I have now had a chance to try Krieg (sic?) and Hannibal. I have mixed feelings about both. I like the play of Krieg but it has the feel of a late playtest version rather than a final release. The rules include 2 pages of errata (including many significant chart and counter errors) and there are another 10 pages or so of errata on the Internet. This is a bit of a swiz for a game which was supposedly a year or so under development. I also thought that the rules were absolutely horrible. Because of the layout, nothing is where you would expect it to be. The rule for Russian surrender could as easily be found under the heading of weather as of US build points (I am exaggerating a little, but not much). The basics are fairly easy to grasp but the more complex aspects (for example, para effects) certainly are not. After a day, we were both getting massive tension headaches because the rules are so fiddly and counter-intuitive. You know that there is probably a rule in there somewhere, but you have to read through the whole (literally) bloody thing to find it. After this has happened a few times, you are not happy. I like the card driven element of the game, and most things seem to make sense. I am not sure, however, about the supply rules. Am I misunderstanding something, or do out of supply units really last forever? I also think that it is outrageous that a game of this complexity does not include an index. Hannibal is, as you would expect, much more polished and looks to be quite an accomplished piece of work. On the basis of half a dozen games it does seem to be massively luck dominated (battles, attrition), and this seems mostly to affect Carthage because of its limited resources. The Romans can lose lots of battles, but if Carthage loses one, it's hurting. I am not sure about the long-term play value of this, but will give it a few more whirls. (CHV: There must be Barker-Barca pun in here somewhere, I'll work at it). World in Flames I have always thought that this was one of those games where piddling detail, revision and re-revision of rules (where are we now - 6th edition?), and ever sillier expansion sets (for example, sub-Saharan Africa), suggested that the designers had made something which did not work but were smart enough to see that plenty of people out there would buy more of the same in the hope that it would come together. Supremacy is similar: a fine-looking game (physically), and superficially interesting. lf you had bought all the Supremacy add-ons you would have spent about £500 and you would still have a game which was rubbish because the heart of the system (the economics) has always been fatally flawed and none of the amendments has ever put it right. I hear that there are some enthusiasts out there for the ghastly white elephant that is Supremacy, but God knows why. I did pick up a copy of WIF a year or two ago to see what the fuss was about but gave up after reading the designer's notes which recommended all sorts of ridiculous, gamey, ahistorical ploys as being the right way to play. Dredging my memory, there was something about how the English could manipulate the turn sequence to prevent a German invasion and how the French should always be able to hold up the Axis until the end of 1940. I do dislike games where the designer assumes that what happened historically cannot happen in the game or introduces a spurious mechanism to ensure that it must. WIF seems to me to be guilty of both flaws. Would anyone play it if it did not concern that endlessly fascinating subject: WW2 strategic? I am as guilty as anyone here since my first ever wargame (if you discount my childhood, Merit-published, copy of Lt Gen Sir B Horrock's excellent Combat - it of the little plastic tanks and stick-on minefields) was Third Reich, which I bought when it first came out in 1974. I then bought the second and third editions before deciding that, really, it was no good. The Death of GDW Good riddance. GDW produced some of the worst games in the world, despite the occasional - very occasional - flash of brilliance such as Red Star White Eagle. Even that took about three hours to set up which, with only about 150 counters a side, was inexcusable. I always felt that GDW despised their customers. The set-ups were always a fiddly nightmare. The rules were always wrong (for example, White Death, which never worked), and were never corrected. I remember writing three polite letters (with IRCs) to GDW over the course of a year asking a number of questions about rules gaps in Tet but never received any answer. In their more recent flowering, I picked up Kasserine Pass which was hopelessly ahistoric. One of my all-time favourites (not) was Belter, where you played an asteroid miner You could start as a one-man firm, or as a corporation of various sizes. The bigger your starting position, the more handicap points you started with. Did it occur to the designers that the big firm would just mosey on over to the one man band and laser him out of the game on turn 1 ? Did it hell. RIP. The Legend Begins I dunno why Steve Thomas ends by describing this as brilliant when his (very interesting) review makes it clear that it is actually pretty hopeless. His conclusion seems to belong to a different essay. Ever a terminal enthusiast for block games, I think that Rommel in the Desert takes a lot of beating. Combined arms, hidden forces and supplies, months where nothing happens and months where all hell breaks loose, both sides usually petrified that the other is far more powerful than they are... But you absolutely must have Columbia's errata - it does not work without it. (To their great credit, Columbia will fax errata to the UK if you ask them nicely.) I think that RITD is one of the great sleepers, and as fresh today as when it was published. The group/re-group movement concept was a brilliant solution to desert movement and command capabilities. The standard complaint is that the rules are so short, the information available to the players' so limited, and the options so great that some players go into analysis-paralysis and find that the whole thing hurts their brains too much. This, I think, only suggests that most gamers would have been appalling military commanders. If you find someone like this, play the short 1940 scenario and give them the Italians. With luck, they will not want to play you again. The Gamers I was in Just Games a day or so ago, and saw lots of The Gamers WW2 series games. Are these any good? Is the system any good? (CHV: Only if you believe the tedium is the message, long wristey stuff) I did not buy because suspicious me thought that they might be a bit painting by numbers. Breakout Normandy Reason for asking the above is that my regular weekly opponent and I have now finished off about 100 games of BKN and are looking for something new. It's good for an evening after work since it's over in 4 hours, but it is also surprisingly gripping, tightly balanced, and we keep coming up with new wrinkles. With the slowdown at TAHGC, it is becoming a bit like the days when people spent 5 years becoming good at say Stalingrad or Panzerblitz. A bit sad really. No doubt an equally good game will come along in due course: any reports on the Carthage effort? Sharpe No interest in this stuff- either the books or the TV rubbish. However, I discovered the O'Brien naval books a couple of years ago and devoured them all. First rate. Unusual to find a period naval/military novelist who can (a) write (b) knows his history (c) has a sense of humour. If someone likes O'Brien, you know that he is a good egg. If he does not like him, then you can discard him utterly as a wet and a weed. (CHV: Then I am proud to be a Wet and Weed O Fotherington-Thomas! I have evidence that this rule is not of universal application, but I did read the interview with the author in The Times). Top 20 I was interested to see that Alan Sharif included the Kaiser's Battle in his top 20. Was this not the old SPI game in which the Allies could always win by stacking in alternate hexes at the far end of the map to the Germans? I ask for information only... Following my harsh comments on GDW, a friend was down a little while ago with a second hand copy of their Imperium-based Dark Nebula (which he had collected for £20). I had bought this about 15 or 20 years ago, and still have it tucked away somewhere. (Will anyone give me £20 for it?) I was unkeen to play because I remembered that it was massively flawed but could not remember what the flaw was. It soon came back. Both players get about 30 build points for buying their start-up forces. The first player then builds another 30 and moves/attacks with the lot, followed by the second player. Other thing being equal, therefore, the balance of forces on turn 1 are 60:30, turn 2, 90:60, etc. In practice, things are worse, because the more powerful first player will take every opportunity to smash up the second. We abandoned the game after set-up, when I had gone through the maths. As before, my views on GDW are good riddance. It was quite clear that Dark Nebula had never been play-tested by anyone, and was a straightforward rip-off aimed at catching mugs who had bought Imperium and wanted something similar but a bit smaller. Was it just a typo when you mentioned rolling 1D6 in Breakout Normandy (herintoafter refereed to as BKN)? Both sides actually roll 2D6 each in an attack, which leads to a wide spread of results, such as the time when I attacked Caen, and rolled a 12 to my opponent's 2 (1 in 1300 chance). A 1D6 system (which I was a little surprised to see in Mars la T.) will, other things being equal, hurt the attacker since a large differential can do no more than spend the attacker, but can crush the defender. It will also, I would have thought, make use of the Advantage less significant. Another BKN point, possibly also a typo: in the first week the Allies only get 60 supplies a day (30 British, 20 Omaha, 10 Utah) not 80. I agree that BKN is an absolutely ace game. The only drawback is that there is a chess-like learning curve: a reasonably experienced player should always flatten a beginner since the best plays are not always very intuitive. [CHV: Duh, cannot remember if I played wrongly, but if I did it still felt right to me which is an awesomely strong design chassis]. Now up to March 1941 of a Krieg! game. I do like the way in which the early war tables can produce unwanted, but sort-of plausible, minor country results which are out of the direct control of players. In this game, Allied attempts to pressure the neutrals led to a border war between Spain and Portugal in April 1941. Spain joined the Axis and eventually took out the Portuguese (who were reinforced by a British corps) with the help of a German panzer army after a four month siege of Lisbon. Surprising to see that there is no Russian winter effect: fighting around Moscow in the snow is the same as fighting in Kent (the famous "white hell"), unless there is something that I have overlooked. Gettysburg I have Talonsoft's Battlegroup Gettysburg, but have not really been enthusiastic enough to play it properly (although I gave their Ardennes effort a good run through). BG Waterloo does not really sound worth buying. Computer wargames are still pretty primitive. Their strengths must be in doing tedious calculations, having short rules, and making use of hidden information; their weaknesses the need to appeal to an LCD to make a profit, and inability of a computer to squirm in front of you. I thought that Talonsoft's games were a huge advance in that they actually looked quite good. A year ago I bought the Stalingrad game produced by TAHGC/Atomic collaboration and it looked so dreary with teeny hexes and NATO symbols that I did not bother learning the rules, and eventually gave it away. Why do computer wargames bother with hexes, though? There is surely no need. I would like to see strategic/operational games based on staff maps. They also present a golden opportunity to hide friendly forces as well as enemy, surely a key element of fog of war (" "Grouchy, dit-il." C'etait Blucher"). Is the General worth reading these days? I gave up subscribing about a year ago when it went through a long patch of being very childish, devoting far too much space to ads and third-rate computer stuff. But I do miss it a bit. I see that you have a number of harsh words about the great Berg this issue. Have you two had a quarrel? My view has always been that Berg has never designed a game that was either worth buying, or playing more than once. (CHV: well that's telling him!) FOE sounds very interesting. I agree that it sounds wrong to have all the cards dealt out initially (a la Nuclear War, that fine, admirably non-PC, game: You have Tricked Your Opponent into a Timewasting Peace Summit: He Loses a Turn. . . SUPERGERM: Lose 50 million Population, heh, heh). I have just finished Holmes' Riding the Retreat, which I enjoyed (although it could have done with a bit more analysis of the context) and it does seem reasonable that there should be a small chance of a summer 1914 knock-out. After all, both sides thought that they could achieve this, and it avoids the need for gamey French and Russian mandatory-offensive rules. Maybe as time goes by, cards could be taken away even without offensives (for example to reflect the blockade)? Given the political imperatives of the period, I would have thought that states should be obliged to carry out quite a number of offensives each year. Also that offensives would usually need to be met by counter-offensives to avoid losing territory. It should not be possible for a major power to sit on its hands for two years, however well or badly it has been doing. Back to Perfidious Albion #94 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com