There was an article about a skirmish game in WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED (#166, of July, 2001). In truth, the article was not so much on a skirmish game, but an advertisement for Icon Miniatures. The article was bedecked with photos of Icon figures, each of the four pages of the article had a huge icon for the Icon firm, and in the article, the author, Mike Roberts, stated that for his game, he used Icon’s WW2 skirmish rules, called LANDSER, to be found at the Icon Miniatures website. It appeared that the publisher had told Roberts that if he wrote an article for the magazine, he’d get some freebee publicity for the firm. And Roberts took him at his word. And so I logged onto the Icon Miniatures site... the name of which turned out to be, not "icon.com", but "harlequin-miniatures.com", and I located LANDSER, and downloaded it, for a total of four pages. The author of LANDSER is Nick Eyre, and at first glance, Eyre’s rules set appears to be an outline. For example, there are only six types of weapons listed... the rifle, the SMG, the Light Machine Gun (LMG), the General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG), the Heavy Machine Gun (HMG) and the pistol. Unlike other sets, Eyre doesn’t go through a page-and-a-half of all WW2 weapons to make his rules a complete "source book" for the era, and more power to him, I say. Problems But in my first reading of LANDSER, I saw what, to me, were two problem areas: First, the sequencing consists of: (a) Side A move all troops and fires, (b) close assault is resolved, and (c) Side B does the same thing. Side B, during Side A’s half of the turn, doesn’t normally reply... he has no defensive fire phase prior to resolution of melee in the sequence of alternate movement phases, unless he places his men in what Eyre terms a "covering fire" mode. This is similar to the "overwatch mode" used in the sci-fi games, and it enables a man to fire during the opposing side’s movement phase. Having been placed in overwatch, the man can neither move nor fire in his own half of the turn. In a game played at the skirmish level for WW2, this doesn’t gel... to my mind, there should be some sort of response built into the sequence, some sort of reaction, permitted to Side B, so that he can respond in normal fashion. Second, allied to this is that LANDSER is a pure "gotcha" game. Side A, during his action phase, moves and fires and charges and gangs up on Side B’s men, and poor Side B stands there. LANDSER doesn’t give a maximum number of men permitted to gang up on an enemy trooper... apparently, any number of troopers can attack. It simply states that if the defender beats off the first attacker, the second guy comes in, and if he’s again successful, the third guy comes in, and so on. And in each successive melee, the poor guy is given a "-1" in combat, so that he’ll eventually crumble. Seems to me, that Eyre has got to rethink his sequence. Jim Butters and Cliff Sayr were the opposing commanders in our test encounter for LANDSER. Cliff had 6 riflemen plus an MG, attacking Jim’s defending force, consisting of 4 riflemen and an MG. Jim’s troops were set up in a couple of small houses, and his men could pop up whenever Cliff’s men got too close. The intent was to game LANDSER just as it was written, and then to critique it in terms of its plusses and minuses. On the first turn, the attacking troopers moved forward, and all of Jim’s men, who had been placed in the overwatch mode, opened fire. Cliff’s advancing troops had been in "fast mode", allowing them to run up 7 inches. By moving fast, anyone firing at them got a -1 on his to-hit die roll. The defenders opened fire at a range of 20 inches, termed "long range" in the fire chart. The riflemen needed a toss of 4, 5, or 6 on a 6-sided die to hit. But because the targets were moving fast, and had a negative die-roll modifier, only a 5 or a 6 would strike successfully. Three of the attacking troops were hit, and now we entered the second phase of the hit procedures... i.e., what was the effect on the targeted men? There’s a table which regulates the toss of another die. 1 to 3 : Target goes into "hide mode" 4 to 5 : Light wound 6 : Serious wound All three men tossed low and went into the "hide mode". The term "hide" is awkward... essentially, it means the man is suppressed for one turn. The rules state A soldier... drops to the ground, does not move or fire, and tries to disappear into any hole he can find... If ...(he)... received one "hide" result from firing... (he)... may sneak toward the nearest terrain... There’s a wee bit of confusion here. First, the man does not move, but if you read on, he can "sneak" toward cover. In fact, there’s more confusion. What’s this "sneak" business? The movement chart states that a "sneaking" man can move 2 inches, compared with the fast move of 7 inches, and the text says: "Soldiers who elect to sneak are harder to spot but don’t move as fast." They’re harder to spot? LANDSER has no spotting rules. In fact, there is no negative modifier when firing at a "sneaking" man. And so a "sneaking" fellow is a better target than one who moves fast, who gets a -1 modifier when fired on. Jim and Cliff and I talked ourselves blue, trying to sort out what the rules required. LANDSER turned out to be a "chittie" game. You need chitties next to each man to tell what his movement mode is (fast, normal, sneak), then you need chitties to tell what his status is (in the "hide" mode, in the overwatch mode, does he have a light wound, serious wound), and then you might need a chitty to tell if his weapon is jammed. I tried to do it all with data sheets, but, after a while, it became somewhat confusing. With its 6-sided dice, and its firing modifiers, the LANDSER firing routines quickly run out of pips on the dice. Knowing this, Eyre’s fallback position is that if the modifiers make a shot impossible (about a third of the time in our brief game), you toss a die anyway, and a 6 is a hit. And this time, apply the modifiers to the effect table, so that most of the time, the target goes into "hide". The firing table is also skewed. The MG, at a range of 5 to 30 inches, hits on a die roll of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. Pretty hard to miss unless you can dig up a negative modifier. Sadly, we all shook our collective heads at Eyre’s creation... not quite yet ready for prime time. Back to PW Review April 2001 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 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