No Saturday Afternoon Wargames for a while!

Those of you who are familiar with Stately Counterpane Manor will be surprised to see the current state of our usual Saturday Afternoon Wargames venue:

The kitchen floor has shown signs of movement (tiles cracking) for a while. We're having the previous arrangement, half suspended floor and half solid, replaced with a solid floor throughout and with underfloor heating. In the meantime it's sandwiches and instant noodles I guess.

Harpers Ferry Characters

My game for Steel Lard this year will be a What a Cowboy exploration of the events at Harpers Ferry in 1859, when John Brown and his men seized the Federal armoury in an attempt to trigger a slave uprising throughout Virginia.

I've started photographing the figures so I can produce illustrated character sheets and a dedicated game deck. This will make it easy to see which figure needs to be activated next. Here are a few of the characters who'll be represented in the game, starting with the more prominent abolitionists:

John Brown

John Brown was a long-term leader of abolitionists who had previously been involved in bloody violence in Bleeding Kansas. At Harpers Ferry he seems to have had no clear plan to recruit large numbers of revolting slaves. It seemed as though he had set out to become a martyr for his cause, and so he proved.

Aaron Stephens

Stephens was Brown's military deputy at Harpers Ferry. 

Stevens is in the same cell with Brown. I have frequent talks with him. He's in a most pitiable condition physically, his wounds being of the most painful and dangerous character. He has now four balls in his body, two of these being about the head and neck. He bears his sufferings with grim and silent fortitude, never complaining and absolutely without hope. He is a splendid looking young fellow. Such black and penetrating eyes! Such an expansive brow! Such a grand chest and limbs! He was the best, and in fact the only man Brown had who was a good soldier besides being reliable otherwise.

"Emperor" Shields Green

Shields Green was an escaped former slave from Charleston, South Carolina. He had been a follower of Frederick Douglass. When Douglass refused to join Brown's expedition (believing it suicidal), Green declared, "I believe I'll go wid de ole man".

Dangerfield Newby

Newby was another former slave. His wife was still in slavery and Newby aspired to either free her by force or to gain enough money to buy the freedom of her and their children.

Edwin Coppoc

Edwin Coppoc was born to Quaker parents in Ohio. At Harpers Ferry he shot and killed former mayor Fontaine Beckham.

In addition we have some Harpers Ferry locals, some of whom will be available as player characters:

Thomas Boerley

Thomas Boerly was an Irish immigrant who had lived in Harpers Ferry for many years. Armed with a shotgun, he approached the gates of the armoury and was shot by one of the insurgents (probably Shields Green).

Fontaine Beckham

Fontaine Beckham was 71 years old at the time of Brown's insurrection. He was the local agent of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road company and a former mayor of the town. He was shot dead whilst trying too peer round the side of the watertower to catch a glimpse of the insurrectionists holed up in the armoury's engine house.

Colonel Lewis Washington

Lewis was the great grandnephew of Revolutionary War general and first President George Washington. Brown's men roused him from his bed and took him as a hostage, also taking a pair of pistols allegedly present to the president by the Marquis de Lafayette and a sword gifted by Frederick the Great.

John Allstadt

Allstadt was another local land-owner and slave-holder taken as a hostage. He was eventually freed when U S Marines stormed the engine house.

Lt Col R E Lee

Robert E Lee was in Washington when news of the Harpers Ferry insurrection arrived. President Buchanan order him to proceed there and take charge of the situation, empowered to declare martial law if necessary. Lee didn't even have time to change into uniform. He would go on to become the pre-eminent Confederate general of the Civil War.

That'll do for now. More characters to follow as I get them painted and photographed.

Latest 3D printing

As I continue to get the hang of the 3D printer I'm trying a variety of different subjects.  Just finished this morning are these 1/300th scale vehicles, some of which might find a use in the Prague Summer 1948 game.

They are all by New Zealand-based Thingiverse user M_Bergman. They were originally uploaded in 1/200th scale but they've worked OK printed at 1/300th with a 0.15mm layer height.

First up are some JS-IIs:

Half a dozen M3 scout cars should be useful for WW2 US and Soviet forces and perhaps in 1948 as well.

Finally, you can never have too many trucks. These are GMCs ...

 

More on TacWWII - revised slightly

I plan to use some house rules in the Prague Summer TacWWII game. Some of them are a subset of ones I've been using for some time, others are attempts to include things that I've liked in other sets of rules. 

A couple of new rules for recce elements:

At the start of the Order Transmission Phase a recce unit that has located enemy one or more enemy units may elect to communicate with its parent headquarters subject to a successful Tac roll. The recce unit may move this turn but may not fire. A headquarters unit may reroll a failed Tac roll (for any purpose) for each subordinate recce unit that successfully communicated with it. 

If a recce unit subordinate to a battalion headquarters has located one or more enemy units, all units in that battalion are assumed to have succeeded in their location Tac rolls.

Hopefully those changes will encourage the proper use of recce units.

Recce and HQ units in cars or light trucks are treated like motorcyclists in terms of never having to declare mounted/dismounted. They are spotted or shot at as vehicles if in Bold Attack or March, otherwise as infantry.

Changed all references from Default/DT to Confused/CON for consistency with Arc of Fire as I play a lot of the latter and get Confused myself!

Optional rule to allow units in Defence or Prepared Defence to get an extra +1 if defending hard cover.

"Ridgeline" is now an alternative to "Rise" in the terrain types. I prefer linear representations of line-of-sight-blocking terrain to one contour hills.

Where it's desirable to include a model to represent only one or two real-world vehicles (eg the Czechoslovak railcar) the weapon may only fire in Fire Phase C.

 

I may use a communication net diagram for each side rather than the simple Company-Battalion-Brigade-Division track.

Artillery requests must specify the duration of the fire mission. I've added rules to specify how fire missions may be terminated early.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Prague Summer - about rules

This is a long one and to some extent it's about getting my thoughts organised on the matter. Feel free to skip the text and just look at the pictures if that's what does it for you.

How does one come to prefer a particular set of rules? Whilst out walking the dog this morning my thoughts turned to TacWWII. Why am I going back to it after having abandoned it in favour of Blitzkrieg Commander years ago? I think part of the story lies in my reasons for flirting with BKC back then. BKC had three things going for it. 

I like the idea of building headquarters units as little dioramas, which BKC supports but which doesn't entirely suit TacWWII as written.

The second appeal of BKC was that it was substantially similar to Cold War Commander, the game that got my Cold War collection onto the wargaming table for the first time in years. It made sense to use common basing standards and common mechanisms for both my WW2 and Cold War collections.

Thirdly, I do think the BKC/CWC command and control mechanisms are fun. Having recently played a comparative game of A Fistful of TOWs, I was struck by the relative lack of interesting command and control challenges. Without the uncertainty of CWC's command dice rolls the game seemed very flat.

Ah, the joys of the ill-timed command blunder!

So why would I go back to TacWWII? In many ways it's an old-fashioned set of rules. It uses simultaneous movement and written orders and it's completely lacking in the full-colour, glossy-photos-on-every-page approach that seems de rigueur today.

The answer, it seems to me, is related to why I prefer Basic Impetus over DBA. Both of these rules sets use element bases representing indeterminate numbers of ancient warriors. Both would have you field armies of maybe a dozen elements (exactly a dozen in DBA's case), and both emphasise speed of play and simple rules.

DBA focusses totally on the outcome of a combat between two groups of men. The fighting may continue for some time without a decisive result, one side may somewhat gain the other hand and push its opponents back, or the fight may be decisive with one or other of the units wiped out (or more likely routed). DBA does this on the basis of a single pair of opposed die rolls. That's great in terms of moving the game along quickly and allowing the players to concentrate on their roles as army commanders but it's just a bit... vanilla.

When I discovered Basic Impetus I was immediately struck by the fact that melées were now exciting. You could envisage the swaying back and forth of momentum as both sides got inexorably closer to the point where one of them would collapse and flee the field. Yes it was slower that DBA but DBA's speed now seemed to come at the cost of an unengaging narrative experience.

This speaks to why I'm proposing to use TacWWII instead of, say A Fistful of TOWs or Spearhead. Having tried both of those, I find them unengaging. I struggle to get excited about playing either game and I think it's because the units feel like anonymous playing pieces with no connection to what the troops are actually doing below the level of the battalion.

TacWWII's mode system (every company is in a distinct tactical mode at any given time) allows me to better envisage what the troops are doing. The Volkssturm Kompanie in Prepared Defence mode in the ruins of Oderbruch are well-hidden, having scouted out the lines of sight and stockpiled additional Panzerfausts. Across the Hitlerstrasse, while the Soviet tank company in Bold Attack is perhaps being too aggressive, the dismounted tank riders in Deliberate Attack mode are more cautious. Each platoon, we can infer, has one section moving at any one time with the other two laying down covering fire.

So does BKC suffer from this blandness? To a degree, yes but there but I think it's another issue with BKC that's pushing me back to TacWWII. I'm not convinced by the tactical decisions BKC is asking me to take.

Let's say I have a battalion of six Panzer-IV lining the edge of a forest somewhere in Lower Silesia and a wave of T-34s is advancing towards me. It's my turn to shoot and immediately the sense of immersion in events takes a hit whilst I ponder the maths of the situation. To knock out a T-34 will take five unsaved hits and my Panzers are rolling four dice per gun. Should I fire two Panzers at any given T-34? Three? Am I better off just trying to suppress as many enemy tanks as I can? These are valid tactical questions in the context of the game but what do they represent in terms of real world decisions?

Another set of decisions in BKC that I struggle with from this point of view is around giving orders. There are lots of decisions to make within the game turn. I may want to use a particular HQ to order the tanks to advance and to call down some fire from more distant supporting guns. Do I try to combine both in a single order that'll have a lower chance or success or do I make sure I get the tanks moving first? Having got the tanks moving, do I risk giving them another move order or do I pass on to the supporting guns and give up on moving the tanks again? Again, these are valid tactical decisions in the game but they don't seem to me to map well onto the tactical decisions required of a real-world commander.

A final element of BKC that I'm slightly uncomfortable with is the core combat mechanic. Hits are added to a unit during a turn and they may suppress the unit. Only if these hits reach a certain level is the unit destroyed. If it's not, the hits disappear at the end of the turn. Now you can just accept this ("It's how the rules work; don't sweat about what it means") or you can justify it to yourself in terms of units ability to fight being destroyed if the stress of action meets some hard-to-define crisis level. I certainly have argued that but not with real conviction.

One thing I want from a wargame is an emerging narrative of events occurring on the field of battle. BKC and TacWWII both do this but in my view TacWWII does a better job of allowing me to command a brigade whilst showing me what's actually happening to the units below battalion level. That it does this in a way that neither bogs down in detail nor involves complex on-the-fly statistical analysis hits a sweet spot for me.

More on the Prague Summer

I suspect even the most observant among you won't have noticed that the previous post on plans for Joy of Six carried both the "Cold War Commander" and "TacWW2" labels. This was because we plan to try running the same scenario side-by side with both sets of rules.

Back in 2018, we did something vaguely similar when we ran three scenarios, identical except for the fact that that they were set, respectively in 1959, 1973, and 1989. This let us see how CWC handled forces varying from the super-heavy Conquerors and T-10s of the 1950s, through the rise of missiles in the 70s, to the smart technology and composite armour of the late Cold War.

This time the plan is to see how two different sets of rules handle similar scenarios. With a 1948 early Cold War setting we should be entirely OK using WW2 rules on one table and "moderns" rules on the other. 

I plan on running on one section of the table using the old but characterful TacWWII rules while Neil and Andy run similar forces with Cold War Commander. I anticipate the rest of the group will play 1985-era CWC over the usual excellent terrain (pretty much entirely provided by Richard Phillips's) on most of the usual big table. 

A good piece of news is that I've spoken to Chris Pringle and he plans to make the TacWWII rules available in pdf form. I'll let you know the details when I have them.

Steve J, commenting on a previous post here suggested that we might use Blitzkrieg Commander rather than CWC. This would certainly work but I'll leave that decision up to Neil and Andy.  We may see some T-54s and MiG-15s so using the post-WW2 set may be more straightforward.

This game is also a chance to use some fun aircraft. Early as I am in learning the ins and outs of my new 3D printer, I've managed to produce this rather crude but, I think, usable Me262 (or Avia S-92 Turbina as the Czechs call it).

I also have an ancient white metal casting of an Me109 that I acquired in a bag of assorted bits from Wargames Emporium. This is a great opportunity to paint it up as a Czech S-199.

Since I printed the Me262 I've got a little more confident with the slicer programme I'm using and I've managed to print off this MiG-15 to provide air support for the Soviets though I really ought to check the in service date before committing to using it! Still needs a bit of cleaning up.

Also 3D printed is this apartment building, which I think will pass for somewhere in Czechoslovakia. Basing to be done - I'm going to try to match Richard Phillips's usual standard.

Keep looking out for future posts on this!

The Joy of Six plan - The Prague Summer

As some of you will know, I usually attend Joy of Six in Sheffield as part of the Cold War Commanders group. This group's usual focus is fighting huge battles set during various fictional "Third World Wars". We tend to use (of course) the Cold War Commander rules.

In recent years I've come to the conclusion that I really don't enjoy those big battles. I find them ponderous with turns taking so long to resolve that there's insufficient back and forth of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre over the course of a gaming session.

Having said that, I'm quite happy with the rules for smaller games and I'm keen that we continue to show them off at their best for potential players. This means making sure that at Joy of Six we have a small, fast-moving game with the possibility that punters can sit in for a while and see a reasonable number of game turns.

This year, in addition to the group's usual mid-1980s fare, we'll be running some fast-moving participation action in what I'm guessing will be a unique setting. 

Our starting point is the February 1948 coup d'etat that saw pro-Soviet Communists take over the Czechoslovak government. In our fictional reality the coup failed and later that year the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.

The 1948 Czechoslovak Army is made up of troops trained and equipped by the British and others trained and equipped by the Soviets. In addition, the Škoda and Avia factories were equipped to continue manufacturing Nazi-era German tanks and aircraft. This is an opportunity to use some interesting kit. 

I've already re-painted some spare SdKfz 251/1 halftracks in the colours of the Czechoslovak army, for whom they have the designation OPp 3t N. 

These will carry a mix of my Soviet and British infantry and support weapons - I'm not going to produce stuff especially for the game, except where I have suitable models lying around that can be repurposed.

I've started keeping a few soft-skins and/or APCs unbased so I can add them to generic HQ bases as particular games require. Below we can see an unbased OPp 3t N added to an open space on a base that otherwise has just command figures and a Jeep. A bit of Blutac will keep the vehicle in place for the course of the game.

Neil McCusker and Andy Taylor are on-board with this plan and it looks like we'll have a quite a bit more narrative to share by the time the event comes around. I'll add some more details here as time passes.