Stary Boleslav - plan of action

With less than a month to go before Crisis Point 2024 I'm well on the way to having everything in place to run my game Stary Boleslav, 1948. It's a game for 4 to 8 players set during a fictional Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1948. 

This game sees two Soviet command teams racing to be the first to reach the Czechoslovak city of Stary Boleslav. For the winner there’s the prospect of being awarded the Order of Suvorov (Second Class), while for the loser there’s the very real possibility of being appointed to command the security detachment of a chemical weapons research facility. In Kazakhstan!

Meanwhile the Czechoslovak command team will be tasked with defending two major highways converging on the city. But with what forces? The political situation is confused. Have pro-Soviet elements been successfully purged from the Czechoslovak Army? 

We’ll be using the TacWWII fast play grand tactical rules. They are easy to learn - no previous experience necessary and put players firmly in the seat of the brigade commander while still giving a decent impression what’s happening right down to platoon level.

Having a whole weekend available should allow us to play the game properly. Too often with just a Saturday afternoon (or a club evening) available we rush to get a game set up and running. This inevitably means we skimp on things like writing orders, pre-plotting artillery targets or even having a proper plan of attack. We can also end up calling a halt when one or more players' time runs out rather than when we've reached a genuine conclusion to the battle.

This time I hope to fight the action to a conclusion. This means:

Preparation

I'm trying to cover as much as possible before Crisis Point weekend. This means getting the two sides (three really) to pick their optional supports in advance. emails are currently flying back and forth and it's interesting to see which choices are being made.

In addition, I set up a little pre-game political phase for the Czechoslovaks. I rolled three six-sided dice and told the Czechoslovak players the scores. They knew that 1 was bad and 6 good. I asked them to allocate the dice as "political effort" in three areas - "Intelligence", "Purging Communists from the military", and "Seeking Western support". I can't share the results at this stage but I can tell you that results have impacted things like troop quality, deployment and weapons availability.

When the weekend rolls around I hope to start early on Saturday with the tables laid out and mapped in detail and the forces laid out on unit sheets.

Scenario Balancing

Any attack-versus-defence scenario needs time pressure if it's not to degenerate into a static shooting match where the attacker tries to destroy any visible enemy units before daring to advance. But how much time should we allow the attackers? This is where the race-between-rival-attackers approach comes in. By awarding the win to the first Soviet brigade to reach the objective city of Stary Boleslav we set a time pressure that has nothing to do with the umpire's estimate of what constitutes "fast enough".

Where the umpire's estimate does become relevant is in the relative strength of attackers and defenders. If I make the Czechoslovak forces too strong, the race between Soviet detachments won't matter; they'll both be bogged down unable to break through the initial enemy line. 

There's probably no substitute for experience and what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl in this case.  All I can say is that every time I've thought to myself, "Maybe I've made the Czechoslovak forces too weak", I've stifled that thought. Far better to have the game end early and have to set up another game to fill time than to end the weekend with both Soviet teams frustrated by their inability to get close to victory and the Czechs bored by fighting a successful static defence.

Another way we'll balance attack and defence and encourage mobile warfare is is by restricting the defenders' deployment options. Details are still confidential, of course, but "political and logistic issues" mean that they won't be able to stack the front line with defending battalions.

Managing the Battle

Experience shows that having two or more players sharing command of the same force slows play down. Neither player wants to be seen to dominate the decision-making process so every decision gets discussed in excruciating detail. 

The obvious solution would be to divide the player teams such that one player runs the front-line battalions and the other looks after reserves, artillery assets and air support. I do plan to do that but it might not be much fun for the guy who gets to play staff officer. So that approach will be modified. 

Firstly the roles of "staff officer" and "front-line commander" will swap as soon as the advancing forces move from the first table to the second. 

Secondly, in addition to his administrative duties, the staff officer will be responsible for movement and die rolling for an element of the front-line force. This way when he takes over command he'll have a handle on the rules and a feel for the relative strengths of units. 

Learning the Rules

This is a tricky aspect. Only I and one of the players have tried TacWWII previously. Fortunately I've been able to share my version 1.5 adaptation of the rules in advice. Depending on progress with the above we may be able to get in a little teach-in before we start the game proper.