Gamers’ Corner : Set Europe Ablaze Bibliography

November 6, 2014–Just a head’s up! We have now posted a product which lists the various histories consulted in the course of designing the game Set Europe Ablaze and compiling the historical articles that appear with it. Not everyone will be interested in the bibliography, but for anyone who wants to look into Resistance to the German occupation of Western Europe in World War II, the history of the Special Operations Executive, and the French and American (OSS) special services that matched it, this listing furnishes a useful compilation of the sources. This product can be found in the “Downloadable” section of the website. It is a premium content item.

Gamers’ Corner: Four Roads to Paris

September 13, 2014–My colleague Stephen Rawling of Against the Odds (and several other boardgaming ventures), came up with quite a nifty idea with his “Four Roads” series. A package of games, smaller than a full-dimension wargame but still substantial. In days of yore there was a formula called the “quadrigame,” or just the “quad.” In those sets the games were linked because they were all on different battles of a war, and all had the same, very simple rules. Steve’s dared to forge a fresh trail, wherein the games are linked by means of all being on the same subject, but no longer simplistic and each the vision of a different designer on that theme. The first assay in this direction was called Four Roads to Moscow and framed the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Steve’s new selection is going to be four designer’s ruminations on the German defeat of France in 1940.

In history, of course, France virtually collapsed when the Nazis invaded that May. That makes a game on the subject a dicey matter. If you go “simulation” then the French have to collapse and there is little competition in the game. If you go for play balance you need some device to accord the opponents a reasonable chance without sacrificing the simulation quality. All in all it’s a challenging proposition.

Designer James F. Dunnigan long ago postulated one answer–a scenario-based approach. In Dunnigan’s France 1940 (published by Avalon Hill in 1972), players each selected a force mix that had a weighted value, in effect handicapping various alternate possibilities against the historical. Many  subsequent gamers have adopted similar approaches.

For this game I wanted to ensure the French (read Allied) side has a chance but without biasing the game. I also wanted to make it enough of a simulation that action on the board retains some of the flavor of the history. And I wanted to accomplish those things without artificialities. The scenario-based approach is fine, but what it does is tie the players to a moment in time, with backstories (the force mixes) that were completely made up. It is not at all clear that in the real Europe of the 1930s a nation’s procurement of the particular force mix represented by one of those scenarios would have been uncontested. The politics and diplomacy of the arms race could have gone so many different ways.

So, for my “Road to Paris” I decided to bring the players to the table in 1934. The Maginot Line is funded and construction largely complete. The massive buildups of armor and air forces are in the future, the big expansion of the German Army has yet to happen. What this game seeks to do is to bring the players to a combat contest (the blitzkrieg of 1940) based on an evolution of the game–active play that can take many directions.

To make this happen I have created a “scripted game.” Here we create a new narrative of the 1930s that will be different every time you play. Gamers who like Beyond Waterloo will be familiar with the idea of Diplomatic Status. This game takes the crisis level of Diplomatic Status and makes it the baseline for such game events as mobilizing forces or moving troops on the board. At the same time, the players are not the only actors in Europe and there are events outside their direct interactions which affect them (for example the Spanish Civil War). So the system introduces a “Chronology” device which influences war budgets and diplomatic status. Event Cards impact the players for every year-turn, and those play out very differently in successive games. There are two other kinds of “events”–command and intelligence–and both award the players capabilities they will exercise once it comes to combat.

This game contributes a mechanism for accommodating the impact of spies and espionage in an unusually detailed and straightforward manner.

The combat system accommodates air forces and mobile forces, has armies whose strengths reflect what the players were able to obtain with the military budgets the game allowed them through active play. Thus they arrive at war with military establishments conditioned by game events. I think that a more satisfactory arrangement than simply working off a scenario base.

There are some new wrinkles in the combat system but, for now, I’ll leave those for the future. Look forward to this piece of Four Roads to Paris.

 

Gamers’ Corner: Set Europe Ablaze

September 2, 2014–Just a quick note! Some of you will know that Against the Odds magazine has selected my Western European  (WW2) Resistance game Set Europe Ablaze as their “annual” issue game for this year. The game is a two-player simulation of the partisan war against German occupation from 1941 to 1944. Anyway, while ATO completes its playtesting and starts to put the game itself into production, I’ve taken time to craft the historical articles that will accompany the publication. (Thus I’ve been only fleetingly on this website of late.) That work is now done.

ATO doesn’t have space for everything I did. Accordingly I lopped off the Bibliography I had prepared for the game and articles. In the next few days I am going to post that biblio as a product on this website. FYI.

Wargamers’ Corner: Cobra II

August 27, 2014–I’ve been asked several times now, in connection with  my book Normandy Crucible, about making available to gamers the modifications I made in the wargame Cobra for purposes of creating the “wargame laboratory” I used as part of the research for that book. Most recently that question was posed directly on this website by gamers William Barnett-Lewis and Sergeant Skip Franklin. As we pass the 70th anniversary date I wanted to post something about why I don’t feel comfortable doing that. But I’ll also describe my process–and alert gamers will be able to craft their own “house” versions of the modifications.

Fundamentally it’s a question of publication rights. When I worked on that book and I wanted to put together a lab apparatus, that was for my own research and the only question was a suitable vehicle. The Simulations Publications (SPI) game Cobra had the right qualifications: a suitable geographic scope, a good level of unit representation; and, at one map, a game that was not impossible to keep up and get out of the way so that it could be used in spurts on a long-term basis.

But as for publishing amendments to the game, I would not want to do that without reference to the rights holders, and that’s a more ambiguous situation. Brad Hessel is the designer of record, but the game had editions from SPI and TSR Hobbies both. Most of the SPI/TSR games’ rights today belong to Decision Games but some do not, having been covered by direct contract between the publishers and designers (for example, my games Monty’s D-Day, Warsaw Rising, and Kanev reverted after publication). The situation with Brad I don’t know about. I asked around a bit, but no one I know seems to have his current address so I was unable to clarify the rights situation.

Now, if a publisher comes to me and wants a new Normandy breakout & pursuit game, I’ll gladly incorporate the features I am about to discuss. But short of that you’ll have to bear with me.

OK. There were certain problems with the Hessel Cobra design. One was that the Falaise Pocket battle rarely occurred with the game since the German line simply disintegrated, the German armies were destroyed and the Allied pieces rushed for the map edge. There were several reasons for this:

(a) One was the time scale. The game had three-day turns. The historical period for the Falaise Pocket typically ran out before the game reached the “pocket” stage. Switching to two-day turns allowed the history more time to develop.

(b) Most important was the issue of the Combat Results Table (CRT). This was an odds ratio CRT–very common for that time–and required mathematical calculation of a strength ratio between attacker and defender. Not only is that very cumbersome, since the society has moved so far away from these kinds of routine math problems, but all the trouble didn’t seem to be worth it–the strength disparities between the two sides were such that the vast majority of combats were resolved on the top few columns of the CRT.

This also meant that the German player had very few possibilities for counterattack, because his forces were just too thin to generate decent odds.

A related issue was with terrain effects. The requirements of the Terrain Effects Chart (TEC) were typically to shift columns, inserting an element of asymmetry with the odds ratio calculation. I thought that gave the idea. Change the CRT to a differential calculation. Now the attacker simply compares his strength with the opponent and immediately derives the CRT column. The “0” differential occurs at 1-2. Columns increase to advantage (+1), then by 5s to +25, then to +50, +75, +85, and 99+. Below zero the splits are at disadvantage (-1), -5, and -10 or less. The CRT generates step losses for both sides. In keeping with the larger differentials at high levels of advantage I used more higher-level loss results (e.g. 1/3, __/4) on high columns.

The one mathematical calculation I required was for troops attacking across rivers, who are halved or reduced to one-third strength depending on whether the river is minor or major. In general I converted most game effects to column shifts in keeping with this procedure. (For example, instead of doubling a stack (division), in this game unit integrity conveys a column-shift advantage.)

(c) Players might want to experiment with ZOC rules, giving Allied units and German mobile forces (because all are motorized) ZOCs but none to German infantry. That opened the game up when I used it.

(d) At the time of the original game the existence of intelligence (ULTRA) was just becoming known, much less understood in any detail. A major element was to insert intelligence rules. I added both sigint and combat intelligence (interrogation of prisoners). The former depended on an ULTRA table on which the players rolled each turn. That allowed the player to neutralize the divisional integrity of a certain number of opposing stacks and pre-emptively exhaust the column shift advantage of a number of Headquarters. (I also added Allied HQs for Bradley and Monty in addition to Patton). With combat intelligence, for every three losses the previous turn the player could neutralize the integrity of an opposing division.

Also–

Some German capabilities (Tiger Battalions, Nebelwerfer Brigades) were never modeled in the game. I added counters for these and endowed them with column-shift capabilities.

On the Allied side the rules governing the “Cobra” air strike were both too restrictive and too loose–too restrictive because they did not permit the Allies to create an actual break in the lines by means of a saturation attack, and too loose in that the player could stage a “Cobra”-level air mission every turn if he wanted to. (The Allies actually managed two “Cobra” equivalents plus two attacks that were of the same type but smaller.) I inserted a radically different rule on air strike effects that widened the sector struck and had target units incur losses, temporarily disappear, and reappear afterwards next to a friendly headquarters. This afforded the opportunity to open an actual hole.

At the time this game appeared in the 1970s, our knowledge of the Allied order of arrival, funneling fresh combat divisions into Normandy, was well developed, but our knowledge of the German side was much less perfect. So I created a new German order of appearance with units (and even replacements) arriving according to the historical record.

Apart from anything else I think these changes resulted in greatly improved historicity in this game. You can try it at home.

 

The End at Dien Bien Phu

May 7, 2014–At 10:20 AM on May 7, 1954 (10:20 PM of May 6 on the U.S. east coast), the Frenchman leading all forces in Laos asked the general commanding the north of Indochina to give him immediate notice if there were a “grave event” concerning Dien Bien Phu. The Laotian commander, Colonel Boucher de Crevecoeur, was clearly thinking that he should warn the troops sent to effect an overland rescue of the entrenched camp that they should get out of the way. Tonkin theater commander Major General Rene Cogny advised De Crevecoeur a few hours later that if the threatened event occurred he would have French radios broadcast the phrase “The fruit are ripe.”

In gaming there are only a few boardgames which deal with the Franco-Vietnamese war, and even fewer that concern Dien Bien Phu itself. The ones that do uniformly confirm the French did not have a chance at that battle, indicating the dubious strategy of selecting that high mountain valley for the scene of a major encounter.

That was true of my game as well. Around the time I first wrote my book on Dien Bien Phu, Operation Vulture , I also designed a boardgame on the battle. For those familiar with the gaming of that era, it was a “mini-monster” design with a main board depicting the valley center and French strongpoints, plus a strategic board of the region surrounding Dien Bien Phu. The strategic/tactical split followed the concept of the Avalon Hill Roman era siege game Alesia. Using the strategic board forces could maneuver to the battle, the French in Laos could try and rescue the camp, and the French air force could attempt to reduce the scale of Viet Minh supply. French forces were modeled in companies, with breakdowns to platoons; the Viet Minh were at the battalion-level, with breakdowns to companies. It was a highly detailed boardgame and showed very well the dynamics of the strongpoint battle. Viet Minh forces sustained tremendous losses, but the French could not win.

What the generals learn–or do not learn– from history could fill books. Politicians too. Let’s just hope we’re not seeing this lesson repeated today.

House Rules Rule

March 27, 2014– News that Hasbro, the game company, has asked players of its classic Monopoly to write in with their favorite “House Rules” in hopes some of them may be formally included in new editions of the boardgame opens up a vein for discussion. (Personally, my favorites are “Free Parking” gets $500 plus all the fee and fine money; and the one where, if you land directly on “Go,” you double your income.) Media attention has centered on the supposition that Hasbro is updating the game, as they did last year by pulling the Shoe token, holding a poll, and then substituting a Cat. But I think there’s a more interesting question regarding House Rules.

People acquire all kinds of products–including games– which they adapt to their personal preferences. Zero in on boardgames specifically and you’ll find that one of the most frequent adaptations is the adoption of House Rules. For those who’ve never delved into this juicy subject, House Rules are changes you make in the specific rules of a game when you play it at your place (your friend may have different ones at his). Like when you play Poker (five-card draw) and declare that Aces, Deuces, and One-Eyed Jacks will be wild cards, or when a National League team plays at an American League ballpark (and vice versa).

The recent coverage of Monopoly has included some discussion of specific House Rules that seem to be common, like the ones mentioned earlier. What struck me is that so many of the House Rules I saw cited are ones I’m familiar with, either having used myself or played with someone else who utilized them. Coincidence? I think not.

Game rules are littered with ambiguities and questions that may require interpretation. The popular “family”-style games, which skimp on rules to the maximum extent possible in order to bring in the players, are especially prone to this. The more complex games and simulations, as the wargames strive to be, also have ambiguities, plus more perplexing contradictions where the designer or developer changed one aspect of the game without accounting for all the ways that rule interacts with some other. The bottom line is that ambiguities and contradictions can be minimized but never completely eliminated.

My advice has always been to go for it. The game won’t be perfect but it can be what you want it to be. If a House Rule makes the boardgame work better, play faster, or make better sense, by all means use it.

Meanwhile the Monopoly example shows something else very interesting about House Rules–that different players, from a wide variety of backgrounds, in different places, have all come up with the same or similar solutions to game issues. There were only one or two of the House Rules mentioned for that game which I’d not heard of. That was amazing. And amusing. Great minds and all that. So go for it–and keep on gaming!

PANZERKRIEG FOG OF WAR

February 23, 2014– And now for something completely different. Looking over the new, Six Angles edition of the game Panzerkrieg it came to me that we can use the components to craft a fresh game variant. Masahiro Yamazaki has added “Objective” pieces to the countermix. Fans of the game will know that most of its scenarios postulate one of the players “To Win,” and to do so by means of capturing a number of named objective hexes. Mas has made this more visual with the Objective counters.

But the same pieces can be purposed differently. I’ve compiled a variant that inserts Intelligence Deception. Players designate their Objectives as before– but some of the Objectives can be phony ones! This way the opponent may work to defend cities the player is not really interested in.

The Panzerkrieg variant is a product among those in the “Downloadable” section of this website. Hop over there and check it out!

The Wargame Laboratory

February 17, 2014– Several years ago, for my book Normandy Crucible  I chose to make use of a boardgame as a kind of historical laboratory. I took an existing game on the Normandy campaign, SPI’s Cobra, done by Brad Hessel many years back, to generate virtual data on the actual campaign. (I’ll say something in a moment about how that went.) The other day, while researching a topic from World War II in the Pacific, I was delighted to encounter another instance of someone who’d done the same thing. This was an honors thesis in history done at Ohio State nearly a decade ago. There’s not enough to call this a trend, but clearly the notion is out there, so I thought I would say something about best practices.

A little more detail on the Normandy Crucible experiment: I set out to explore the contours of the German defense of the hedgerow country following the D-Day invasion in June 1944. I wanted to see if a different combination of German strategic approach and/or defensive tactics might have worked better and, in particular, how these factors impacted on the size of the force the Germans would succeed in withdrawing from Normandy once they began their retreat. To accomplish this I first took the Cobra game and brought it up to date. When it was published in the late 70s we knew very little of the Allied intelligence advantages with ULTRA, the design itself had certain awkward elements, and now we have much better historical data on German replacements and reinforcements. All these things were factored into the game.

To effectuate the laboratory schema, I chose a set of parameters–some strategies, some tactics, some were terrain-based defense emphases. Each of these became a scenario. Then the game was played numerous times with extensive data recorded, ending with the number of German troops who escaped the debacle. The game was played solitaire and with various opponents.  Every scenario was played multiple times. I ended up with a very interesting collection of insights.

In our other example, in 2005 Mark Gribbell at Ohio State used the 1992 editions of the Avalon Hill games Midway and Guadalcanal and modified them to replay the battles of the Philippine Sea (June 1944) and Leyte Gulf (October 1944). Gribbell asked the question of whether the Japanese, had they had better pilots at that time in the Pacific war, could have done better at these decisive naval battles. We don’t know enough about his assumptions or data to judge his actual scenarios, but his conclusions were that the outcomes would still have been Japanese defeats although the Americans would have suffered somewhat higher losses. To judge from the honors thesis, the battles were replayed just a few times.

So, best practices? In my view the first key element is to ensure that the simulation platform actually has the capacity to answer the questions posed. In both of these examples an original boardgame (or games) were modified to accommodate the experiment. There is not sufficient information to describe the actual modifications made in the Pacific war laboratory, but in the Normandy case I am confident the game update provided exactly the platform required.

The second key element is to ensure the questions are the right ones. For Normandy, the ability of German forces to withdraw was directly measurable by the game. Secondary questions, such as the effect of commencing the retreat at different moments in the history, was also observable. In the Pacific war case, losses were a surrogate measure for the impact of pilot quality, but there the connection is less clear. For example, what about the effect of better Japanese aircraft, along with or apart from, pilots? Gribbell himself suggests something of this with a related conclusion he draws–that the American use of the F-6F “Hellcat” aircraft was a key factor in Japanese losses.

Finally, it is very important to ensure that there are enough iterations of the scenario to collect a broad range of data. This takes better account of the effect of different player strategies and tactics, as well as for the element of chance.

In my case one other lesson of this exercise was that some readers and historians are not yet ready to accept the simulation as a valid tool for historical analysis. In the text of Normandy Crucible I made some use of the simulation laboratory results, but I had originally done more. Comments from readers and editors encouraged me to extract most of this material and move it to an appendix, and some items I had to drop altogether. The simulation laboratory has yet to come into its own.

Panzerkrieg Rules Arrive!

February 8, 2014– Masahiro Yamazaki has just sent his translation of the rules and scenario sheets for Panzerkrieg. I’ll be checking them against the originals for any discrepancies, but if there are any you’ll easily be able to download updated versions later. In the meantime you can play the game in its new edition.

At this point English versions of the charts and tables are still outstanding but they’ll be coming along soon. Those of you with earlier editions can simply use the currently existing versions during this interval.

The new material looks very nice and has already given me an idea for a game variant rule that will put some strategic intelligence flavor into the game.

Enjoy!

Overheard on Amtrak: A Gaming Story

February 4, 2014– If you’re a boardgamer who looks askance at the first-person-shooter variety of videogames, here’s some grist for your mill. Of course lots of folks love videogames, and the first-person-shooter variety is a strong category in that field, so if that’s your passion please excuse this. My take is that of a longtime boardgame designer who was there when computer games first got started, solicited our help, then left us in the dust.

Anyway the story is this: a few years ago I was on my way to take care of chores in New York. I prefer Amtrak for these periodic business trips. The train is more comfortable, you can walk around, and it leaves you in the heart of The City, ready to go wherever you need to. So I’m on a Northeast Regional bound for a city I love, where I lived a long time. I read a book as the train barreled along. Sitting there I became conscious of the conversation from the twin-seat ahead of me. Two men were engaged in avid debate. I heard the words “axe” and “sword.” That got my attention pretty well.

Some nefarious plot? I worried briefly but it quickly became clear the two men were game designers, and their purpose was to figure out what weapons to put into the first-person-shooter they were crafting. The conversation was quite interesting. Heft of the axe and sword, length and edge-type of the latter, single- or double-bit for the axe, type of metal, weight–all were things they considered. What struck me in particular was their focus on the visual impact of the various weapons configurations. They were clearly concentrating on a game design issue.

The purloined conversation got me to thinking. Plenty of gamers have asked me over the years why I did not move into computer games. Actually a few of my designs–Third Reich and Kanev are two–have appeared in computerized versions, though the games (and even the computer platforms which ran them) no longer exist. But I never made the crossover myself. At first I thought I would, but that I needed to wait–the early platforms were very restricted in terms of core memory. For a long time the memory requirements for representing a mapboard effectively consumed the machine’s capacity leaving little for the game itself. As a designer my preference has always been to innovate systems that mimic large-scale processes in the real world, requiring pretty sophisticated code. But I anticipated that CPU memory capacities would someday reach the level required for both board and design, plus, of course, pieces. In any case, focusing my design efforts on image (as my Amtrak friends were doing) rather than content, as in the modeling of processes, was not something I wanted to do.

That evolution of computers happened–but so did something else. The early electronic games were very much like the boardgames. But as computers improved, the action game, granddaddy of the first-person-shooter, eclipsed the old-style game. The charm of putting the person into the game–as character (in role-playing), as ball player, as shooter, as action figure–was irresistible. The personal element made computer games the behemoth they are today. Even large-scale games today, as in the massive online game, are permutations of single person action. My two friends on Amtrak were onto something.

But I did–and still do–prefer to model processes, not individual action, whether cumulative or not. I’ve been pleased that old-style electronic games have survived, even as a niche in the computerized milieu, and also that computers have come around far enough to develop game-assist programs (like VASSAL) that improve the practicality of boardgames. And developing trends may be moving in the direction of  a more central role for boardgame-like computer games. Sales of first-person-shooter designs peaked in 2011 and have diminished since. Though these games still account for nearly a fourth of all electronic game sales, their dollar volume has decreased by more than a third. This suggests there is space developing for electronic wargames of the traditional kind, now in an environment when the platforms are fully capable of handling a sophisticated boardgame. Some of my old designer colleagues–Eric Lee Smith is an example–have chosen to go straight to electronics with new game companies. And games are being formatted to work on I-pads and I-phones. We may be witnessing the dawn of a new age. Let a hundred flowers bloom!