In late October, on the 31st to be sure, I presented two games, each of which fell flat. Dead as a doornail. The first game was a huge, table-size area affair, an invasion scenario, of WW II vintage, with armor and aircraft. The second was a British colonial effort, circa 1900. You'd think that by now I'd have learned how to create a balanced scenario. For example, in Scenario #1, the defending forces were set up in some 8 towns sprinkled throughout the field. The defense did this in secret, listing the location of each of their units prior to the first turn, so that the oncoming attackers had to first ferret out the location of the defending units. But in the melee that resulted when an attacking force ran into a defending one, the defenders were not given any "plus" modifiers. Which says that there was really no need for the defenders to hide themselves... they did just as well out in the open. And a second reason for the defending force not hiding in the towns was that the towns were worth nothing... nada... zilch... not only did they not provide any defensive modifiers, but they provided no logistics points of any type... hence there was no reason for protecting them. I had also failed to provide any protective terrain modifiers for the defenders... again, there was no place, nor reason, for them to hide. On the field were two defending divisions, each of five brigades (a brigade consisted of 2 to 4 tokens), and against them, the invading force consisted of three divisions, also of around five brigades. Ordinarily, one would think the ratio of 3:2, attackers-to-defenders, would have produced a satisfactory set-up, but with the lack of defensive modifiers, all that the set-up produced was an unbalanced game and a great deal of unhappiness around the table. Scenario #2 used my 30mm British colonial figures... an attack on a British-held fort by masses of native troops. John Shirey commanded the "masses" making the main assault on the fort. Unfortunately for John, his "masses" were not massive enough... wiped out to a man. The next day, in reviewing the rules, I noted that John's "masses" had been shortchanged. He had an assortment of rifle-toting units which moved 10 inches per bound. But he was also given a number of scimitar-waving assault troops who were supposed to move 20 inches on the bound, but, due to the fact that I didn't read my own rules, were restricted to the 10 inch distance. This meant that since the British rifles reached out to 20 inches, the attacking troops were subject to at least two devastating volleys, maybe three, before they reached the walls of the fort. A second silly item in the set-up (not silly to John Shirey, since his troops suffered because of it) concerned the number of men-per-unit. The rules were set up for 10-figure 'battalions', and unit fire-power was calculated on a per-figure basis. But I noted that I had given the British defenders at least one 18-man unit... and a unit larger than the requisite 10-men was a true killing machine. And I did the same for the cavalry units... each cavalry squadron was supposed - according to the written word - to consist of 5 troopers. And I gave the British 8, overbalancing the combat ability of the unit. Back to PW Review October 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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