Thus far, six battles have been fought on Ishtar Island. The rebels, known as the Brotherhood of Love (BOL) have won xxx of them… they now hold xx of the total xxx sectors on the island. The Local Government (LG) has been singulary unsuccessful in putting down the uprising. This is essentialy a solo campaign and perhaps I’ve been too restrictive in setting out the size of the LG forces. Each time they do battle with the BOL, the LG starts out with 10 units… and depending upon the rules used (it varies from battle to battle), each unit can be either 1 or 2 stands. The BOL force starts out with 9 units, one less than the LG, and I’m beginning to think that the basic single-unit advantage of the LG is just not sufficient to bring law and order to Ishtar. One of the battles was not solo… Terry Sirk and I commanded the LG units, while Bob Hurst and Fred Haub were the rebel commanders. Terry and I divided our 10 stands and entered the field from two of the four sides. Before the battle, while we were “drawing up” our grand-tactical plan of attack, Terry kept saying things like “You be the hammer and I’ll be the anvil…” What hammer? What anvil? This man had read too many military history books… it had twisted his mind. It was a good thing I was there to keep him on the straight and narrow. The defending Hurst/Haub BOL units were spread out amongst some 7 different potential ambush points. If you’ve got rebels, you’ve got to have ambushes, no matter how much it hurts. On Bound #2, Terry sent one of his 1-stand government infantry companies into a woods on the south side of the field… he diced to see if his unit entered the dimly lit wooded area… 70 percent chance to do so… and was successful. And what did he get for his troubles? He got an enemy tank and an enemy infantry company for his troubles, that’s what! In the sequence, after the active side (Terry) moved, the non-active side (the BOL) fired. Each BOL firing stand tossed a 10-sided die… a basic throw of 1-to-7 was a hit. Here, the defending infantry and the defending tank each tossed its die and each scored a hit. When hit, a target crosses out boxes - termed ‘Efficiency Levels’ - and receives a casualty figure. Terry crossed out 2 of his unit’s EL’s (one for each hit)… a loss of 6 EL’s destroys an infantry company… and the infantry took a morale test… it failed, fell back and received another casualty figure. This, plus the 2 figures placed due to the initial 2 hits, gave the unit a total of 3 casualty figures. At the end of the half-bound, there’s a phase wherein every unit on the field which has one or more casualty figures attached, must test for additional damage. When this phase came, Terry’s unit, when it tested, had a poor dice toss, and lost another 3 EL’s. Out of its initial 6 EL’s, therefore, the infantry company had lost 5 in this very first encounter. Terry’s unit seemed to set an example, a bad example, for the remainder of the LG forces. We LG commanders could do nothing right. Another sector of Ishtar Island fallen to the rebels. Back to PW Review July 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon 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