A battle with 40mm figures. In my presentation, a squad consisted of 3 men, 3 figures. I've never been able to successfully determine if this should be called a skirmish game or a 'small unit' action game. The visual aspect, with small groups of 3 men moving on the field, is at the skirmish level, but the squads take casualties as a whole, and the status of individual men is not tracked. There were two methods of recording casualties on the squads: a. When a squad was hit, it received a casualty figure. This casualty counted as a negative when the squad took a morale test. Three such casualty figures and one man was temporarily removed from the squad and placed in the Rally Zone. b. Each bound, men in the Rally Zone attempted to return to their squads. They each had a 50 percent chance to do so. If they failed the test, they were defined as dead. Note that in this scheme of things, the enemy didn't kill your men... the most he could do was to send your boys to the Rally Zone. Once a man was sent to the Rally Zone, you became responsible for his fate... you either returned him to his unit, or killed him yourself. Ben and Stan faced off in this encounter. The two sides started out with only two squads each, a total of 6 men. Each turn, the active player selected a 'Reinforcement Card'... this deck had 20 cards in it... the cards stated such items as "1 squad appears", or 2 squads appear", or "mortar barrage", and so on. In the scenario, there were 6 houses on the field, plus 4 wooded areas. Each was numbered, 1 through 10. When a reinforcing squad appeared, the side would then toss a 10-sided die to see in which piece of terrain it popped up. Stan was lucky in that one of his cards said that a light machine gunner appeared to help out. But he proved unlucky in that the location die said that the machine gunner and his weapon popped up in a house in which one of Ben's squads was already located. The machine gunner had evidently been hiding in the basement, and chose to look up at the wrong time. The machine gunner fired his weapon, but so enraged the men in Ben's squad that they soon sent him to the Rally Zone. Ben's reinforcement cards proved way superior to Stan's, in that squad after squad seemed to pop up to help out Ben's troops. The one saving factor for Stan was that when Ben diced to see where his pop up units appeared, they seemed to congregate in the boonies, on the outskirts of the village, and so couldn't immediately get into combat and add their fire power to Ben's other units. A couple of the cards stated that a mortar barrage struck the enemy force, or it stepped on a booby trap. While this type of card helped, the cards that were desired were those that provided additional support units. There were only two weapons in the game: rifles, and machines. Each rifleman added 10 percent to his squad's Firepower Points (FP). Thus a 3-man squad totaled 30 FP, a 30 percent chance to hit. But if 2 squads coordinated their fire, the total became 60 FP. And the total increased even more if a machine gun was added in... this yielded another 30 points, for a hit percentage of 90. A maximum of two squads could coordinate their fire, as I didn't want the numbers to get out of hand. In melee, again to reduce the numbers, only the lead two squads initially made contact, and the cards from a Melee Deck were drawn. The annotations on these cards provided for casualties to the engaged squads, and for bringing in a nearby unit for support. We quit after some 8 bounds. Ben's troops had occupied 4 of the 6 village houses... not a grand victory, but sufficient. More Awash Introduction Greek Naval Warfare Modern Gulf War Napoleonic Skirmishing World War II The English Civil War Back to PW Review June 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