Crusader is one of those little gems that The Gamers toss out so effortlessly. It is part of their Standard Combat Series (SCS), meaning strategic modernish combat in a simple, straight-forward vein-- Stalingrad Pocket, Afrika, Ardennes, and Yom Kippur are the earlier volumes in the series. If Afrika is the macro version of the North African campaign then Crusader is a micro study of the Allied Crusader Offensive outside Tobruk in November, 1941. The Axis begin with a weak Italian garrison defending the critical bottleneck of Halfaya Pass, another weak force besieging Tobruk, and the 15th Panzer, 21st Panzer, and Ariete divisions covering the 85 miles of sand in-between. Into this vacuum storms the Allied XXX Corps, two armoured (British 2nd and 7th) and three infantry divisions (2nd Zealand, 1st South African and 4th Indian, stay in the tanks and let the wogs get out and walk, that's our motto) strong. (CHV: The Berg Force seem to think the appellation "wog", which is a highly racist and disgusting label, akin to calling a Jew a yid or a kyke, applies to all foreigners as far as the British are concerned. For their information, it was commonly applied to Egyptians (Wily Oriental Gentlemen) and I doubt most troops in the Kiwi and Afrikaner formations would take kindly to its use, or that it was ever be used about them, so let's have no more of this silly stuff please. We return you to Our Man in The Maelstrom with a Splendid Tash and Jodphurs). A swirling, mobile battle followed, which ended with the Tobruk garrison marching forth to strike the Axis rear, and Rommel, his tank forces badly attrited, retreating all the way back to El Agheila. Not a decisive victory - Rommel would be in Tobruk a year later - but the first sign that the Afrika Korps was not invincible. The SCS is the Gamers' attempt to get back to our roots, the SPI games of yore. While the series covers a broad range of scales, from regiments/brigades in Afrika to battalions/companies in Yom Kippur, it has the same constants-- Igo/Hugo sequence of play, loose ZOCs, light on the supply considerations, emphasis on quick play without a without a whole bunch of detail. Crusader uses 2-day turns, 2.5 mile hexes, and battalions. The Gamers are inveterate tinkerers with their rules, and Crusader is the latest revised revision, version 1.6; the fact that designer Dean Essig numbers them means that even more changes are certain. The biggest and most welcome modification is in the Exploitation Phase, in which mechanised and motorised units gain an extra Movement Phase after regular movement and combat. In previous games in the series tankers gained four combat phases per turn; Overrun during Regular Movement, Regular Combat, Overrun during Exploitation Movement, and Exploitation Combat, thus removing them from their tanks and putting them into Imperial Death Stars tearing around the map and destroying enemy planets at will. Removing that Exploitation Combat is key as it reins them in somewhat. They can still attempt Overrun combat, but that can only be performed one stack at a time and allows a strong, entrenched defender to resist the armoured hordes. A Reconstitution rule has been added, too, allowing players to resurrect eliminated units to re-appear in later turns. The Design Notes give a couple of reasons for this. First, units that are destroyed in combat have not just disintegrated, in most cases they have been broken up and need only a period of reorganisation to get back on track; second, it's a sacrifice to the Great God Game Balance to give the Germans the tenacity and sticking power that they demonstrated historically. I'm not sure if I buy this one. Seems to me that a reconstitution rule belongs in a game with a larger scale, say a campaign-level game like Afrika, rather than a battle simulation such as Crusader. If a battalion has been reduced to near-zero combat readiness, is six days all you need to return it to peak form ? As for the second point, if the Germans are being destroyed too easily, then that should tell you that your combat system needs work. Crusader uses the old SPI step-loss method of take a hit, flip; take another hit, you're out. Maybe the Germans should have four steps, not two, or units should be taking losses in friction points (similar to SPI's Fifth Corps) to represent the attritional nature of the battle. Otherwise, reconstitution sounds like a fix tacked on to repair game design errors. And just a word about the zones of control, too. All units with attack strengths greater than zero exert a ZOC, regardless the type of unit or its victims. As you'd expect in the desert, these ZOC's are quite flexible-- you can move from one to another by simply paying a cost in movement points. But this means that foot infantry can hinder tank units, while infiltrating the armoured ZOC's at will, and the deadly German Flak-88 batteries, with attack strengths of zero (but a whopping defence of 8) can only sit idly by as the slowpoke Matilda's lumber past. What we need here are different types of ZOC's based on the exerting unit. (CHV: That's the spirit, if you do not like the game change it). Helpful soul that I am, here goes: Type of ZOC Exerting Unit ZOC Affects Foot ZOC Infantry Units Infantry only Armour ZOC Armoured Units Infantry & Armour Anti-Tank ZOC Anti-tank Units Armour only ZOC effects remain the same, they just don't bond to all units indiscriminately. I would also offer a fix for the combat system. As it stands right now, it's a standard CRT . Units are rated for generalised attack and defence strengths, which for the sake of simplicity replaces specific tank/anti-tank combat effects. For example, the German Flak-88's have the highest defence strength on the map whether they are being attacked by tanks or foot infantry, to whom anti-tank guns represent only a minor obstacle. And unsupported infantry can attack armour without hesitation-- Sergeant Rock, the legendary American comic book hero who would attack a tank armed only with a can opener and a tennis racquet, lives on. So, I think we'll modify the tank & anti-tank counters; instead of attack/defence, these guys will now have anti-tank/armour ratings with anti-personnel strength in the upper right corner next to the unit symbol. The heavily plated by under gunned Matilda would have anti-tank/armour ratings of 2/4, while the lighter Mark IV with a heavier gun gets a 3/3. The anti-tank batteries would depend on the type of gun-- the Flak-88's would weigh in with a fearsome 5/0. To resolve tank combat, both sides roll a 10-sider simultaneously, adding the difference between the opposing anti-tank and armour ratings. A modified roll higher than, say, 8, would be a hit. AT guns would fire first, and the tanks would have to attack them with regular combat using their anti-personnel strengths. Anti-personnel ratings would be 1 for all AT guns, 2's and 3's for the slow British cruisers lacking in machine-guns, somewhat higher like 4's for the better-armed Crusaders and German Mk III's and IV's. Lacking AT ratings, infantry would be forced to stack with armour or AT guns to stop the enemy's tanks, thus requiring true combined-arms tactics. This might have the added bonus of cutting back on the overall losses, thus removing the need for the reconstitution rule, but we need more study to see if this is true. This would obviously require extra research and some spare blank counters. Luckily there is plenty of information available on the tanks used by the various battalions in Crusader from such diverse sources as DAK or Campaign for North Africa or the Avalon Hill Crusader computer game, if you have access to them, or the books by Jackson or Harrison listed in the bibliography. Blank counters can be ordered extremely cheaply from Avalon Hill or Chessex in the States; perhaps CV can suggest where to get them in the UK? I think those two changes would really punch up Crusader's accuracy without a big cost in playability, but I can see that Mr. Essig cut out such detail in a desire to make the game extremely accessible. My suggestions are only part of my relentless search for detail; even without them, this is a fine game. Most of the action takes place in the wide-open space between the bastions of Tobruk and Halfaya Pass, so the situation is extremely fluid. The game is long enough ( 11 turns) and movement allowances for the mobile forces high enough to allow for sudden switches in initiative, spontaneous shifting of attacks and nick-of-time appearance of reserves. Once the armoured forces make contact there is a "grind it out" quality to the fighting as the Allies try to attrit down Rommel's panzers, but the trick for the Axis player is to avoid this fate and keep the battle mobile. When the BROG testers played it, I was Rommel vs. Richard Berg and Jack Polonka as the Allies. Richard grabbed all the Allied tanks for himself, rushed onto the map from the South and immediately piled into the Ariete armoured division hanging out to dry at Bir El Gubi (the normal Allied strategy when played for the first time, I'm told), leaving poor Jack banging away at the Halfaya fortifications with a bunch of Indian footsloggers and no armour. But the Ariete proved to be a resilient bunch, weathering the initial assault and even counter-punching in the following turns. Meanwhile, chuckling at my good fortune, I brought the 21st Panzer down to hit Richard's rear (ahem) and sent the 15th Panzer against the unsupported Indians around Halfaya. Finally hearing Jack's pleas for help, Richard tried to disengage his cruisers only to find the 21st blocking his route east. The Allies did finally break through to Halfaya near the southern map edge (and here was where the attrition really started to hurt the panzers) just when Jack finally realised that I had stripped the Tobruk besiegers of their artillery to bolster the Ariete division and launched a break-out attempt with the Tobruk garrison, forcing me to divert the Ariete and 21st Panzer and commit my emergency reinforcements (an Italian armoured group, at a cost in victory points) to stuff the garrison back into their trenches. Meanwhile, Richard had rescued the Indians and finally captured Halfaya Pass, and the game ended with him struggling vainly to fight his way past the 15th Panzer around Hafid Ridge. While I lost the Pass I had maintained the siege of Tobruk and held onto enough VP hexes to gain an Axis Minor Victory, much to my surprise. As you can see the game was very fluid, sweeping from Bir El Gubi to Halfaya and back again, and a real test for players attempting to utilise the best combined-arms tactics. Do we have here the ideal low-complexity WWII system, a suitable heir to Panzergruppe Guderian? I think so. If not, at least you have something to do during your opponent's player-turn in DAK. Back to Perfidious Albion #96 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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