I first spoke of BATTLEGROUND in the March, 2001, issue of the REVIEW. I participated in a scenario depicting an amphibious assault in the Pacific, with lots of 20mm Marines grouped in 10-figure squads. A “buckets of dice” game, with which I wasn’t too impressed. This current scenario supposedly represented a “what-if” engagement taking place during Operation Sealion, the German invasion of England. As the map indicates, two German gliders landed on the field, and out of the town of Little Puttery poured the British defensive force. With Little Puttery in the Southwest corner of the table, the rest of the field was supposed to represent a golf course… I imagine the Germans chose to land there because of the level terrain. BATTLEGROUND (BG) was published years ago by EASY EIGHTS, which has since gone out of business. The rules seem to be focused on 20mm figures, although I remember that the company had an excellent 25mm line of WW2 figures. The BG sequence is card governed. Each unit (squad) on the field has its own card, the cards are assembled into a single deck, and a squad is activated when its card is drawn. With multiple players, the result is (a) a “lurchy” game, as first one unit moves and fires, and then the next unit moves and fires, and so on, and (b) kinda slow moving, since the firing routines, with their buckets of dice, require a wee bit of time to adjudicate. Our umpire, Dewey (not sure of his last name), did a magnificent job in chart reading for both sides and in keeping the game going. When I say “buckets of dice”, take for example, the firing routines of a squad composed of 7 riflemen, one light machine gun (LMG) and 2 submachine gunners (SMG). When the squad is activated by its card draw, I receives 2 actions. It can fire on both, or move on both, or fire and move. Suppose it chooses to fire on both. We go through the following routines for the first volley, tossing 20-sided dice: (a) Each of the 7 riflemen gets 1 die 7 The LMG gets 4 dice 4 Each SMG gets 3 dice 6 That’s a total of 17 dice to be tossed, looking for “hits”. The only parameter affecting the probability of hit is the range. (b) Now that we have the “hits”, we see what type they are. Here, the various modifiers appear… is the target in cover (if so, what type), is the target prone, is the firer wounded, is the firer prone, and so on. And so we toss dice again for every “hit”, and determine the result. It well may be that a “hit” is not really a “hit”, but is sloughed off by this second series of tosses. The results of being hit can encompass ‘light wound’, ‘major wound’, morale check, etc. (c) Now, having determined the results, we have to see which men of the 10-man targeted squad were affected. More dice tossing. (d) Lastly, if any in the targeted squad have to take a morale test, toss another die or two. (e) But we’re not out of it yet… we go through the same routines for the second volley. I took a squad from Little Puttering and had it advance due east, toward Hill #2. When the squad’s card was drawn, it used both its actions to move… at 4 inches per action, it advanced 8 inches per card draw. Hill #2 was some 24 inches to the east, and all went well, when disaster struck. One of Bob Liebl’s German squads had previously dashed out of Glider #1, and ran for Hill #1, where they set up shop. My boys from Little Puttering got about halfway through their journey when Bob’s squad opened up. I mentioned before that the field was supposed to represent a golf course, which meant that, practically speaking, there was no cover… the only protective cover around were Hills #1 and #2. The lads from Little Puttering were caught in the open, and the buckets of dice tossed by Bob were awesome… after two consecutive volleys, two guys made it to Hill #2, and two other survivors had failed a morale check and were madly dashing back to the town. In a sense, the game reminded me of the first time I played Arty Conliffe’s CROSSFIRE (CF). In CF, units have no weapon range restriction… they simply fire LOS across the table… and if you set up a CF scenario without sufficient cover, then whoever moves will die. In BG, rifle range is 60 inches, LMG was about the same, SMG range was 24 inches, and with these ranges, on the level field of the golf course, devoid of cover, then the same results held true here… who dared to move, died. One Abhorrent Note of My Own The game turned out to be a Class AAA Abomination. Little colored pipe cleaner rings were placed on the little 20mm men to indicate their condition… different colors for light wound, for serious wound, for prone, for a man who panicked under fire, for a man whose weapon jammed… these horrible markers were everywhere! As I mentioned, a squad was energized when its card was drawn. But there was another ploy one could use. At the start of a turn, before any cards were drawn, one could announce that a squad was waiting for “opportunity fire”, i.e., on overwatch, and it could fire anytime during the turn, without waiting for its card to be drawn. The disadvantage here was that when it fired, it only had one volley, one action, as opposed to the two it would normally have if it had waited its turn in the que. With the “who dares to move, will die” syndrome in effect, the game evolved into a static encounter. For the most part, units sat and fired at each other. Around Turn #10 or so, it seemed to me that interest was waning, as one participant took to reading a book, two others started a discussion of the game they were going to put on at the next convention, and I, of course, was deep in my note taking. We had 5 participants, and one umpire. When this game is put on at a convention, there’ll probably be two umpires, another German glider (each glider carries 2 squads), and a couple of additional British squads. And if I had my druthers, I’d apply a heckuva lot more terrain items for cover. Back to PW Review March 2002 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com