Bob and Cleo Liebl hosted a game for nine people... Bob had accumulated an assortment of 25mm Amazons, and the game pitted several bunches of nekkid wimmin against each other. All figures were single mounted, and unit size varied from about 6 figures to 16. It was around Bound #3 that the term, the "sleazy move", was first heard. Now, I must immediately step back and deny, under oath in open court, that I did not coin the term myself... so help me, it be one of the other guys. In the past, I've written about 'sleazy movement', but I've always referred to it under what I term the "Gotcha!" effect. The "Gotcha!" effect arises from the fact that many wargames employ alternate movement systems. The active side shouts "Gotcha!" and runs and fires and changes formation and moves and melees without any response, any reaction, from the non-active side. The little guys of the non-active side merely stand there and wince, and take it on the chin, and hope they'll survive for the next turn, when they'll be on the active side. In our Amazon game, 'sleazy moves' were discussed quite openly, and each side tried to make optimum use of the ploy. Let me go through the details of a typical 'sleazy move': (a) You've got a 10-man unit within 6 inches of a 7-man enemy unit. Your movement distance is 12 inches, so there's lots of room for maneuver. (b) It's the melee phase, and you now start to place your men in contact with the enemy unit... the rules state that "only men in contact can participate in melee", and so you'd like to get as many of your own men, and as few of the enemy, in base-to-base contact. (c) You gang up on the first three of the men in the enemy unit... by scrunching and pushing and shoving, and moving around behind the enemy unit, and having some of your men standing on the bases of others, you manage to get 8 of your 10 men in contact with 3 of the enemy. (d) Never mind about the remaining 4 guys in the enemy unit, and never mind about the 2 of your own men that are left in the cold... they're not important. You've maximized the odds in your favor at 8-to-3, and so you get to toss a lot of dice, while the opposing unit suffers accordingly. (e) On occasion, if you're lucky, you can cluster about 5 of your own men on 1 unlucky soul in the enemy unit... simply ignore all the other guys in your own and the enemy units, and focus solely on getting as much advantage as possible. The above is the result of a one-man-on-one-man melee... only the figures in contact will count... as opposed to a unit-on-unit melee, wherein all men in the opposing units contribute to the combat values. I think it was way back in the early seventies that I first wrote about the "Gotcha!" effect, and, at that time, I was convinced that a unit-on-unit melee procedure made sense, while man-on-man did not. Back to PW Review November 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