I thought it might be useful to produce some reviews of WW2 scenario books with particular reference to their usefulness for TacWWII players. I propose to rate the books by scoring them from 1 to 5 in each of the following categories:
- 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- Historical Content - does the book provide useful background?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.
These won't necessarily be newly published books. If you're interested you may have to search some of them out via eBay or your local convention's bring and buy stalls.
First up is Richard Marsh's Third Supplement published by Stratagem for the Rapid Fire! rules.
The 56-page, softbound A4 book contains 14 scenarios covering the Great Patriotic War. These range in space and time from the crossing of the Bug in June 1941 to street fighting in Budapest in January 1945. The contents are mostly in black and white including maps apparently designed with Microsoft Word back in the distant past. The maps are rather stylised and do little more that show the relative locations of significant battlefield features.
However, the front and rear cover (inside and out) and the centre eight pages feature colour photographs of 20mm scale models on terrain appropriate to the scenarios. While these are clearly posed shots, they are consistent in style with actually gaming the scenarios. These are inspiring, albeit most TacWWII players would need to think in terms of building their battlefields in smaller scales.
For Design of the book I rate this offering at a slightly generous 4/5.
In terms of history, the book contains a potted description of each battle. The background is given as is a brief outline of the historical result and often some notes on scenario design choices made by the author. In addition, a couple of dozen sources are mentioned at the start of the book.
At the back of the book we get some optional additions to Rapid Fire to capture specific aspects of war on the Russian Front. Obviously these are not directly relevant to the TacWWII player but they do serve to highlight issues the designer thinks are particularly important.
From a Historical Content point of view the book's perfectly adequate to the task. It does give context to our games - 4/5 points.
The scenarios are generally a little bit same-y in that they tend to be attacker-vs-defender games played along the long axis of the table. However, there are some interesting factors such as "Your ammunition is limited and you can't resupply until you've captured location X" or "You need to rescue a besieged force and then get them back out the way you came".
On the whole I think the scenarios will give reasonable games and a fairly decent impression of the historical situation. I'm going to go with 3/5 points for Scenario Design.
I've spoken previously about adapting scenarios from this book to TacWWII. The conversion of orders of battle from Rapid Fire format is fairly straightforward bearing in mind the slightly idiosyncratic model ratios (1:5 for vehicles, 1:15 for men).
Slightly less easy is the widely varying ground scale used in the mapping of battlefields. Basically you're going to have to do your own research to establish the size and layout of your TacWWII battlefield. For this reason I can't give this book a Usability score any better than 3/5 points.
Overall, then, the third Rapid Fire supplement scores 14/20 as a resource for TacWWII players. If you can find a hard copy and you're into wargaming the Eastern Front, I'd certainly recommend giving this a try. Alternatively you can purchase a pdf copy of the supplement from the Rapid Fire website.
