In 1981 or so, Dave Waxtel offered the SUN NEVER SETS (TSNS). This was a campaign game to generate battles based on the Larry Brom rules THE SWORD AND THE FLAME… our group tried the campaign system (in fact, Dave Waxtel himself came down to run a TSNS effort), but as I remember, we had trouble with it… too many loose ends. Waxtel, who published FIRE AND FURY, SPEARHEAD, ARMATI, and TACTICA, decided not to push the system, and it died. Occasionally, you’d hear of someone resurrecting the rules, but nothing really exciting. In the March, 2000, REVIEW issue, I described a presentation that I set out for the PW crowd, somewhat based on TSNS, but here, too, lots of holes developed, and nothing ever came of it. And so, recently, I was invited to a rerun of TSNS, and was quite curious to see what, if any, changes had been made to the system to improve it. Six players were tableside… in accordance with the system, each player had two conflicting roles. First as a British General commanding troops in far-off Afghanistan or Hong Kong or Burma (there were ten such territories), and second, as a native general in command of the troops in one of the other territories. TSNS has lots of tables to see if the territories become unruly, if uprisings begin, if the natives want to declare independence, and so on. Each player is a Member of Parliament (MP), and each turn, Parliament meets to decide about raising troops, about shipping troops to trouble spots, about disbanding units to save money, and other key issues. When voting time comes, the MPs cast their votes and their decisions are based on two conflicting outlooks: First, as British Generals, they like to get their own troop allotment bolstered to keep the natives in their own territories under control, and Second, as native commanders, they’d like to see as few troops, if any, shipped abroad to fight the native units which they themselves command. And so the wheeling and dealing starts, as each MP tries to convince the others that his cause is the right one to follow. Each MP has one vote, except for the Prime Minister (PM), who has 3 key votes, which can be fairly decisive. Campaign Begins As the campaign began, I served both as PM and as the commander of the native forces in China. Tony Figlia was the commander of the British forces in China, based in Hong Kong. At every meeting of Parliament, I offered a motion to have the British troops in Hong Kong shipped to other places in the Empire, places where trouble seemed to be brewing. If I could get the troops to leave China, my native Chinese forces would, according to the tables, tend to become unruly, rise up, battle the British, throw them out and declare China’s independence. Victory points for me. And for Tony?… that’s his problem. Parliament meets every turn, which represents a month in time. And every turn, when I presented my motion, despite my swing vote as PM, it was voted down. I could persuade no other MPs to support me in my attempt to denude Hong Kong of troops. Fred Haub took charge of the treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Each month, he’d tally our expenses… a long list of 24 items, such as £1500 for every cavalry unit, bribes paid, £100 for each unit that had engaged in combat, £50 for each infantry replacement, and so on. At the beginning of the game, January, we diced for our yearly treasury, which turned out to be £550,000, a fairly low number. We were spending around £50,000 per month, and it looked as if we’d overspend our budget. While serving as financial minister, Fred also commanded the native Zulu forces in South Africa and it turned out that his Zulus were the first to rise up and fight the British. The tables and procedures that governed the political dispositions of the various territories were not the clearest in the world… it took lots of discussion to determine what they meant and how they should be translated. Each turn, a 6-sided die was tossed for each territory, and a toss of 6 indicated potential trouble and that there was a state of unrest in the colony. This condition added a +1 to the next month’s die roll, but you had to total 8 to get to the actual state of an uprising. A single toss of a 6, therefore, wouldn’t do it. You had to get several ‘unrest’ tosses in a row to hotten the pot. As a result, of the 10 territories dotting the map, there were very few trouble spots, and most of the time, most of the players sat back and twiddled their thumbs. Fred’s Zulus lucked out, and managed to beat the odds and attack the British ruling Zulu Land. TSNS is oriented toward table-top battles with THE SWORD AND THE FLAME, (TSATF), and the charts give unit sizes in terms of the number of figures in the 20-man TSATF platoons and armies. Tony had translated the TSATF tables from figures to stands… basically, each clump of 20 figures equaled one stand of 15mm troops for our campaign. And so Fred, after a couple of turns, managed to raise about 10 stands of Zulus, and started dodging the British forces searching for his boys. If the Brits enter an area occupied by natives, only on a role of 5 or 6 on a 6-sided die would they find them and do battle. Fred’s Zulus were holed up in the Zulu capital, and there was lots of discussion as to why the ‘search die’ was even needed, since it was obvious that the Brits would know the natives would defend their capital. It was finally decided that the Zulus were discovered, and the battle began. More problems… the charts said that if the Zulus were defending their capital and were behind works in the capital, they’d get a +2 in combat. The British commander was unhappy: “Whoever heard of the Zulus hiding behind works?… shouldn’t they just attack in the open like normal, everyday Zulus?” Alas! for the British commander… he lost the argument. The battle stands were set out opposite each other on a type of AXIS AND ALLIES (AAA) battle-board. Each stand tossed a 10-sided die, which, if it was less than its strike number, would knock off one opposing stand. Why the switch to 10-sided dice? I have no idea. Bad News for Zulus And now comes the bad news for the Zulus. Normally, with each side possessing firing weapons, they fire simultaneously, thus guarantying that all stands get to strike. But here, with the Zulus brandishing assegais and the Brits firing away, the rules declared that the entire British line would fire away, the Zulu casualties would be removed, and only then would the surviving Zulus strike. This sounds logical enough if you’re playing a TSATF game. The orders of battle set out lots and lots and lots of Zulus to attack the British… odds of, perhaps, 5-to-1 to ensure a balanced game. But somehow, the tables in our game went awry… we had about equal numbers of Zulu and British troops. And when the Brits finished firing, the Zulu nation wept. Fred’s Zulus were massacred… only 1 or 2 stands survived the battle, while the Brits took minimal losses. TSNS states that if a side suffers more than 50 percent losses, it takes a morale test, and if it fails the test, it flees. But if it passes… then what? The Zulus passed their test, and we had another half-hours discussion as to what would happen to the survivors. It was eventually decided that they’d stay hidden in the capital, which meant that the British still didn’t possess this most valuable city, and had to rout the Zulus again. Again, the British commander was unhappy about the decision… and I sort of agreed with him. As I mentioned, trouble spots were slow to develop. We played 12 full turns… each turn being a month, January through December. In Afghanistan (as in the other territories) we rolled the ‘political die’ for Afghanistan 12 times, once a month. Six of the 12 tosses were “6’s”, indicating unrest. Yet troubles never developed in the Afghan territory. The dice just never took off. It seemed to me the tables were far too conservative in assessing the political situation in the territories of the Empire. The only place that gave the Empire trouble via its die rolls was Zulu Land. A problem did crop up in the Transvaal… but that was of our own making. Each month, an event card is drawn, and sometime around July, the card stated that if the Transvaal was annexed, the Empire would receive an additional £80,000 per year. And so British forces entered the Transvaal, and the Boers arose to beat them back. The campaign game commenced at 1000 and we quit around 1700, 7 full hours of gaming time. During that period, only 4 battles were generated, and these were quickly disposed of (about 5 minutes each) with the abbreviated battle-board technique I previously described. Failed To my mind, TSNS failed its purpose. Twenty minutes of battle-time in 7 hours won’t hack it. As PM, I was fairly content, but in September, Tony, evidently unhappy with my constant motions each month before Parliament to remove his troops from Hong Kong, moved to unseat the PM. The vote was taken, the motion passed… and I was out of a job. The very next month, under the new PM, bad news for the Empire… in South Africa, the Zulus just couldn’t be annihilated, and the Boers proved just as hard to conquer. And without a decisive victory against the Boers, the £80,000 addition to the treasury, as promised by the event card, didn’t materialize. I quickly explained to my fellow MPs that since they had taken the post of PM from an old and grizzled veteran (me!), and appointed a virtual newbee, an inexperienced politician, to serve as PM, they got no more than they deserved. You can’t expect a mere boy to do a man’s work. In looking back at the game, I could understand why the system never took off. The “fun” mechanism is, of course, the goings-on at the Parliamentarian meetings, but there’s gotta be something more than that to keep a handful of gamers occupied for the entire day. In my opinion, there was too much nitty-gritty to keep the game flowing. There are 12 charts to be consulted every turn (every month of activity), plus the calculations required to be performed by the treasurer. Events in which the players were interested (uprisings, declaration of war, etc.) happened infrequently, and, most important of all, because the rates of native mobilization and reinforcement were too small, not enough battles were generated to keep everyone at tableside happy. I’d give TSNS a rating of 4 on a scale of 1-to-10. Back to PW Review September 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