Of late, I've been experimenting with a set of "variable" Victory Points (VP) which determine which side comes out on top of any given encounter. The term "variable" is used in contrast to "fixed", since only at the end of the battle does a commander know exactly what he's won. In past games, geographical locations on the table-top have been assigned specific values: that farm is worth 10 VP, the woods over there are 5 VP, while the other woods comes out to only 2 VP, etc. The tabulation is purely subjective in that while you can fairly well judge that a particular objective may be more valuable than another, it's almost impossible to quantize their relative worths, i.e., to determine how much more valuable. If you assign 10 VP to the farm in midfield, and The Crossroads on the left flank is not quite as important as the farm, but still worth "something", do you give the cross-roads 6, 5, or 4 VP? My latest solution to this earth-shaking dilemma is to start out with the most important terrain feature on the table and assign it a VP value of 10 + (10-sided die roll) Which means that it may vary between the bounds of 11 and 20 points. The next most important site is (5 + 10-sided die roll), and so on down the line to features which may be given (10-sided die roll 2). The VP are not permitted to go negative, and so for this last terrain item, there's an 80% chance that it'll be worth a few points at battle's end, and a 20% chance that it's valueless. Given this range of potential VP, the commander may now judge for himself the advisability of concentrating and going for the higher probability items or of spreading his forces out and picking off the lower payoff features. Our current rule is that the VP's go to whomever is the last to "touch on" a terrain item... we don't require a permanent garrison to man each feature throughout the battle. This makes for some interesting initial march patterns on each side as both commanders send out parties to pick up as many of the "cheapies" as they can, before gathering all their forces for the major battle. Back to PW Review November 1988 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1988 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