS v2 playtest!
Seriously, when you're trying to make a beginner's introduction to a wargame enjoyable and illuminating, you need to consider what sort of presentation is appropriate to that person's age and knowledge. I know I don't like condescension any more than I like confusion when I'm listening to someone dispense some sort of expert knowledge. You need to decide how much and what sort of explanation is going to help make the playing the game clear and enjoyable.
Lessons Learned
For a child, I had to explain what "morale" means and what the trajectory of mortar fire looks like, to name two examples. Consider a similar approach with non-children who may know something about military history and technology but are unaccustomed to wargames.
For that sort of TCS novice, you can say, for example, "You might as well keep the mortars out of observation, since they can use high-angle fire from behind the hills." The point of all such comments is to show a wargaming newcomer how the rules and quantificahons all aim to represent some real-life phenomenon. Otherwise, the combination of numbers, tables, dice rolls, and jargon can start to seem rather abstract. We experienced gamers sometimes forget how unwarlike our gobble-d-gook sounds. Compare these two descriptions of the same action: "These four units, plus a sixpointer, will do an SFA against that hex with 14 points, back 2 columns to 8-9" and "I'll open up against those guys on the crest with the machineguns at 500 to 600 yards, plus fire from the battalion mortars."
At one point Eric said he didn't "want to bother" shooting artillery in his 0800 Action Phase. I pointed out he could shoot HE 50 times, then counted the number of game turns times three (39 standard battery fires) to prove that he might as well shoot every battery every turn. I held off on mentioning fast fires to avoid information overload. At this point I suggested that his strategy should be to blast the hell out of my positions before trying to maneuver against them.
When one of his tanks got knocked out in a duel with my ATs, Eric complained, "How could I lose him? He didn't take any damage yet." I had not explained that tanks are one-step units, though I had explained the numbers of steps in various infantry units. He was expecting his tanks to hold up (at least) as long as his platoons or MG sections.
Moral: don't take a newcomer by surprise with a rule explanation just at the point when that rule works to his disadvantage. You'll create a sense of frustration and powerlessness that can only discourage the guy you're trying to get addicted to the hobby.
In this case, the addiction seemed to be taking effect. Sunday morning, before leaving for services, Eric asked, "Dad, if I eat my breakfast really fast, will we have time to play some of that wargame before we have to go?" Another time it was, "Don't we have time for just one more suppressive shoot?"
Eric went for revenge against the ATs that cost him a tank. He dropped all three battery missions on Tugok (hex 10.15), getting one harmless scatter and two good shoots with effective results. Is he turning into one of those "If I only had more units/firepower" kind of gamers?
While Eric and I were playing, my friend Joe visited. He's former US Navy and a Civil War re-enactor who has read Sun Tzu and a book I loaned him by Robert Leonard. He is also the veteran of one afternoon's wargaming, max, with me. In other words, Joe's one of the many guys out there with plenty of knowledge and interest in things military, but no wargaming experience.
I found myself giving him explanations similar to those I had used with my son about how the game models reality what's the ground scale, how many guys in one of those units, how point fire and area fire differ, and why the artillery is sited off-map. Though we were able to speak on a more informed level, a similarity remained: stressing all the little points where the game works as a simulation greatly helps the newcomer "get it."
Gaining Sophistication
Early in the game, my son was having plenty of fun just blasting away with artillery, Corsairs, mortars and anything else that would shoot. Sometimes he'd cheer when he inflicted a Suppressed result. After a couple clean-up phases, he noticed that suppression in itself is not such a big deal. Then he started learning how a combination of suppressing NK unit and obstructing LOS with artillery fire zones and even a smoke shoot gave him the chance to maneuver.
Soon he had only his FAC, a couple platoons (to spot for the company mortars), and his supporting MGs and RRs exposed to direct fire, with everyone else hunkered down waiting to go "over the top." As in real life, exposure to fire is a great educator. He stopped losing steps from those all-important Marine platoons and concentrated on blowing holes in the enemy.
At 1000 hours, after several turns of adequate prep fire -- my poor NK guys thought it was plentiful fire -- Eric was ready to take that hill. He had pasted or suppressed enough ATs so that his surviving tanks could roll out along the road, their only way forward through the rice paddy, without taking killer overwatch hits. The tanks are not very useful on this map because of the terrain. It seems like every hex non-paddy has at least two contour lines in it, so there was no way the armor was going to go up the ridge.
Therefore Eric picked Hill 102, with a road adjacent, as his objective. In the end the game came down to the Marine platoons maneuvering through the holes and blind spots to make a final assault against this hilltop. <>Strategy
As the game went on, I realized that the strategy of prepping like crazy before the final assault just happened to work out well as a "syllabus" for introductory TCS, progressing from basic fire combat to more advanced considerahons of fireand-maneuver.
The first part of our game was all about lines of sight and weapons fire. These actions -- calculating ranges, dropping artillery fires, and counting up various points and modifiers -- involve lots of numbers and dice rolls on various tables. For all their apparent complexity, these number-and-chart exercises are pretty straightforward. By reading the charts and listening to me work through them, my 8-year-old developed proficiency pretty quickly here.
What took him more time to master was the mechanically simpler but more subtle business of moving around the map safely. Gethng your troops into (or out of) combat on No Name Ridge's small but hilly map takes some finesse. Specifically, you have to plan ahead to make sure your suppressive fires, mode changes, and moves all work out in a sequence that minimizes the damage your troops take from a dug-in defender.
Eric was catching on to this idea, but it's clearly an area where he -- and I, for that matter -- could benefit from more practice. Consider this analogy: It's easy to teach a child how chess pieces move and capture, but the advantage of sacrificing a pawn for a positional advantage is a topic that grandmasters analyze and debate.
Along the way, Eric learned another good lesson about wargaming. I had a hard time convincing him to throw the dice in the box lid -- until he accidentally bounced a die right through several stacks.
Teachable
What I learned is that TCS is an easily teachable system. That is, if you introduce it properly it's much more approachable for a beginner than a superficial appreciahon of it complexity might suggest. Yes, Napoleon at Waterloo, reprinted once by SPI specifically for use as an introductory game, has fewer rules, counters, factors, and tables. But if the teacher already feels comfortable with the rules, their weight is not a burden for the beginner. And I suspect that the richer, less abstract experience of playing Semper Fi! makes it a whole lot more sahsfying for a beginner than a putatively "easier" game.
We stopped our game several turns before its official 1200 hours end time. Yes, I still had a fresh platoon ready to counterattack the hill, but the writing was on the wall. Fire support and aggression in Marine proportions carried the day. As might happen in any game, we didn't have to work through to the last turn to reach that satisfying conclusion.
At one point Eric asked, "Can I make up my own game with these maps and units?" Yikes, I guess I must have created a wargamer, if he's already on his way to house rules and home-grown designs."
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