There were six of us table-side in this "invade the Pacific island" game. Four of us ran the assaulting Marine squads, while two, familiar with the rules, ran the Japanese troops and acted as umpires.
I commanded 3 of the 12 Marine squads, each of 10 single-mounted 20mm figures, a total of 120 Marines. Although we never got to it, coming in behind the Marines were a buncha tanks and other armor support.
BATTLEGROUND (BG) seems to focus on small unit actions… it would appear to go to pieces with larger scale units. To my mind, the most probable reason is the sequence… a throw back to ON TO RICHMOND, in which movement is governed by a deck of action cards, one card per unit. We Marines, with 12 squads, had 12 cards in the deck, and the defending Japs had 7, making a total of 19 cards in the deck.
Pull a card, read off the unit, and all men in the unit are each given 2 actions. Each man can move twice, or fire twice, or move and fire, and so on. In moving, he can dash up to an enemy and close for contact… immediate contact and resolution of combat. There’s no provision for defensive fire. Worse, BG is a "gotcha" game… you can surround the enemy and smash him to little, itty-bitty pieces, without any response on his side. Once, during the game, one of my squads surrounded an enemy figure, and I managed to get 5 of my guys touching the single Japanese soldier. "Can I get all 5 of my men in melee?" I cried. My blood lust was up, and I wanted to strike out for justice and liberty for all.
Alas! The umpires limited me to a mere 3-men-on-1 "gotcha". Very disappointing.
B>The Island
The island map, as laid out on the table, was about 4 feet across, and some 8 feet long. The Marines were to land along one of the long sides, all 120 of us. The entire island was defined as light woods, and to portray this, there were lots and lots and lots of palm trees stuck in lots and lots and lots of little holes in the island… too many, I thought, since each time I moved my troops, I had to uproot a couple of trees to get them out of the way. And, after I moved, I replanted the trees.
Running parallel to the long side of the island, along the center, was an airfield, a strip about 9 inches wide, and 8 feet long… this was the Marines objective. To get to the airstrip, the Marines had to forge through some 3 feet of palm trees. Unopposed, the Marines could move 4 inches per action, and with 2 actions could advance 8 inches in all, but we had to use many of our actions for firing at the defenders, and we were greatly slowed down. Drawing a card and activating one unit at a time leads to a "lurchy" sequence, and so was it here. In my squads, there were riflemen and a guy with a BAR, and a guy with a bazooka, and a guy with a heavy machine gun, and a guy with a submachine gun, and so on. When one of my cards was drawn, all these guys could move and fire, and the draw of another card was held up until the firing results were adjudicated.
The rules set AGE OF REASON (AOR) also uses a card deck with one card for each unit. In the AOR sequence, pull a card, move the appropriate unit, and only after all units have had a chance to move, i.e., the complete deck is run through, it is then that the firing procedures are called into play. I’m not a fan of either sequence, the one for AOR or the one we were using for BG… but the BG sequence, since it intermixed movement and firing, seemed to be more time consuming. All BG combat uses 20-sided dice, and the firing procedures require 2 tosses per man firing. First, see if you hit the target, and second, for each hit, determine the effect on the target.
Riflemen can fire twice for each action they receive, and so if they remain immobile and use both actions to fire, they’ll fire 4 times, i.e., toss 4 dice. On the wooded island, most of the firing was well under 12 inches. According to a table hung on the wall, a 6 or less on the 20-sided hit die, was needed to hit a guy in light woods. Evidently, I didn’t understand the chart, because my Marines were zapping the enemy with tosses of 12 or less, giving them around a 50 percent chance to hit. It may have been because most of the firing occurred at "point blank" range (3 inches?), but I’m not sure. Once a rifleman hits, the following Effects Table is looked at:
| Die Roll | Result |
|---|---|
| 1,2,3 | Kill |
| 4,5 | Heavy wound |
| 6,7,8 | Light wound |
| 9,10,11 | Morale check |
| 12,13,14 | Target suppressed |
| 15 and up | No effect |
Note that a lousy "effect" toss, a high toss, even though you thought you had hit a guy, produces "no effect". Seems to me there should have been some sort of a filter built into the numbers, and the "no effect" result done away with.
When machine guns fire, there’s a similar Effects Table, but there’s one additional result added. A low toss not only results in a kill, but it results in a "gory death"! All the members of the affected squad now take a morale check. When one of their buddies undergoes a "gory death", and they see a head go this way, and a leg go that way, and an arm go the other way, the entire squad has second thoughts about staying in place.
I’m not sure what the Japanese morale level was, but I think the Marines needed a toss of under 15 or so on the 20-sided die to sit still.
And I must note that the game quickly became a Class AAA Abomination. Here were all these nicely painted 20mm figures, and when they were hit, they received horrible garlands of colored pipe cleaners around their necks. Looking at the above Effects Table, you needed markers for the status of each man… red for a serious wound, or yellow for suppression, and so on. And if a man tossed a 20 on his firing die, his gun was jammed… he was gifted with a black garland of flowers. For me, the entire visual effect was spoiled… surely, there’s a better way…
Oh well, at least I didn’t see a single casualty cap.
I mentioned that when a rifleman fired, he tossed 2 dice. When a machine gun or a BAR fired, it tossed 3 dice… thus if a BAR-toting man fired twice, he’d toss 6 20-side dice.
Battle in Progress
When I first arrived, a test battle was in progress, and after a turn or so, the umpires decided to begin anew, and the field was cleared and the Marines placed in their landing craft on the beaches. In this new game, as the cards for the Marine squads were drawn, each squad tried to climb out of its landing craft and run up the beach.
One of my squads, call it Squad A, decided to sit in its tracked landing craft for 2 of its card draws, i.e., wasting valuable assault time. To get the tracked landing vehicle up on the beach, the driver had to pass a morale test… he couldn’t toss his required low morale throw.
He simply sat at beach side. When he failed a second toss, I decided to have the squad jump out of the vehicle and wade ashore, but they, too, couldn’t pass the requisite morale test.
With 19 cards in the action deck, Squad A just sat there for 2 complete bounds, and each time its card came up, once each bound, it refused to budge. This was no way for a bunch of trained Marines to act! Finally, Squad A got its act together, disembarked and went inland.
When a squad’s card came up, it could call in for an off-board bombardment, presumably from the big ships waiting off-shore. The umpires had placed washers on the field, denoting where the "hidden" Japanese troops were located, and I asked for a barrage directly on a couple of washers in my path. The umpire tossed a number of dice, and evidently the barrage was successful, since he removed the washers.
The first turn, a run-through of the 19-card deck, took 20 minutes. There wasn’t a lot of firing, and most of the time was spent in the participants asking many questions and having the Marines jump out of their vehicles.
For the second turn, the run-through took 35 minutes. The third run-through took an hour, as both sides traded lots of fire.
Note that my Squad A, sitting in its vehicle for the first 2 turns, sat there for 55 minutes of game time… and it was only when we were into 20 minutes of the third turn, that Squad A’s card appeared again and it was able to get into action.
Many things happened with which I couldn’t keep up. For example, suddenly a Japanese officer leapt out of a redoubt and savagely attacked a Marine BAR-man, chippy-chopping him into little pieces. I never found out what excited the officer so, but the other Marines in the squad took their vengeance out on the Japanese fanatic. Definitely a "gory death!"
The umpire decreed that one Marine, while traipsing through the jungle, fell into a "punji pit", was impaled on stakes, and was seen no more. I never found out how or why the "punji pit" ploy was triggered.
"Were there punji pits in the Pacific island battles?" I asked.
"Certainly!" replied the umpire, and that was that.
As my squads advanced, they came across what I thought was a small white building, and I assigned one of my machine gun crews to sit atop the building and zap whatever they could see. All the while, the rest of my men were under intense enemy fire. I asked the umpire from where all the enemy fire was originating.
It turned out that the white building on which my MG crew was perched was a concrete Japanese bunker filled with nasty, nasty people. I waited until the next card draw of one of my squads, and I ordered a couple of Marines to approach the bunker and toss in several grenades. Again, the umpire tossed a couple of dice, and although I was not privy to the calculations, the result was that the nasties were gone.
Alas! Due to the colored garlands bedecking the troops, the lurchy card system of movement, and the "gotcha" effect, i.e., the lack of defensive response in the sequence, BG is not my favorite set of rules. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if far fewer figures had been used in the scenario… as it was, I thought the rules system was being stretched to the limit.
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© Copyright 2001 Wally Simon
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