- Book Design - layout, illustrations, maps
- Historical Content - does the book provide useful background?
- Scenario Design - are they interesting, challenging?
- TacWWII Relevance - relevance and ease of conversion to TacWWII.
This time I'm looking at Frank Chadwick's Benghazi Handicap for the Command Decision rules.
This is a 170 page, soft cover book, approximately 8.5"x11" (ie slightly smaller than A4) published by Test of Battle Games in 2007.
The book covers the Western Desert Battles from June 1940 to the end of 1941; from the start of fighting to Operation Crusader. The illustrations are mostly in black and white but there are a few colour photographs of games in progress and there's a double page spread of colour illustrations of allied and German unit insignia and Italian uniform collar patches (probably something I can ignore in 6mm scale).
Most of the book covers the organisation of Italian, German and Commonwealth units in the desert. I've previously provided advice on converting these and won't go into detail here.
Instead, let's concentrate on the twelve included scenarios. The maps are scaled with (rather difficult to see) grid lines defining two-feet squares at Command Decision scale or one-foot squares for TacWWII. As such, for us most of the games will be playable on a 3'x3' table. They are detailed enough but we will need to convert the accompanying descriptions (shallow wadi, paved road, track etc) from Command Decision terminology to the TacWWII equivalents.
Overall I'm happy to give Benghazi Handicap 4/5 for Design of the Book.
Moving on to Historical Content; we get an excellent overview of the campaign as a whole at the start of the book and each scenario gets its own "Situation" section that clearly sets out the local context.
In addition a section entitled "Battlefield" provides useful clues as to how to rate battlefield areas in TacWWII terms. Finally the sections "Historical Result" and "Battle Trivia" also help to paint a picture of the battle. For Historical Content I'm rating Benghazi Handicap as 5/5.
When it comes to Scenario Design I have to confess that I haven't yet played any of these; the Middle East portion of my WW2 collection has been focussed on platoon level games in 20mm scale. One day, though, I will do some 6mm desert TacWWII!
When I do come to use the scenarios I think I'll omit the advice given to players in the "Tactical Note" section. I'm not keen on telling my players how to fight the battle and some of the guidance ("Early on you're facing only a single A9 and an anti-tank gun") seems to me to stray into providing excess information.
Noting that the Little Wars TV guys appear to have used a couple of them for their Operation Compass episode, I'm going to give them a provisional 4/5 for Scenario Design.
The twelve scenarios are ideally sized for TacWWII adaptation. Each force typically has two or three battalions and some supporting companies. A couple of scenarios use up to half a dozen battalions on one
side but this should still be manageable.
side but this should still be manageable.
Each game has overall mission descriptions; "Breakthrough", "Hold at All Costs", "Counterattack" etc and several include a situational addition such as "Capture location X" or "Exit three units of the southern edge". The mission descriptions relate to the number of victory locations that need to be captured or held, as detailed in the CD rulebook but an experienced TacWWII referee should have no problem extrapolating victory conditions.
If we reserve maximum marks to scenarios written specifically for our favourite rules, we are clearly in 4/5 territory for TacWWII Relevance.
Overall, then, we get a score of 17/20 for Benghazi Handicap. If you're in the market for some early desert war scenarios, this may be the way to go. Unfortunately, though, the book is out of print and second hand copies seem to be going for silly money. Get it if you can!
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