I was cleaning up the rec room the other day, and came across several sets of old, old, rules which had been gathering dust for at least 10 years. There were rules by Tony Bath and rules by Don Featherstone, and two sets of rules by a fella named Phil Barker. Jeff Wiltrout appeared a day or so later, and we tried out both of the Barker sets. The first was titled RULES FOR WORLD WAR TWO (NORMANDY) WARGAMES. We'll abbreviate this to NW for ease of reference. These was no date on the NW papers, but they looked like they dated from the mid-sixties. NW is a skirmish game... the text states: "These rules are tailored to the use of AIRFIX figures and models... The unit scale used is one for one, i.e., a section of ten is represented by ten soldier models with the appropriate weapons." Jeff and I set up a very simple scenario... I took ten men, supported by two machine guns, and came on the field, trying to scout a small village of some five houses. Jeff had secretly set out a defensive force of seven men, plus two machine guns. The weapons in the scenario were: Pistol Max range of 3 inches Submachine gun Max range of 12 inches Rifle Max range of 36 inches Machine gun Max range of 72 inches Of interest is the firing procedure, which, Barker said, would use a deck of 160 cards, half of them red, and half black. The cards were to be annotated... 40 of them as "0", 40 annotated "1", another 40 as "2", and the remaining 40 as "3". This was in the days prior to the advent of the percentage die, and the author was forsaking the 6-sided die in favor of a percentage scheme which employed 25 percent increments. For example, when a submachine gun fired, a card was drawn as follows: Up to 3 inches 1, 2, or 3 was a hit 75 percent chance of success From 3 to 12 inches 3 was a hit 25 percent chance of success My ten men advanced through the village and I quickly discovered that it was a death trap. Movement rate per man was 6 inches per turn. Note that a teeny move of 6 inches in the face of a rifle range of 36 inches... machine gun of 72 inches!... bodes ill for the advancing troops. Especially so, when the option for the active side is to either move OR fire, and not both. If hit, a man was wounded, and if hit on a black card draw, the wound was termed a kill. The rules did not state how the wounded man was incapacitated, nor if a second wound killed. We permitted a man with one wound to fight on... but if hit a second time... he was out. The last two pages of the rules contained tables for (a) the penetration, in millimeters, of various heavy weapons, and (b) the hit probability for "wartime tank guns" such as 'probability of hitting a 9 foot high target at 1,000 yards is 37 percent'. Why this was included when the to-hit procedure was based on the card draw system using only 25 percent increments, was rather puzzling. There were no rules for close assault... evidently, with the horrendous casualty rate, Barker didn't envision any troops ever coming close enough to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Jeff and I thought that NW was not really a "set" of rules, but a bare-bones outline, which had never been completed. Oldies But Not Goodies: Napoleonics Back to PW Review December 1999 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 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