Tactical Frederickian warfare is largely an untouched area in American wargaming, aside from a brief foray by GDW back in the late 70's, and is often perceived as only a dignified prefix before Europe got down to some really serious bloodletting under Napoleon and his associates. But Clash of Arms, never one to let a potentially profitable subject area slip past- they did publish an obscure English Civil War game last year, didn't they- has tackled the period with much zeal. Zorndorf is Volume 2 in Clash of Arms' series Battles of the Age of Reason (now there's a title fraught with irony). Next in the series promises to be Leuthen, which brings up another nagging question concerning Clash of Arms-- why wait until late in the series to do the most famous battles?

Waterloo was seventh in COA's La Bataille series, the first being Albuera, for crying out loud. [CHV: It must be noted though that Albuera is a much more playable battle than Waterloo, and more balanced] Why start a series about Frederick the Great with Kolin, his first defeat, and put Leuthen, his greatest victory, third ? Guess I slept through the marketing class where they talked about that one. After Leuthen they're advertising Brandywine & Germantown, where General Washington and I will finally get a chance to lay a whuppin' on the Mindless Redcoats.

In his game notes, designer Paul Dangel explains the genesis of this new series as Ed Wimble's desire to modify the immensely popular La Bataille system to fit warfare in the mid-18th century. But the La Bataille rules had not changed much since the 70's, and by the time Mr. Dangel was finished modifying, adding, and updating, the only things that BAOR had in common with its French uncle were the map and counter graphics.

Everything else- everything- was different. I am in favour of this, myself, since for me and many others the La Bataille rules are so outdated that now they serve as nothing more than a point of departure, a set of maps and counters onto which I add my own home-grown tactical Napoleonic gibberish.

For those not faint of heart there is even a set of rules on the Internet designed by the Australian, Geoffrey Phipps, that modify the La Bataille rules by adding The Gamers command system from Austerlitz and Richard Berg's LIM system from Waterloo (slight pause here while Charles gets his breath back). Anyway, what Mr. Dangel found as he worked on the series was that Frederickian warfare was a lot more than just "Napoleon with lines instead of columns." He has added much more depth and detail to the rules than La Bataille ever aspired to-- the result is just about the closest you can get to a Frederickian battle without being there.

Parting Company

And here is where PA and BROG part company. There are some games- Vae Victis seems to very good at it- where fiddly, micro management battalion-level tactical treatments are streamlined and accessible, but not Zorndorf. This game is blessed with a system that is just as concerned with why and how a battle went a certain way as it is with who won or lost it.

The basic command system is a modified version of Berg's old Turn Continuation Table (TCT), where initiative is determined by both overall commanders making activation die rolls, the winner kicking a brigade into gear, and if his die-roll double his opponents, an entire wing (usually 3 or 4 brigades). There are only a limited number of activations per turn, the total steadily decreasing as the day goes on to simulate the growing effect of fatigue. Frederick gets a hefty +3 bonus to his activation rolls vs. his sluggish Russian opponents, which just about guarantees that he will be getting 3-4 times as many activations as the Russkies.

Realistic?

Realistic? Yes, as the Russian commanders were historically a lethargic bunch, yet as Berg pointed out in his review of Kolin, it's mathematically possible that the Russians may never get to move during a game. Also, once you've activated everybody you must pass to your opponent, so if you are able to activate several wings (as the Prussians will normally do) you leave your enemy with a bunch of freebie moves before the turn ends. So moving by Wings with clockwork Prussian efficiency leaves the bad guys a chance to react, while if you shuffle each brigade around individually you use up the entire turn and leave your opponent locked in immobility. What ? Methinks I see Game Balance at work here.

Activation is automatic as long as a leader is in the overall commander's range. If not, you can roll against that leader's command rating to see if he activates anyway, missing the roll freezing the commander for the turn. With some leaders, particularly the talented Prussian cavalry commander Seydlitz, with a command rating of 8, it's no sweat-- but most Russians labour under a miserable 3 or 4. The Prussians also have General Moritz, a sort of battlefield command amplifier who can extend Frederick's command range, crucial if Old Fritz is to keep in touch with his thinly stretched forces.

Charles has criticised this notion, saying that it turns command control into whomever can SHOUT the loudest-- I see it rather as reflecting which army had the more efficient staff system and officers with superior training, areas where Frederick clearly comes out ahead of his opponents. (CHV: I think not, and even he had its effect would not be an increased radius of command). But even with these limits I think the players have too much power over their generals. Historically, Frederick had a very difficult time controlling his leaders once the bullets started to fly, whether due to the normal noise and confusion that accompanied battle or because of outside factors like the fog at Lobositz, an extraordinary amount of dust and smoke kicked up at Zorndorf, or incapacitation from an upset stomach at Prague- Napoleon could surely have sympathised with that- and we must assume that his opponents felt these effects as well.

Disaster

Disaster struck the Prussians at both Kolin and Zorndorf when Frederick lost control of the battle. At Kolin what was meant to be a flanking move turned into a frontal attack when Frederick inexplicably pitched right into the Austrians at his front, while Zorndorf turned sour when General Kanitz wandered in the wrong direction, leaving Manteuffel's advance guard exposed, unsupported, and in heaps of trouble. There is no sense of this in the game, no feeling of the battle slipping out of a commander's control; a command freezing for a turn is the worst that can happen to an irresponsible officer. What we need here is a Command Confusion table similar to what Richard Berg created for 3DOG, where command breakdowns cause all sorts of wild things to happen.

Still, the activation mechanic is easily learned, a walk in the park compared to the microscopic treatment given to Frederickian tactics. Ever read any of the drill books of the period outlining the endless number of machinations necessary for a unit to manoeuvre on the battlefield, complete with dozens of goofy pictures of how the soldier is supposed to look when he presents his lock and cocks his piece or any of 40 other tedious manoeuvres ? Zorndorf is a drill book in itself, filled with all sorts of stylised minutiae and some goofy pictures, although in this case they're effective period caricatures by Adolph von Menzel, which help by adding a badly needed light touch.

Infantry

Infantry have eight different formations to choose from- column alone comes in three flavours- each one with a different set of abilities and limitations, and two entire charts, one for each army (!), given over to calculating the movement cost of moving from one formation to another. Movement thus becomes a frenzy of paper shuffling, checking formation change costs, terrain effects, facing, and unit density all to push a battalion forward three hexes.

It took me until my third playing of Kolin to finally become certain I was doing it right, and by then I felt qualified to write a thesis on movement rates in the Austrian army. Manoeuvring the units properly requires un-learning much previous wargame experience. If you've got used to mobile French battalions wheeling and prancing around the field in l'ordre mixte, you'd better forget it, pilgrim. Marlborough was not that long ago, and the guys in tricornes are still stuck in such rigid postures that just changing direction to the right or left is a major undertaking, while reversing direction takes almost an hour. Column is for bringing your foot soldiers to the battlefield, but not for fighting, as a column of infantry caught in the open by enemy infantry or artillery is in for a rough time.

The short command ranges of most leaders forces you to line up the battalions check by jowl, creating the sort of long, unwieldy lines of foot soldiers that Frederick and his contemporaries struggled so hard to manoeuvre. A line of infantry, if enfiladed, is truly scuppered, which further emphasises Frederick's tactical ability in that he was able to do it so often.

Don't despair though; the cavalry is re-assuringly Napoleonic, complete with dragoons, cuirassiers, hussars, and even Cossacks in a typically useless battlefield role. The horsemen, too, have a wide variety of available formations. Attack column packs a wallop but is very vulnerable to fire, while a line of cavalry- the Prussians have some hussar regiments that can stretch out for six or more hexes in line- can knock a huge gap in a disordered line of infantry. An interesting debate developed after Kolin about infantry's capability to form square. They didn't form square in those days, preferring to face the horse in manly lines, said some; square was not uncommon in emergencies, said others.

Dangel comes down, correctly I think, as distinctly pro-square, saying in his Designer Notes that square was used by both sides at Kolin, as a last resort, true, but to leave it out would be incorrect. Nice to see a designer stick to his guns like that, and it's an effective game indeed that creates this sort of discussion. Combat is a bloody affair, loaded as you'd expect with waves of fire and morale checks. Attackers move adjacent and fire, defender returns fire, resolve morale checks. Attacker may declare close combat, resolve morale checks, defender may reaction fire.

Cavalry Charging

If cavalry is charging, try to form square. Resolve close combat, perform all morale checks required by combat results. If attacker or defender runs away, morale check for all friendly units they rout through. Like a cardboard minuet it goes on, step by step, to the rhythm of rumbling dice.

Units are given a close combat rating to reflect their ferocity with the sword and bayonet, ranging from the measly +1 of the Cossacks to the ferocious +6 of the Prussian Guard types. Resolving shock is quite involved, requiring the calculation of combat value from a host of factors, including morale state, formation, and the number of hexes charged (if cavalry). Casualties from shock are heavy for both attacker and defender, with the possibility of one side surrendering entirely being far from remote.

So combat tends to be short, sharp, and usually quite decisive-- none of the hours-long gun battles from A Famous Victory here. I find this accurate, as once all the preliminary manoeuvring was finished, the actual clash of arms in Frederick's battles were fairly short. Duffy writes that at Zorndorf, Manteuffel's wing hit the Russians at 11:15, and by high noon had broken and fled the field after taking huge casualties. There was a respite, then at 3:00 they started up again, paused at 6:00, then at 7:00 fought some more until darkness brought an end to it. A long day, with short bursts of fighting broken up by longer periods to rest and regroup. Zorndorf does a good job of modelling this, as a wing-sized assault, even if successful, leaves you with many battalions at half-strength or lower, out of position, and out of command, forcing you to pause, re-group, and move up reserves before going on.

One of Dangel's innovations is the Special Result, both one of the more creative and frustrating elements in the system. He has moved to using two ten-siders for almost all of his die-rolls, thankfully abandoning La Bataille's two sixes, and whenever a zero is rolled in most situations a Special Result table is to be consulted to drop an unusual result on the offending player. Creative, because it's a clever way to work stuff like obscuring high crops, smoke and dust, and the Russian commander fleeing the field into the game-- my favourite is the Oh Scheiss!' morale check result, when everyone adjacent to the original unit must check and see if they don't suddenly decide to be somewhere else.

It also makes things more chancy, so that no combat is entirely certain of victory, as I found out when I watched a regiment of Cossacks suddenly turn on and rout the Prussian Garde du Corps. Frustrating, in that statistically they happen too often- 10% of the time is about 5% too often for me- and for some units, like the aforementioned Gardes with a morale of 12, the only time they miss a morale check is when they roll a zero, so they either stand fast or trigger some awful morale check Special Result. Sort of an all or nothing situation. Some house rules are in order here, I'd say.

Lovely Maps and Counters

"But when, when, is he going to mention those lovely maps and counters?" you cry. Since every Clash of Arms review begins with raptures about the wonderful artwork, I thought I'd change the order a little, but I can't put it off any longer. They are in their glory here, with particularly striking work by the multi-talented Mr. Dangel on the counters that includes great uniform detail, from sputtering grenades for the grenadiers and tall caps on the fusiliers to the red waistcoats worn by the Russians, who historically had taken off their greatcoats due to the heat, so that Frederick was facing an enemy mass in red rather than the usual Russian green.

One criticism of the counters in La Bataille was that it was impossible to figure out which command a unit belonged to, not a problem in the traditional game since command isn't an issue, but a real nightmare when trying to work your own home-grown command rules-- it got so bad in Eylau that I had to re-do all of the counters myself. Dangel has overcome this in Zorndorf with a nice system of alphanumeric codes on the units and leaders.

The Rick Barber maps are just swell, too, with a Clash of Arms tactical game attempting- finally- to work with a system of terrain elevations instead of the generic "hill" hexes that La Bataille lifted straight from miniatures.

What Mr. Dangel has given us is a system with great depth and detail, that requires a significant investment of time and space to learn and use properly. The full Zorndorf battlefield requires three maps, which takes up both of my card tables with a little overlap on each side (much like a gamer's waistline). Shorter scenarios are available, including one where you can play the full battle on two maps, at the expense of giving the Russians the Grand Canyon to protect their left flank.

So, what do you get in return for your investment ? The best comparison, I think, is with the Fontenoy system first seen in Vae Victis # (what issue is that, CV ?), [Number 7 I believe] and used again in Rocroi 1643 in the most recent issue. Zorndorf breaks down every activity on the battlefield into its component parts, requiring constant page turning, card fumbling, and die rolling. Fontenoy is of the macro approach-- stay in your C.O.'s range and you can move whither you want, combat is one die-roll, although with many modifiers, while I can honestly say that in Zorndorf each modifier becomes its own series of die-rolls.

Detail

Does all of the immensely greater detail of Zorndorf give you a correspondingly more realistic portrayal of Frederickian combat? I would say, yes. Fontenoy is quite a generic system, one that with minor adjustments should cover just about every battle from the Thirty Years War to Napoleon, without giving you any feel for the period it's covering, quite the reverse of Zorndorf, a veritable primer of Frederickian formations and tactics. Dangel worked closely with Christopher Duffy when doing his research and development, and it shows.

The feel for the period tactics- the savage nature of close-up firefights, devastating charges by heavy horse, tedious manoeuvring of awkward columns and lines of men- seems, based on my own reading of Duffy and Nosworthy, dead on. Infantry in line rules the battlefield, their superiority in firepower outweighing their lack of mobility. Just try moving a few columns of infantry in to attack and watching them get shot to ribbons to learn what I mean.

Although skirmishers don't put in an appearance at Zorndorf, they do in Kolin when the Austrians trot out their Croats and grenzers, and you begin to see the evolution from Marlborough to Napoleon as the effectiveness of skirmishers, particularly under cover, vs. a packed mass of enemy troops becomes apparent. But when weighed against the lack of mass firepower and extreme vulnerability to a cavalry charge, as a player you see why infantry in line remained the preferred formation of the period.

Cavalry charges can be appropriately devastating but can also backfire as well, particularly if you run into a wall of stout infantry or are counter-charged by fresh enemies just as your own horsemen are sitting about gasping, exhausted and depleted after a charge. You can also see that artillery is just starting to move into its own in this period, as the guns grow more manoeuvrable than in Marlborough's day and the use of massed grand batteries becomes a viable battlefield tactic.

Zorndorf particularly revels in the minutiae of close-up fighting. I like seeing the details of combat. Rather than just getting a ATTACKER ROUT result on the Rocroi combat table, I'd like to see what made the attackers rout. Were they unable to push the charge home ? Did the men hesitate at the most critical minute ? Was a close-up blast of defending musketry too great for them? In Zorndorf I found myself hanging over every die-roll to see what happened, while playing Rocroi recently, I did not. I was frustrated by the inconclusive nature of the fighting in Rocroi, where the mid-range combats results are quite desultory. It requires a considerable set of die modifiers- three units ganging up on another, an enfilade attack, and probably a leader's combat bonus, too- to achieve any sort of decisive outcome. When playing Rocroi and two units of about equal size fight each other, you can just about predict the result-- probably nothing, or at most one will retreat a hex. In Zorndorf, with all those dice rolling around, just about anything can happen, and better yet, I can see what that anything was. I will admit that the player's role at Zorndorf is quite schizophrenic, jumping between becoming the King of Prussia ordering wings of his army into motion, and then being quickly demoted to a battalion colonel ordering his men where to shoot. Thoroughly conditioned by many years of La Bataille and Terrible Swift Sword, I don't mind. This is a very personal reaction, but it's what I look for and what keeps bringing me back to spend so many hours with a game like this one.

[CHV: Interesting, many Napoleonic infantry duels, no matter how even, ended decisively with one side clearing off sharpish. Many ACW duels ended up with no result because both sides wisely halted and fired away aimlessly, much the same happpened in our own Civil War ( See the Duke of York's comments on Edgehill). Was the Seven Years War a Musketry Duel or Morale Break war? Back to the books for me. Frank Chadwick used the "someone is going to lose" model for melee in Lobositz and Prague].

By choosing Frederick the Great as its subject, the series unfortunately insures battles of a rather one-sided nature- of his many enemies, only the Austrian Field Marshal Daun seems to have come close to Frederick's talent- where larger but fairly immobile Austrian and Russian armies are forced to squat patiently while the nimbler Prussians dance around them, looking for an open flank to develop, much like watching George Foreman fight Evander Holyfield.

At Zorndorf the more numerous Russians (46,000 vs. 36,000 Prussians) hold a fairly strong position, anchored on both flanks by marshy streams and liberally sprinkled with artillery batteries. Sounds pretty good, huh ? Well, their army is split between solid regulars and a feeble collection of garrison troops and militia called the Observation Corps (neither part of the army talking to the other, of course), they have a fat, juicy baggage train to protect (chances are the Cossacks will loot it anyway, the stinkers), and they are saddled with the dumbest bunch of officers this side of Chechnya.

The Prussian player's first, and most important, task is to decide just how to take on this monster, whether frontally (as Frederick did historically, with disastrous consequences) or by sidling towards one of the flanks. He will have plenty of time to get his forces into place, because given average die-rolling the Prussians will easily be able to move their entire army every turn, while the Russkies will be lucky to stir more than a couple of brigades.

This is quite realistic, of course, the strength of the Russian army being its soldiers' stolid courage rather than its tactical mobility, but that doesn't make it any less dull for the Russian player gloomily watching Frederick get activation after activation, moving his troops around like pieces on a chessboard.

Many of Dangel's mechanisms are inelegant, his combat and formation systems, tedious. As I said earlier, Zorndorf is a game which requires a substantial commitment of time and space. But if you like the tactical detail in which I revel, there may be no other choice. Fontenoy offers a battle from the same period on about the same scale, much faster and easier to play but with a correspondingly generic approach that sacrifices almost all of the particulars that I look for in a tactical game. Until I played Kolin a couple of times I really was not familiar with Frederickian warfare, with how it differed from the days of Marlborough and Napoleon-- now I do. If you are looking to be immersed in period detail, then Zorndorf is for you. If not, you'll be frustrated- as I am sure Charles is- by its microscopic mechanics, and then I would point you towards more streamlined games of the period like Fontenoy, and the older games Lobositz and Prague from GDW.