My personal opinion of these 'pip' games is well known... avoid them at all cost. There are two basic reasons for this: a. The 'pip' system of movement, wherein you move a number of groups on the field designated by the toss of a 6-sided die, leaves something to be desired. Tossing a couple of low numbers on successive turns, say a "1" or a "2", means that most of your forces sit comatose on the field, unable to do anything despite the proximity of the enemy. To my mind, the thought that suddenly, your entire army is stricken with paralysis on the battlefield, and cannot react to the opposition, is not the way to run a wargame. b. In combat, when two elements (stands) meet, there is a good chance that one or the other will be momentarily driven back and must fall back one stand's width. This is fine if it happens once or twice, but I've seen in these games, that, over and over and over again, two stands bunk heads continuously turn after turn after turn. Despite this continuing combat, neither stand shows any ill effect... there's no provision for fatigue, for lack of endurance, for a diminution of strength. Ben Pecson, a PW member, and (or so I had thought) a devoted DBX gamer, arrived at my house one Saturday in August with two armies set up for the DBA/DBM systems. Lots of Romans, Celts(?) and Celtebarians(?) and Crustations(?) and Carnucians(?) and so forth. Each PW meeting, Ben and his devoted DBX friends retire to one of the meeting rooms and set up their DBX encounters, ignoring the rest of us. Mutiny But now, suddenly... mutiny in the ranks! Ben announced he had a variation to the DBX rules system he wanted to try. When Ben arrived, we set up a battle, Romans versus the other guys, and while Ben had the Roman force, Fred Haub and I commanded the opposition. As Fred and I set up our force, the first thing I noticed was Ben's basing for several of his war-band units. The stands were some 2 inches wide, and about 3 inches in depth. The figures on these stands were set out, roughly, in four ranks, three figures per rank, 12 figures per stand, giving an excellent impression of mass and war-bandedness. I had never seen this basing before for the DBX system (not that I had paid any attention to it) and I thought it rather clever. Now the game began, and Ben announced he was staying away from the pip system of movement, that he had another method. Both Fred and I immediately shielded our eyes, awaiting the thunderbolt that would strike Ben down for his stated heresy... but Zeus, or Somebody Upstairs, must have been asleep at the switch... nothing happened. We then tossed a 6-sided die to determine our unit 'prompting' requirements. The 'prompting' ploy, I think, is a fall-out of the WRG rules (does anyone out there remember the WRG rules?). We both tossed a "1" on the prompting die, and Ben looked up his prompting results table, and stated that, henceforth, during the battle, a unit could move only when a "6" was tossed. "Wait!!" Fred and I shouted in unison. "We're in trouble here!" Ben agreed... his prompting table was a bit much. And so we tossed out the prompting table. Units could move as they liked straight ahead (the distance shown on a 6-sided die for infantry, and a 10-sided die for cavalry). What did remain was a prompting requirement if a unit wanted to deviate from straight-ahead movement. Wheeling a unit required a toss (6-sided die) of anything but a "1" or a "2". This was similar to the CONTROL requirement I had expounded upon in the ancients game we played and which I described in the last issue of the REVIEW... here, too, to deviate from straight-ahead, a unit had to toss less than its CONTROL number. I should note that the CONTROL concept was a Tom Elsworth concept, which he had come up with during a renaissance game in which we engaged at HISTORICON. And now, suddenly, here in August, Ben Pecson independently came up with the same idea. Great minds do think alike. Advance Our forces advanced, and eventually came together in the center of the field, when close combat started. Ben's Romans contacted our war-bands, and the combat dice tossing began. Ben's Roman stands had a Combat Value (CV) of 6, while our war-bands had a CV of 5. We each tossed a 6-sided die to add to the CV, and the high total won. If your total doubled the opposition's, his stand was destroyed. If doubling was not achieved, the lower total fell back about an inch. Note that if the Roman stand tossed a "6", and our stand tossed a "1", the respective totals would be 6+6, or 12 for the Romans, and 5+1, or 6 for us. This was a doubling... and our stand would be removed from the field. Any other result was, essentially a stand-off, and the stand with the lower total fell back. But also note that simultaneous tosses of a Roman "6" and a war-band "1" occur only once out of 36 possible outcomes... a 3% (approximately) chance of happening. What this meant was that, time after time after time, one stand or the other would fall back, and come rushing back into combat, without any apparent lessening in strength. This kept up for some 3 or 4 turns, when Fred Haub suggested a way out of this. Suppose, said Fred, that we decrease the CV of each stand by one point each time it engages in combat. In this manner, for example, after three combats, the Roman 6 becomes a 3, and the war-band 5 becomes a 2... with a relative 3-to-2 CV ratio, the Roman chance of doubling the war-band's total goes up to 19%. After 5 combats, a ratio of 1-to-0 results, and the chance of the Roman doubling is 35%. This made for a much better, more decisive game. Our war-bands, starting with a CV of 5, "tired"... relatively speaking... much more rapidly than did the Romans, and consequently, as the battle continued, more and more of our stands went down before the Roman pressure. The Romans finally broke through in the center, and Fred and I gave up the ghost. Ben, however, ever the diplomatist, stated that in truth, he had lost because of the relative number of Roman stands we had destroyed. Our war-bands had knocked out about a dozen itsy-bitsy, dinky Roman 'psiloi' stands, and these, said Ben, were determinative. We, of course, agreed. Back to PW Review September 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