While in England, I played about four or five WWII games. These were mainly of my own derivation, as I wanted to display to the Brits what Simon's latest WWII efforts encompassed. Alas! I'm afraid my rules sets were not greeted with acclaim. For example, the true WWII buff will not settle for the Simple Simon designation of heavy armored weapons as 'light', 'medium,' and 'heavy'. These three categories are simply insufficient in the calculation of firepower. Which means that when I toss off all light weapons as having, say. a probabllity of hit (POH) of 50 percent, the WWII advocate will ask..."But what about the 30mm Grumper? And the 40mm Schtachenblik? And the 45mm Kriegenschein? Are these all to be classified under one category with one POH?" Stubborn fellow that I am, it hasn't yet embarrassed me to repIy "Yes!" WWII Set At Robin Peck's home' he showed me how he had put together a WWII set using an amalgam of procedures taken from STONK by Jim Wallman' from the WRG WWII rules set, and from THE SWORD AND THE FLAME (TSATF). TSATF provided the sequence. A regular 52 card deck was used, and to it were added 4 jokers. Cards are drawn for movement (black and the Germans move a unit, red and the Brits go), untll a joker appears, movement ends, and the fire phase begins. Again, cards are drawn... black for the German firing units, red for British... untll the next joker signals the appearance of the hand-to-hand phase. Then the sequence starts anew. Since the jokers can appear anywhere, any of the movement or firing sequences can be abruptly terminated, surprising both parties. Robin had, with great trouble, pulled out all the potential weaponry and their assoclated offensive and defensive factors from the WRG llstings, so that when the fire phase appeared, one ran down the list, and picked off the required to-hit number. Six-sided dice are used, of course. The 75L46 hits on a 3,4,5,6... the 55L52 hits on a 4,5,6... the 46L47 hits on a 5,6... and so on, for all the weapons of WWII. It's all so neatly laid out and 'historically accurate' that, after awhlle, one actually begins to believe that the teensy-weensy 6-sided die can do so much, and cover so much ground! I should note that WRG firing is a 2-phase affair... first, a reference to the table to determine if the target is hit, and second, another table to see if the target is blown up I believe Robin's melee procedures were taken from the STONK rules. When we played a small game, we found we had misinterpreted the rules. I closed with the enemy with some infantry and a tank or two (under STONK and WRG' a tank model represents a single tank), and we added up the plusses and minuses to detemine the outcome, and proceeded from there. later on, Robin, in giving the STONK procedures a closer look, found out that only "assault tanks" gave one a plus... other types of tanks couldn't assist in close-assault. Neither of us understood why the author forbade all tanks except "assault tanks" to participate. Here was discrimination at its utmost! Digression I've often found out, when attempting to amalgate varlous systems from several sets of rules, that if one isn't careful, one ends up with a hodge-podge of conflicting procedures. Which is why... most of the time... when I set up my own rules sets, I start from ground zero, completely generating my own independent system' end after all is pretty much laid out and in place, will, at that time, 'borrow' at most, one or two procedures from someone else's rules as icing on the cake. End of digression. Tanks As I noted before, WRG designates a tank model as a single tank. When hit, it either brews up or recovers. In other simllar scale rules (BREW UP for example) in which a tank is a tank, one can dice to see exactly where the hit occurred... tank tread, gun turret, engine, etc. I like to think of a tank model as representing several (3? 5?... who knows?) vehicles. If hit, the target gets a marker... a puff of cotton smoke ... and the smoke stays with the tank, indicating that there's been a certain amount of damage... exact extent unknown... to the tank. In my current rules systems, I've incorporated a "Damage Assessment" phase... actually, several phases... during the bound. When it comes time to see what the puffs of smoke actually mean, a Damage number for each vehicle with a smoke puff on it is calculated: Damage = 50 + (10 x Number of smoke puffs) Once the Damage factor is determined' the following chart is used: Over Damage: Vehicle has recovered. If more than 1 marker exists, remove all but 1 marker, but if only 1 marker, remove it. Between 1/2 Damage and Damage: Vehicle receives one additional smoke puff Under 1/2 Damage: Vehicle is destroyed Thus' if hit twice (2 smoke puffs on it)' a tank will have (50 + 10x2)' or 70 percent as a Damage factor. A resuItant percentage dice toss below 35, and the tank blows up. Note that 'most of the time' there's a chance the vehicle will recover. With 4 hits on a tank, the Damage factor is 80 percent... there's stlll a 20 percent chance for recovery. With 5 hits on a tank, however, it's definitely in trouble. The Damage factor is now 100 percent' and a percentage dice throw can no longer reach the recovery zone, i.e., be above 100. This type of approach slows down the attrition rate in a game. Three or so tanks constitute a platoon... if they all suffer one or two hits, there's stlll a chance that a couple of them will shrug off their damage with high dice throws and recover completely. And what does shrug off mean? It means that the crew' looking at the puffs of smoke over their vehicle coming from the engine compartment, and sensing impending disaster, quickly leaped out, raised the hood on the engine, used their fire extinguisher, straightened out the Chrysler torque assembly, replaced the main impellor gear, recalibrated the bipartisan braking module... and all this before the next damage assessment phase occurred!! In England, at Robin Peck's house, Tony Hawkins fllled in for one WWII battle. Tony is the Wargames Development Group (WDG) coordinator. WDG puts out the 'NUGGET' which is a very popular publication. Sometime in July, WDG will be hosting its yearly convention. Tony indicated that WDG is now rather "big" on minlatures gaming. In the past, WDG was noted for its committee games--hundred-man macro-level games' i.e., anything with minlatures. In the Hawkins/Simon affair' I was the attacker. I had five tanks, divided into a platoon of 2, and a platoon of 3, plus a couple of infantry units. In previous articles on WWII, I mentioned a set of rules by Dan Balley called COMBAT TEAM. And in this current game, I "borrowed" a wee bit of Dan's firing procedures. Rather than have single tanks firing - a la COMMAND DECISION, SPEARHEAD, CLASH OF ARMS, BATTALLIONS IN CRISIS, and so on - Dan fires his armored vehicle by units... one dice toss for the entire unit to determine target damage, sort of a 'massed volley fire'. I, too, wanted to promote "volley fire" rather than tossing dice for every token on the field. To institute 'fire by unit" I did the following: a. A single tank starts off with a basic probabllity of hit (POH) of 50 percent. b. If the tank fires by itself, i.e., no other tanks fire at the same target, we deduct 10 percent, so that the POH is now 40 percent. c. But if other tanks do fire at the same 'target', 10 percent to the basic 50 percent for every tank firing. What the above means is that with a single tank firing, its POH is 40 percent, but if three tanks fire at the same target, the POH goes up to 50+(3x10), or 80 percent. Each time a tank is 'hit' the dreaded smoke puff is placed on it, awaiting the damage assessment phase to ascertain the extent of the damage. In our battle, things rapidly went downhlll for me. Tony's defending armor quickly inundated my advancing tanks with smoke.puffs. Along came the damage assessment phases, and on just about each one, I lost a tank... resulting from a series of low dice throws on the Damage table shown on the preceding page. With no supporting armor, I tossed in the towel. At Tom Elsworth's house, we had a WWII battle... circa 1943... for possession of the Abbey Puy. Tom, however, had only a small inventory of 20mm armor vehicles... a revision of the rules was obviously required... we didn't have enough to form 3-model platoons. And so this time, we reverted to Plan Z... instead of several vehicles constituting a platoon, a single tank model was declared to be a platoon. Each model had a data sheet listing three parameters: POH 70 65 60 55 50 Vulnerabiliity 3 6 9 12 15 Manpower 7 7 6 5 4 When a vehicle was hit, one complete column was crossed out and the number in the row titled vulnerabiliity was examined; this was the probabllity that the vehicle... the entire platoon...blew up, or was destroyed, or panicked, or rendered inoperative, or withdrew from battle. Percentage dice were thrown, and the test made for the survivabllity of the one-stand unit. Note that as the vehicle /unit takes hits (coIumns are crossed out), its offensive value, the POH of the unit, goes down accordingly Tom's Germans outnumbered the Brits (me), and so I was permitted to set up in cover on the field, whlle Oberkruncher Elsworth's forces appeared on the baseline. First to appear was a German one-stand troop carrier, denoting many troop carriers' and toting a battery of 88mm guns and crew. All heavy weapons fired line-of-sight (LOS) and so the troop carrier moved up 15 inches, and the unit tried to set up the guns. Having moved, there was a 70 percent chance of a second action... the unit failed, and the 88's remained on the trucks. The remainder of the German force appeared, and there followed a British firing phase. A note on the sequence. There were four main phases to the half bound: Side A fires, Side A moves, Side B fires, Close-assault. Nothing revolutionary about this. The entire bound, in flowchart form, looked llke: Close-assault to Card draw to Side A fire to Card Draw to Side A move to Card Draw to Side B fire to Card Draw to Close Assault to Card draw to Side B fire to Card Draw to Side B Move to Card Draw to Side A fire to Card Draw and back to the beginning ( Close-assault). Note that between each of the eight main phases of the sequence' we drew a card. These were 'special effects' cards providing for damage assessment, artillery fire, for reserves, and for what I termed a "commando attack"...(we'll do anything to prop up the game). On the "commando attack" card, one infantry company of 5 stands was permitted to: a. Advance 10 inches into immedlate contact with the enemy b. Strike et the enemy with an approprlate weapon. c. Draw back (70 percent chance) to its original position. Note that if an infantry company left its cover and failed its 70 percent chance to get back, it became stuck out in the open and was llkely to draw all sorts of opposition fire. In the Elsworth/Simon battle, as the Germans came on to the field, my emplaced British units got first fire, firing from ambush. One tank, with a POH of 80 percent easlly scored a hit on an advancing German unit. The target unit then took two tests: a.A column was crossed out on the vehicle's data sheet, and using the Vulnerability number given in the crossed-out column, the unit tossed percentage dice to see if it was destroyed. In this case, the percentage was quite small (3 percent) and the unit survived. b.The unit now took a morale test. All units on the field commenced with a Morale Level (ML) of 80 percent, and deducted 5 percent for every hit incurred. Here, the resultant ML was 75 percent, and the unit passed. One of my infantry companies, consisting of 5 stands, i.e., 5 figures, had been placed in the Abbey Puy. My thought was that whatever I put in the Abbey would draw fire. And so it was. Each hit on the 5-man company eliminated 1 figure, and required a morale test. Two or three hits later, my depleted company failed its test, and fled the Abbey. into the Abbey grounds, a German heavy tank poked out its turret. It then drew fire from my own units, and was forced to withdraw. The Abbey grounds were not the most healthful of sites. As the battle continued, I managed to destroy all the German armor except for one stand, i.e., one platoon, of German armored cars. At this point, Herr Oberkruncher Elsworth tossed it in... his German forces withdrew, and the Abbey was taken over by the British. Back to PW Review May 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