I think it was in early ’98 that I described a WW2 ‘pop-up’ skirmish game… I had gotten the basic idea from an article by Andrew Mulholland in the magazine WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED, Issue #2, of November, 1987. The game is played solo… you govern your advancing commando force, and the term ‘pop-up’ is used to indicate the opposing German units, the locations of which are randomly seeded throughout the field, and which, each turn, suddenly materialize to oppose your troops. Recently, my interest in the game was revitalized by an exchange of correspondence which I read on the YAHOO e-group wargame internet site, a group devoted to the skirmish game CHARLIE COMPANY (CC). In my original game, as I played it, the defending German troops were stationary, non-moving. After they popped up, they’d fire and melee when attacked, but they couldn’t move. And so they remained immobile, continually taking losses, until they died in place. In the CC correspondence, one fella described his method of conducting and running his CC game. Evidently, CC is also a ‘one-sided’ game… the players control their units, moving from site to site, while the umpire runs the pop-up opposition, which tries to halt the advance. The umpire’s units were not static… before the game, he pre-programmed their movement. Thus, for example, on Turn 4, he’d say, referring to his list, that Squad A was leaving its bunker and moving into the woods. In the past, prior to his pre-programming unit movement, he’d sort of ‘winged it’ during an encounter, having a unit pop up here, and another unit appear there, and yet another unit fire over there, and so on. He went to the pre-programming procedure because on occasion, a player would accuse him of making it difficult for that player to achieve his victory conditions, while, at the same time, the player would claim that the free kriegspiel efforts of the umpire would be ‘taking it easy’ on an opposing player. By pre-programming unit movement and action, the umpire could easily prove, by showing the list of actions he had noted down before the game, that he wasn’t taking it easy on one player at the expense of another, that he was going according to plan. I thought the pre-programming ploy was rather clever, and I decided to implement it in a skirmish game. I commanded 10 commando squads, whose objective it was to blow up a certain number of ammo bunkers (there were 5 on the field) and then exit the field on the opposite baseline. Arrayed against my commandos were 12 German pop-up squads, which I randomly placed to guard the commandos’ objectives. Eight of the German squads were infantry, and 4 of them were heavy machine gun squads. Then, before the game began, I prepared a list of German movement… for example, one of the listed items could be “any German squad located in the woods at Position 8, will move 15 inches toward the bunker at Position 3”. The list, comprised of around a dozen separate items, was drawn up before I had diced for the actual positions of the German units. This method provided two unknowns, which, to me as the solo player, added a wee bit of interest to the proceedings. First, there was a phase each turn, during which I’d dice to see which, if any, of the movement listings would be activated. Second, having selected the position of interest, I’d go to the particular location and determine if, indeed, there was a German unit there. If not, I’d go to the next phase. But if so, the German unit in question would move out. Occasionally, a German squad would leave cover and dash out into the open… why?… you’ll have to ask the German commander. I had tried to make the German movement as “logical” as possible, i.e., their squads, initially placed in a woods or on some outlying hill, would try to make for a nearby bunker rather than just to dash out on the open, defying the commandos to hit them. It turned out that as the game went on, due to the swings on the battle field, sometimes the movements made sense, but sometimes not. Armed with the rules, with the movement listings and with several dice, I started the game. To determine the entry point of each of my commando squads, I selected a squad, tossed a 20-sided die, multiplied by 3, and that was the distance from my left flank that the squad appeared. The first toss was a 14, and 14 multiplied by 3 is 42, hence my first squad appeared 42 inches from the left side of the field. Each regular infantry squad, commando or German, was composed of 3 figures… I used my 40mm Merten collection of plastic troops. My commandos had no heavy machine guns, while the Germans did. Each German heavy MG squad was composed of 2 figures. In their inventory, the Germans had two elite infantry squads, and as luck would have it, both of these appeared quite near the commandos’ baseline… German Squad A was hidden in a small wooded copse of trees, while Squad B was behind a pile of rocks. Elite units had 4 men in them, as contrasted with the regular 3. The number of men in a squad affected its firing capability. In an infantry squad, each man contributed 20 fire points In a heavy MG squad, each man contributed 35 points. Thus, according to the above, a regular infantry squad of 3 men would fire with 60 fire points. These points would be added to a percentage dice throw, and the following table consulted: 1 to 100 : No effect 101 to 130 : Target squad is suppressed, receives a casualty marker. A suppressed squad cannot move, but can still fire with a penalty. One of the phases in the sequence provided for removal of the casualty/suppressed markers. More than a single suppression marker meant bad things for the squad. When a squad accumulated 2 or more markers, there was a chance the entire squad was destroyed. Over 130 : Target squad is reduced in strength, loses one of its men On the above table, a 3-man squad, therefore, to have an impact on a target, using its 60 fire points, had to total over 100, i.e., toss more than 40 on its dice. Another way of saying this is that the 3-man squad had a 60 percent chance to produce an impact. Elite squads, starting out with 80 fire points, had an 80 percent chance to produce an impact. It took about 5 turns for the commandos to eliminate the 2 German up-front elites. When I diced for the initial position of the commando squads, it seemed that most of them entered the field near the German elite positions, so I couldn’t simply ignore the elites and go around them. And before the 2 German squads were destroyed, they had taken out 6 commandos, a fifth of the total force. I continued with this first scenario for around 8 turns, and decided that my commandos weren’t going anywhere. Essentially, there was not enough commando movement and there was too much German firing. And a third problem manifested itself… remember that there were 12 German squads pitted against the 10 for the commandos. My reason for doing this was that I was gambling that during the German activation phases, when I tossed dice to see which German units would appear, not all of the 12 squads would show up, that several of them would lie dormant for the entire scenario. The gamble didn’t pay off… every cotton pickin’ German squad popped up and took its toll. In the second scenario, instead of dicing for the entering positions for the commando squads, I started them out on the baseline wherever they were needed. After all, I was the commando leader… and surely I could do with my own troops as I wanted? Commando Squad 1 advanced 10 inches upfield toward a bunker on my left flank. A wee bit of dice throwing and not only was the bunker defended, but it turned out that the German commander had placed a heavy MG nearby. Both units fired at Squad 1, which (a) lost a man, it was now down to 2 men, and (b) took one casualty marker, indicating it was pinned, and couldn’t move. I started out the bulk of my commando squads on my right flank… there was juicy ammo bunker near the baseline, which turned out to be not-so-juicy. Once again the German commander had outsmarted me… he had placed a German elite squad of 4 men in the bunker and reinforced them with a heavy MG crew. These guys drove off two close assaults by the commandos before I wiped them out. If a German unit lost a close assault combat, it was destroyed and removed from the field. If a commando squad lost a combat, it fell back 10 inches, lost one man, and received a pinning (casualty) marker. There were three separate phases within the sequence of the bound wherein the Germans could “do something”. One was the fire phase which I previously described… all activated German units could fire. Another was the ‘pop up’ phase. Here, I referred to a chart which told me which German units appeared and where. And a third phase in which one German unit was selected (by dicing) and, via a chart (more dicing), given orders to move… and, perhaps, to fire. Note that on this third phase, I gave up the idea of pre-programming any German movement, instead reverting to a chart which randomly selected a German unit, and then told it to advance or fall back or to fire. This seemed to work as well as the movement system employed in the first game. It was on the commando movement phase that a commando squad, located next to a bunker, could plunk down its explosives, and move away its 10 inch distance. Later in the sequence was the “did-the-explosives-go-off” phase… and here, there was an 80 percent chance the bunker was destroyed. If not, the commandos had to return on their next move phase, set the explosives again, and hope for a better result. I mentioned that the first of my squads to enter the field, Squad 1, had immediately taken casualties and was pinned down with its casualty marker. The very last phase of the sequence was one for removal of these pinning markers. Each casualty marker on a squad had to be ‘rolled off’… each had a 50 percent chance to be removed. If not successful, the marker remained and the squad stayed immobile. Continually under fire and unable to move, the unfortunate Squad 1 kept piling up its markers… it couldn’t seem to dice off any of them, and remained in the open, and collected more markers, until it simply vanished under the weight of the enemy fire. One marker was bad enough, rendering a squad immobile, but with 2 or more markers, there was a chance the entire squad was destroyed. The presence of 2 markers yielded a 20 percent chance of destruction, 3 markers yielded 30 percent, 4 gave 40 percent, and so on. This meant that the very first “roll off” for a casualty marker was quite important, since if the squad couldn’t get rid of this first marker, it would start to dice for its destruction as soon as it received its second marker. While Commando Squad 1 was the only one of my units to be destroyed by the accumulation of markers, 2 of the German squads fell victim to it. Losing those #$%^&! casualty/pinning markers was much more important to me than to the Germans, since their force was essentially static. In contrast, my commandos not only had to advance up the field, blowing up bunkers, but they had to exit on the opposite baseline. Six of the 10 commando squads advanced up the right side of the field. Three went up the center, while, as I stated, Squad 1 took it on the chin on the left flank. I debated with myself for a minute, trying to decide whether or not to reinforce Squad 1, but finally came to the opinion that there was no way I could save it, caught as it was in the open. I rationalized its loss by stating in my official report to Commando Headquarters that the men of Squad 1 valiantly held the left flank, keeping several enemy units occupied and thus preventing them from interfering with the main force’s objectives. Only 2 of the 12 defending German units (both infantry) failed to pop up during the encounter. Of the 4 German heavy MG units, all appeared, and I am proud to say that my boys wiped out 3 of the MG nests, plus another 3 infantry squads, and blew up 4 of the 5 bunkers. Heavy losses, though. Of the 30 commandos (10 squads, each with 3 men), 15 lived to tell the tale. In all, not a bad affair. Not the most complex set of rules, nothing mind bending, and an entertaining game - for me, at least - taking a little over 2 hours. Back to PW Review August 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