On the side of the government were two teams, Force A, and Force B, fighting to restore law and order in the land. This was a pop-up guerrilla game... government Force A was commanded by me and Fred Haub, while Force B was under the control of Don Bailey and Tom Elsworth. A day or so before, Don and I had tried the scenario, and the rebels simply ran wild in the jungle, piling up all sorts of Victory Points (VP). The game was designed by Don, based on the pop-up articles he had seen in the REVIEW. The field was laid out on the ping pong table, and there were several bridges, lots of trails, roads, and some 10 towns. The rebels got VP for blowing up bridges, defeating the government forces, starting riots in the towns, knocking off the civilians, etc. The government also had its list of VP, in fact, Force A had its own separate list to track, as did Force B. The goal was to score 25 VP... if either government force went up to 25 VP, the war was won... while if the rebels scored 25 VP over either A or B, the war was lost. The sequence had three key phases in it: (a) A night phase in which, via several charts and the toss of a 10-sided die, the rebels moved across the field, and attacked a town or two, or attacked a government force, if it was co-located at a site. (b) A morning move, in which Force A and B moved toward the guerrilla units. If A or B came across a rebel force, a 10-sided die told of how many rebel units came out to fight. Each guerrilla force was denoted by a small deck of some 5 cards, and the die determined how many cards would be turned up to reveal the rebels' strength. A fire fight would then ensue, and casualties removed from the government units, and noted on the rebel units' data sheets. Thus, as the campaign went on, each side suffered attrition. (c) An afternoon move, which basically duplicated the actions of the morning. During one night move, the rebels induced the inhabitants of one of the towns to riot. Every night move that the riot continued, the guerrillas would collect 3 VP, and so the first morning move after the riot started, Force B sent in troops and tanks to quell the disturbance. It took only one shot from the tank to induce the townies to stop rioting. The tank had a 90mm gun, with a Probability of Hit (POH) of 85 percent. A percentage dice toss below 85 caused one hit on the target, while if the dice toss was extremely low (below half of the 85 percent), then 3 hits would be scored. One shot, one BOOM!, and all the citizens returned to work. Force B, the Bailey/Elsworth force, won the governmental Award Of The Great Warriors for single-handedly defeating the rebel cause. Force A (Haub and Simon) never got off the mark... our Victory Point total first went a wee bit negative, then a wee bit positive, then negative again, and so on. Force B at first was repulsed by the guerrillas... they initially lost an encounter or two... but this merely got their dander up. Then, dander and all, they rolled into a town wherein was located a fairly large rebel force, indicated by a pile of cards, each card denoting a separate guerrilla unit. A toss of a die, and several guerrilla units dared to come out in the open and fight. I should note that in the morning and afternoon turns outlined above, when the die roll indicated that a rebel force exposed itself, the government side could call for outside help. A card from a 'support deck' was drawn, and Force B found that a huge B-52 airstrike was called in on their enemies. All that the men in Force B had to do was to keep their heads down, and mop up whatever was left after the bombs fell. My memory isn't clear on this, but I think the B-52 card specified about 6 bomb drops, each with a POH of 60 percent. This means that percentage dice were tossed 6 times, and tosses of under 30 percent (half of 60) would cause 3 casualties to the rebels. Needless to say, Force B collected quite a few VP that day. All units on the field, rebel and government, were termed 'companies'. Each company was composed of a single stand of 5 figures, and each hit removed one figure. Each figure that was removed constituted a VP for the opposition. Not content with the above rebel wipe-out, Force B did it again. Just before another encounter with the guerrillas, Force B drew its support card, and this one stated that the Air Force once more flew to its assistance... this time, a devastating napalm attack. More casualties for the guerrillas, more VP for Force B. By this time, Force B had accumulated over 25 VP, and the war was over. Force A (Haub and Simon), with zero VP, could only wonder why the Air Force didn't help at all... Back to PW Review February 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