It was late Saturday afternoon at the last Cold Wars convention, and Simon, Haub and Sirk had nothing to do; always a recipe for trouble. Terry said he had a 30mm skirmish game in the car, and I said, "bring'er in and lets play". And in a few minutes, before our very eyes, appeared Fort Krupp, a defensive outwork of an unspecified Austrian city. This Napoleonic skirmish pitted 25 Austrian infantry, stationed in the fort, against Simon's French force of about 40 infantry, armed with ladders and grenades. Terry acted as referee. The fort was positioned in the middle of the table. At one end of the table was the French trench, full of troops waiting to attack the fort. What was interesting about the game was Terry's rules. Every figure was tracked on a roster, a long column of numbers from one to ten. All numbers, except the first, a morale number, were rolled for at the beginning of the game. This gave random values that were used as actions during the game. It took two actions to fire, eight to reload, and one for each inch of movement. For each figure, you chose from the list of values the number of actions you wanted for that turn. This meant you had to make a choice whether to use up the large values first, and therefore suffer with few actions per figure during the second half of the game, or be more judicious and save some of the big numbers for later. To calculate fire, Terry used "the stick of death", as described in Wally's article. This created a nice, random affect. Most shots missed, and those that hit, often struck another target in the area. This was how I was able to shoot up Wally's troops in a goodly way. They all debouched from the end of the trench, so I had a nice, tight little mass of targets to aim at. So if a shot missed a figure, it generally hit one nearby. Wally's troops went down in small swaths. Six went down on the first Austrian volley (some lucky die rolling here), three went down on the second, and three more on the third. Simon's attack quickly turned into a wreck, except for two grenadiers with a ladder who couldn't be hit. They kept coming and coming and everyone else around them died like flies. These were charmed men until they reached the wall of the fort. Terry cried out, "forget about the ladder and throw the grenade". So Simon took a percentage die in hand, and with a minus 3, rolled to see how far into the fort the grenade would fly. It didn't. Wally rolled a "1" and the grenade exploded on the head of the first grenadier. Then Wally rolled to see how many fragments were created by the exploding shelf. It created one fragment which killed the second grenadier. There were grenadier parts flying every where. Thus there was an abrupt end to the two grenadiers and the French attack. Overall, it was an interesting game even though the record keeping was a chore at best. My thanks to Mr. Sirk for always coming up with new and innovative ideas. Back to PW Review April 1997 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 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