As I write this, I am sick in love with both my kriegsspiel dice (see below), and Battlefield 1. The latter, a glorious ode to organized violence and the Great War, has encamped in my head space like no other shooter since Doom. Among its many enchantments, Allied medics are depicted as Indian troops. Given my affection for "Gunga Din", this is quite a heady thing.
Earlier this week, though, HL and I spent quality time with a very old friend that I did not realize was so dearly missed -- Avalon Hill's War at Sea.
I don't think I've ever owned the game before; not in all these years. I've played the devil out of it, though. It may, indeed, be the very first war game I ever played. The first war game I ever bought, which I've documented several times elsewhere, was Starship Troopers, purchased from a Milwaukee Gimbel's (were there non-Milwaukee Gimbel's?) I was ten at the time, though, and could never quite get my head around the rules. Only a few years later, my best friend and I had at War at Sea and something about war gaming clicked. I can't honestly say who owned that copy of the game. I should probably ask. All that to the side, I was wandering around Half-Price Books with a 50%-off coupon in my hand and this above-photographed copy of the game was on offer. I checked it for contents -- as one absolutely must when purchasing from that often incautious purveyor of used games -- and brought it home.
The first thing that struck me was how small the board is. I don't know this to be so, but it reads like someone at AH challenged the designer to build a game on half a game board; or at least a single Squad Leader/Panzer Blitz-sized board.
The second is how cluttered the game can become as a result of the board's size. The side-charts and org tables that we're so used to seeing in games these days aren't there and there's not even the off-map "battle board" for carrying out combats that would today be obligatory. One thing that I cannot decide if it be genius or madness is the placement of the POC (victory) track smack in the middle of Europe and at a 45-degree angle.
The third is that the game remains, as advertised in its rules, simple. There's really only three pages of rules -- though done up in a tiny print that is also, damnably, BLUE. The combat sequence is, of course, where the game got its nom de voyage, Dice at Sea, and the game can come down to a series of horrific rolls, but the sequence of ASW, U-boat, airstrikes, and surface combat remains refreshingly simple and easy to memorize.
This isn't a review, though. It's a mash note, one I'm glad to write. The stories the designers were trying to tell in this game are clearer to me now as I better understand the battle for the North Atlantic. I get, for example, why the Allies want to smuggle those convoys across the North Sea and to the Soviet Union. I now understand why the British -- and the Germans -- have to choose between defending the North Atlantic and the Med and why the Germans have to keep a tight grip on the Med or risk losing the Spaghetti Fleet. I enjoy the mechanic under which both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. aren't necessarily willing to sail in defense of the Allied cause and, in the case of the former, can force the British to defend the Baltic lest the Germans sail a single ship that way. And, knowing what I do about the big girl, I loved the look on HL's face when he first saw the Bismark take steam on turn two and make a beeline for his shipping. I figured it would distract him, but I didn't expect him to deploy the better part of half his fleet to bring her down. In the event, he was irate to do 9 points of damage (10 required) only to have me ship her back to Germany for repairs. Imagine his joy, then, when, during the airstrike phase, he rolled two 6s on three dice and sent her to the bottom with 10 points of damage.
Of course it's not Seekrieg. It's not close to the verisimilitude of 1805. It was, however, an evening of great fun, die rolling, and exploration; one that made me want to play again very, very soon.
This round went reasonably well. Later on, not so much.
Oh, and, to make the record clear, HL cleaned my clock. I did quite well in the early going, pantsing him rather badly in the Med. He rallied, though, and, by turn six, just about ever ship I had worth a tinker's cuss was populating the bottom of the sea.
There's a moment in the wildly underappreciated Might and Magic X: Legacy in which the brogue-speaking dwarf (female) calls on the party to "behold the great halls of Sudgurd". After the appropriate pause she says, with a fair amount of pique, "I don't think you're beholding enough".
I feel that way when I show these dice to people. They're not huge. In my case they're stickered badly. But, to me, they are grand.
Created by the folks at Command Post Games (their wonderful Pub Battles: Brandywine is the background to this picture) their blog makes it sound like they set these up almost as a lark. Given the title of my blog, though, it shouldn't surprise anyone that I take these very seriously indeed.
While Too Fat Lardies did the world service when it brought the Reisswitz kriegsspiel with several of its maps back into print, and Photon Cutter Studios made nice unit blocks available for a reasonable price, this is the third and final step. Now the combat tables that the Lardies created are no longer necessary and we can play the game the way the Baron did in 1824.
For those unfamiliar, each of the dice represents increasing strong combat odds, i.e. 1:1, 3:2, 2:1, &c. The left numbers are for musketry at various ranges, the right for skirmishers at these same ranges, the top and bottom for melee results. All these numbers are expressed in terms of points, each point representing a different number of men depending on the formation in question.
I could say so much about them, but I'll observe this: Baron von Reisswitz saw musketry as far more bloody than many contemporary Napoleonic rule sets and he -- and those that played his game and praised it -- knew well of what they spoke. I have a corps of red and blue troops courtesy of Photon Cutter and will now be compelled to press the lads into service. If only that I may roll these dice.
Proud to say I played a wee part in helping Photon Cutter get started in the kriegsspiel several years ago. Buy early, often, and in quantities no smaller than a corps per side!
I did a brief write-up on this battle between Doug and myself a little while ago and, finally, it's come to an end. The battles in Combat Mission: Final Blitzkrieg tend to be on the long side and this one is no exception. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but combatants can find themselves in situations where both are spent and have nothing to throw at each other. With a full half hour to go, Doug told me he'd proffered a cease fire and I was in no position to disagree.
As is often enough the case in a double-blind battle, it's what you didn't know that is the most pleasant surprise. In this case, it turns out Doug's boys had hot-wired one of Hobo's funnies and brought it a long to deal with the mine-clearing duties. Problem was, he lost in the first five minutes of the battle. Thus here, wide to my right, is this very expensive parking lot of immobilized monsters. Interestingly enough, my boys saw the KT as a Panther; rather the inverse of what I would have expected.
This is my personal hero, the now blazing tank that took out so very much before being undone by a 'faust.
A view of the carnage from up above. Comparison to an earlier photograph taken from roughly this perspective is instructive. My hero tank is at right. On fire.
And looking the other way. This is the main route of Doug's approach. The little scrap yard at the outskirts of town, just off the bottom of this shot, was another surprise. One of the sadder stories of this one involved the artillery spotter who hid himself for much of the battle right near the center of town to call in danger-close fire on the TRPs you see in this picture. I pulled him back as the ranging shots began to fall only to have him shot up by a half-track I hadn't expected. Ever so.
So how did we do? Well, considering that this was Waffen SS against, essentially, the guys in Kelly's Heroes that didn't go on the heist caper, I'm all but pleased with a minor defeat. As Doug himself said, though, if his tanks would have made it past the mines, this would have been a very, very bad day.
I observe before passing that Combat Mission's scenario writers really seem to be wrapping their heads around the tools presented to them by CMx2. These are some great situations that go far beyond the challenge of "A Meeting at the Crossroads". Makes me wonder what they'll have in store for the East Front as they slowly walk that part of the series back in time as well as West Front scenario packs.
