Fred Haub and I visited Dave Waxtel's home in New Jersey during a September weekend. One of our activities was to play a scenario of SPEAR HEAD, a division-level game of WW II. Dave Waxtel publishes SPEAR HEAD (SH). He says it's selling like hot cakes: "Best rules on the market." And he also said that one of the COMMAND DECISION mugwumps wanted to show him the current version of SH's current competitor, COMMAND DECISION III. I tend to toss both SPEAR HEAD (SH) and COMMAND DECISION (CD) in the same barrel. For several years, I avoided WW II gaming. I thought it would be extremely difficult to meld the procedures for infantry with those for armor and heavy weapons. Heavy weapons fire was several orders of magnitude more powerful than small arms fire... and I always had difficulty in coming up with a single system for combining the two. Earlier eras, wherein one man or one unit clobbered opponents with a sword, or tried to stick spears in them, seemed much easier in which to game. The appearance of CD broke the barriers for me. A larger weapon fires, and you use more dice. Or you use a larger dice modifier. How absurdly simple. Surely, I thought, there must be SOMETHING more significant to distinguish the weaponry than simply to toss more dice or use a larger modifier. But CD came off quite well with the WW II wargamers. And it did display the "page-after-page" syndrome so ardently loved by the gamers... page after page of listings of all weapons, and their penetration values, and the armor values of the target... all exceptionally realistically accurate and oh-so-easily simulated by the toss of a single die. My thought was that, if CD could do it in so simple and silly a fashion, and make everyone happy, then so could I with equally-as-silly rules. Then, when SH appeared, I thought that here, perhaps, Arty Conliffe... bolstered by the unique approach to wargaming he had shown in his two previous publications, his rules of earlier eras (TACTICA and ARMATI)... would come up with a system, or systems, which would outshine that of CD. Alas! To my mind, not so. I should note that my British cohorts - as ably represented by Tom Elsworth, who visits me each year - indicate there's no competition in the race between SH and CD... SH leads by at least two, perhaps three, full lengths. It's easier to comprehend, to play and much more rapid a game. Scenario But enough said. Back to the Waxtel SH scenario... I was the German commander... I had two battalions of infantry, each of 12 stands (a stand represents one platoon, and 3 platoons are a company), a couple of infantry half-tracks, and a tank battalion of 12 tank models (each tank represents 5 vehicles). Fred Haub was the defending Russian commander... he had... well, to tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure what he had... but he did have his allotment of T34-85's and lesser armored vehicles, plus some infantry. As I proceeded "up the road" (my mission was to proceed "up the road" and exit off the board) more and more Russian assets kept flailing away at me. Dave kept tight control of the game. My tanks, for example, could first pivot up to 45 degrees, and then proceed for 12 inches in a straight line. No turning after movement. As my recce half-tracks went forward, proceeding around a bend on the road, there suddenly appeared, on their left flank, 3 Russian tanks. The half-tracks, having moved their full distance, weren't permitted to turn and face their ambushers, since turning had to be done prior to movement. Looking at the map, you'll note that my forces, in following the road, were being funneled into a narrow gap between The Woods and The Town. Which meant that my vehicles, entering the gap, (a) had to proceed due north, (b) had to remain facing north, and (c) were unable, on this first move, to turn and face the Russians. Dave was rather strict about this. This was a Russian ambush, he said, and by golly, the Russians were to get in the first shots. Actually, they got in the first two shots. First, as I moved parallel to the road for my full move distance, my tanks presented flanks to the ambushers and I couldn't fire back since I wasn't facing them (tanks have a 45 degree field of fire). Additionally, if units move for the full distance, facing or not, SH prevents units from firing at all. Second, on the next turn, as my German tanks pivoted to face the Russians, the Russians, who didn't need to move, fired again. SH's sequence has non-moving units firing first, after which, if the moving units are still alive, they fire back. Having moved, i.e., pivoted to face, my tanks were second in the sequence. Seeing that passing through the gap was, in effect, running a gauntlet, I simply ordered all my tanks (12 of 'em) to zip through at full speed... I assume the Russians were overjoyed at all the flanks that were suddenly presented to them. My assumption was that not all of my 12 tanks would be hit, even if the Russians got in the first two shots... indeed, there wasn't enough Russian armor around to target every one of my vehicles... hence I'd simply smash through the gap and my surviving tanks, assisted by my infantry, would mop up these Communist, card-carrying, godless, atheistic, socialistic, red-banner-carrying peasants. It was obvious to me that I was following Guderian's smash-and-bash tactics faithfully. Lead With Infantry? Dave, as umpire, didn't like my tactics at all. Lead with your infantry, he said. In fact, he said it some five or six times. I ignored him... he looked like a card-carrying socialist to me, a Russian spy. Why are you leading with your armor?, he kept inquiring. It was apparent that the man had not read Guderian's text DER KREIGBOOM AUF DER TANKENZITTSERS. Why an armor buff hadn't read Guderian's book was beyond me. The text is always at my bedside. Throughout all the firing phases, Dave was our lead chart-reader. When one tank fired on another, he'd look up the to-hit factor of the firing tank and the armor factor of the target and call 'em out. It was noted that in SH, there's no weapon range factor. For example, my anti-tank guns fired for a distance of 18 inches using the same penetration factor at all ranges. And the same for my 12-inch-range big guns. And the same for the 10-inch-range small arms fire. CD procedures, in contrast, have a decreasing penetration factor with range, which makes the chart-referencing procedure all the slower. In the first couple of turns of our encounter, my tanks took heavy losses, and Dave continued to pull his hair out at my unconventional tactics. Finally, my infantry began to get within range. Infantry stands (platoons) move at half the speed of the tanks, and the tank battle in the gap was in full force as the infantry came up. Each infantry platoon-stand has a "bazooka" capability... if it's within 3 inches of an armored vehicle, it can fire. After inadvertently passing quite close to several Russian infantry companies, and sampling the effect of their anti-tank weapons, I managed thereafter to avoid any close encounters between my tanks and the Russian infantry. I should note that SH has a pass-through fire provision, appropriately called the 'disappearing target' effect. The firing phases occur after movement, and if, during its move, a unit passes through the fire zone of a stationary weapon, then that weapon may fire at the target, not where it is, but where it was. I'm not a fan of pass-through fire, even though people say it's a mandatory procedure for an alternative sequence. I was exposed to the system in my games of FIRE AND FURY, the American Civil War rules set, where the pass-through procedure was used. I noted that the players moaned and groaned at pass-through fire, even as they used it... after all, it's in the book, and a rule is a rule. In truth, pass-through fire helped me. Two of the defending Russian tanks tried to shift their positions and, presenting their flanks, passed directly through the fire zone of one of my tanks, which, on the subsequent fire phase, blew one up. After awhile, sheer numbers proved overwhelming against the Russians. Fred Haub seemed to do everything right, in contrast to me, who did everything wrong... but I had enough "throw-away" troops to counter his defensive tactics, however correct they were. As my infantry moved up and I began tossing the infantry hit dice (6-sided) and suppressing or eliminating defending infantry platoons, Dave kept saying:... "Yes, now you're doing it right! Look at how powerful your infantry are, once you get them in battle!" The Russian infantry platoons in the woods had a defensive factor of 6, against my offensive small-arms factor of 5. Subtract 5 from 6, and my platoons had a "-1" modifier to my die tossing. With my "-1" modifier, I couldn't destroy an enemy platoon (a "6" is required), but I could suppress it. And I had so many infantry stands, that I could score multiple suppressions, which eventually resulted in the wipeout of the Russian infantry. 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