BATTLEGROUND (BG) is published by EASY EIGHTS… the rules booklet is well done, in a format measuring 8 ½ by 11. Mike Byrne hosted a 25mm game using the BG rules, which are oriented toward one-on-one skirmish gaming. This review is based on the single scenario we played. The game pitted the Russians (my side) versus the Germans, who were already set up on the field. Our Russian force was to enter, sweep across the field, and destroy everything in sight. My command consisted of a single 10-man squad of Russian infantry (10 figures). I think there were 7 Russian units and 6 German units. A unit was defined to range from a couple of sniping figures to a full 10-man squad to a single tank. Units were activated via a card deck… each unit had one card in a single deck, and when the unit’s card appeared, it could move or fire. I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here… to me, this type of sequence for a multi-player game (there were 6 of us at table-side) is the wussest of the wust. A single deck was used… all the units of both sides had their cards in the deck… this made a 13 card deck for our game. The first turn (all 13 cards being drawn) took us over an hour, the next turn took us 40 minutes, the next 35 minutes and so on. The game lasted for some 6 turns… around 4 hours. This meant that during that time, my unit made 6 moves, and between each move, I had to wait around a half-hour for my card to appear. And so, of course, did everyone else. Lots of thumb-twiddling time. Spotting The spotting rules were, in a word, unusual (weird?). For example, none of the German units were initially visible, and for that matter, none of our Russian units were visible either as they entered upon the table. Each unit, when activated (its card was drawn), was given two spotting attempts. You’d designate an “area” on the field in which your boys were looking, toss a 20-sided die, and if you had chosen the correct area, and your die was low enough, the enemy unit would be spotted and placed on the table. How large was an “area” for spotting?… I have no idea. For example, one of our Russian snipers decided to see if any enemy units were located in a house, around 2 feet away. He tossed a 20-sided die, rolled an 8, and the umpire consulted his spotting chart, and said, yes, someone was in the house, and the German troops were placed therein. My own squad advanced around 30 inches before it was spotted… the squad was spread out, with about an inch between the men (the men themselves had a frontage of around an inch each), giving a total frontage of around 15 inches, and the German spotter tossed his die and saw them. The reason they were spotted was that the opposing player happened to place his hand exactly over my squad as the spotted location. If he had placed his locating hand 5 inches in front of them, or 5 inches in back… no luck. To me, trying to find an exact location didn’t make sense. A more logical procedure would have been for the spotting player to state “My trooper is located in a shell hole, and he’s looking in a southerly direction… does he see anything along his line of sight?” And spotting was time consuming, as our umpire had to consult his charts, correlating the range with the die roll with the size of the target being spotted. In fact, all procedures were time consuming. When my 10-man squad’s card was drawn, each man was given two actions, hence he could fire twice: (a) First, since I had 8 riflemen, I tossed 8 dice, one for each man for his first shot, to see if he “hit”. Low numbers were good numbers. This die roll was solely range dependent… no other modifiers were used. (b) Then, for each hit, I tossed a 20-sider again, looking for “effect”. Again, low numbers were good numbers. This second die was the one modified for target cover. And a high toss here, said that a “hit” that had been indicated on the previous die roll wasn’t really a “hit”, i.e., it had been nullified. I have no idea why cover modifiers weren’t included under the first set of die rolls in step (a), but were confined to the effect rolls. (c) The effect, depending upon the second series of dice rolls, ranged from a “miss” to a “kill” to a “morale check”, to a “light wound”, to a “heavy wound” to a “suppressed”. (d) Now that we know the effects of the volley, we toss again, counting off the men in the target unit, finding out which men in the target unit were impacted. (e) Now, if necessary, the men in the targeted unit that had to take a morale check did so… more dice tossing (f) And now we repeat the entire process of steps (a) through (e) for the second shot of each of my 8 men. (g) But we’re not finished. The remaining 2 men in my squad carried a light machine gun (LMG), and, for each of the two actions, the LMG tossed its own 4 dice. The charts listed seven different types of small arms weapons, ranging from pistols to rifles to SMGs, up to large caliber machine guns. Each of the seven weapons had a completely different list for its effect on the target. For example, tossing a 6 for the effect die produced the following: Pistol target takes a morale check SMG target has light wound Rifle target has heavy wound LMG target has heavy wound MMG target is killed HMG target is killed LCMG target is killed If I had my druthers, tossing the effect die for any weapon, and producing a modified 6, would always produce the same effect, perhaps a light wound. So that once a 6 popped out of the calculations, the player would instantly know a light wound occurred. The various weapons would simply modify the die roll according to their impact. Anti-tank fire was no bargain either. In our scenario, we had a Russian T-34 which, for its two actions, could first load and then fire. If it moved for one, or both, of the actions, its firing capability was sorely reduced. (a) A hit die was tossed to see if the targeted tank was “hit”. (b) If a “hit” occurred, reference was made to a diagram of the target tank. The frontal aspect of the tank was divided into 20 locations… if a flank shot occurred, the flank aspect was also divided into 20 locations, as was the rear. And so a second die was tossed to determine where the hit occurred. This could range from a tread to a sight glass, to an antenna, to a hatchway, and so on. Why 20 locations? Simply because 20-sided dice were used, and the authors were determined to use them. (c) Now that we know where the “hit” occurred, we toss again, referring to two more tables, the first giving the penetration effect of the firing weapon, and the second, the armor value of the location at which the “hit” occurred. Note that all of the above calculations and table lookups were performed by our sole umpire, who did commendably well. Markers The game used a bunch of “tickies”, little markers, to denote when men were pinned, were suppressed, were praying, were prone, etc. Tickies immediately transformed the game into a Class C Abomination. And when a man went prone, I noted that one of the players not only placed a prone tickie beside him, but also tossed the man on his side… a double whammy, a Class B Abomination. Too much! Too much! The game developed into a simple static fire-fight. We Russians had two 10-man squads (one of them mine) which seemed to do all the moving… everyone else on the field stayed put, and simply fired away. My squad advanced 30 inches before it was spotted. And once spotted... disaster!… after 2 rounds of fire, I had 6 of my ten men left, and three of the six survivors were suppressed and crouched down, mumbling to themselves. In terms of a WW2 scenario, with its devastating long range fire power, there’s nothing wrong with this, but it doesn’t make for a good game. One of the ploys I did like was called “raking fire”. In effect, this was “interdicting fire”… a procedure I had seen in Leon Tucker’s skirmish rules, BREW UP, of 25 years ago. At the beginning of the turn, each unit could call out a sector of the field on which its men would focus, and if any movement occurred in that sector, his unit would immediately get “free fire”. In other words, a unit didn’t have to wait until its own card appeared to fire on an enemy unit that moved in the observed sector. This was invaluable for emplaced machine guns, defending a sector and able to instantly blast away at enemy movement during the turn. In essence, I thought that BG tried to do too many things with too many charts and with too many modifiers. But, to my mind, the procedure that produced the most negative impact, was the use of a single action deck, listing all the units on the field. Twenty-five years ago, when I first started investigating card systems, I tried the single-deck approach and quickly abandoned it. Thereafter all of my games used two decks, one for each side, to ensure that at least half the participants were busy at any given time. Back to PW Review December 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