State of Play: New member of the A Fast Game team

 

Well, less a new employee, more a new strata of management. We've adopted a cat, and her name is Dharma.

"I was told there would be snacks."

Jess and I have been married for twenty-five years, and in that time, we've never owned a pet. But collectively we've cat-sat felines for family members for a total of roughly four of those years, usually six weeks to three months at a time, once for nearly six months.

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but we started talking about adopting a cat a couple of months ago. When Jess was looking at the local Animal Welfare League's website, Luna (as she went by then) jumped out, figuratively speaking. A stray for probably most of her life, the two-year-old was affectionate on her own terms, but had some issues, she didn't like other cats and she didn't like children. It was like it was meant to be. 

Dharma is a strong advocate of paper recycling.

It took a few days for Dharma to get used to her new surroundings, and a full week us to gain a measure of trust from her, and for her to become accustomed to getting regular, small-but-often meals (she'd lived on the streets for so long, fending for herself, that in the shelter she would make herself sick gorging her food too quickly). The adoption officially went through a couple of days ago with Dharma's registration transfer to us.

I haven't tabled a game since we've had her but she doesn't seem to be a physicist (a cat that pushes things of shelves to see if they break of bounce), so I'm holding out hope that she won't countermand my orders with troop movements of her own devising. I'll keep you apprised.

Already, Dharma is expressing some strong views on the subject of CRTs.

Review: Commands and Colors: Medieval

 

 

Commands and Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019) seems to be regarded by some as the red-headed step-child of the Commands and Colors family. It was the only C&C version that met with open (and loud) hostility from some quarters when it first arrived on the scene. I want to say up front, I am not, and have never been, in that camp. 

Everyone has their own opinion of the Commands and Colors system, but nobody can deny it’s been popular (and I’d argue, ultimately good for the health of the wargaming hobby overall, but that’s a conversation for another post). Commands and Colors: Ancients (GMT Games, 2006) and Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) have sold out of their seventh and fifth printings respectively, and demand is still high.  C&C: Medieval is on its second printing, and at time of writing is still available from the publisher.

Set-up for the Petra Mountains Passes (Lazic War, 548 AD) scenario.

A number of years ago, before the publication of C&C: Medieval, there was a short note in GMT’s monthly newsletter penned by Richard Borg, C&C’s designer and godfather of system’s development into new subject areas, from Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, 2004) to Commands and Colors Tricorne: Highland Uprising (Compass Games, 2020). Here Mr Borg spent a paragraph of two on the projection for C&C: Medieval, which at the time, had either just been added to the P500 list or was added in the following month or so. At that time, Borg stated the intention of his development cohort was for C&C Medieval to cover the entire medieval period, from the dissolution of the Roman Empire to roughly the mid-fourteenth century, in broadly chronological order, beginning with the Eastern Roman Empire, and working up form there. The middle-ages cover a period of over a thousand years, beginning around 300AD (though some would argue for the Sack of Rome in 410 being a good marker) through to about 1500 and the birth of the Early Modern period.

There was some kickback about the choice of tackling the period chronologically, but since the game’s initial release five years ago, Commands and Colors: Medieval has received over 600 BGG ratings for an average of 8.2 out of 10 (I’m always wary of BGG numbers, but in terms of wargame-scale, 600 seems like a good sample size). For context, Command and Colors: Napoleonics rates and average 8.0 over nearly 3,300 ratings. With the impending release of C&C : Medieval's first Expansion set, The Crusades (GMT Games, ~2024 - at time of writing still available for pre-order on GMT''s P500 list), I thought this seemingly under-loved game deserved a second look.

A green and pleasant board. The vertical lines you can see are panel folds, not the
sector demarcation lines, which are dashed (each sector is roughly 4 hexes wide). 

 

Appearance

Command and Colors: Medieval has everything you’ve come to expect from a Commands and Colors game; lots of blocks (purple for the Late Romans/Byzantines and their allies, and a sandy colour for their enemies, usually Persian Sassanids in this the base set scenarios, but sometimes their hereto allies), sheets of stickers to go on the blocks, in this instance a combined Rules and Scenarios booklet, and some very nice laser printed dice (no more arduous placing of die-face stickers in the recesses of the old dice of Ancients and Napoleonics (we’d played so many games with my brother-in-law’s set of C&C: Napoleonics, I had to write to GMT and ask if they sold extra sticker sets to replace the faces of the then illegible dice (if you ever find yourself in the same situation, they usually do)). The blocks are of the same proportions used in other flavours of Commands and Colors, so nothing new to report there. The illustrations for the units on both sides are off the usual high-standard.

Unit types in C&C: Medieval. the purple are the Romans/Byzantines. while
the sand-coloured blocks are the enemies of the Romans/Byzantines.

The board is mounted, the background a grass-coloured green that sets off the block colours nicely, and presents the terrain tiles well. For those unfamiliar with the series, the board is essentially a featureless play area of indeterminate scale, superimposed with a hex-grid thirteen hexes wide and nine deep. The hexes are large as to accommodate a unit starting with four blocks (the blocks equate to hit points, and each successful hit against the unit will remove a block, but like C&C: Ancients and others, the unit operates at full strength until vanquished).

Geographical features, like forests, hills and rivers are represented by cardstock terrain tiles that ae placed on the board per the set-up map for that scenario (unlike most other Commands and Colors games, the scenarios for C&C: Medieval don’t appear in a separate booklet, but are incorporated into the rulebook. I like the illustrations on the terrain tiles as well. The tiles are produced on a good weight of cardstock (something that has varied from product to product in the Commands and Colors production queue but has definitely stabilised in the last six of seven years.

Reduced Sassanid medium cavalry holding the high ground. The hill rules are different
in C&C: Medieval, reflecting the evolved style of fighting and concentration on cavalry
as the primary offensive unit. No unit can roll more than two dice fighting up-
 or down-hill, or from hill to hill. 

The game also comes with two pairs of Player Aid Cards. Two present the units types and gives a rundown of their various strengths and limitations, particularly in relation to other units. The other two are duplicate cards presenting two sets of special orders that can be applied to a unit I some situations by spending an Inspired Leader token. I’ll go into a little more detail about these below.

All in all, the production on the game is very good, with an overall feel that manages to hark back to its sibling games from GMT, but also to carve out its own identity. If I could change one thing about the package, it would have been to keep the rules and scenarios in separate booklets, but that’s a fairly minor quibble.

Typical scenario set-up map, showing the positions of terrain tiles and both side's units.
A scenario will also offer a brief historical context for the battle, information for the
players (, i.e., hand size, who starts), and any additional rules peculiar to that
situation (such as fordable rivers or VP locations).

Play

If you’ve never played any Commands and Colors games before, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version. Commands and Colors: Medieval is a card-driven, tactical level wargame that uses blocks instead of counters to denote units of differing strengths and capabilities on a board divided into three sectors, Center and Left and Right Flank (relative to the player). Each side has a hand of cards with varying orders that can be played. The orders may allow the activation for movement and combat of one or more of units in a certain sector, or across sectors, or those close to a Leader, or anywhere on the board, so long as it matches the type (designated chape/colour).

Each unit can move and fight or just fight if adjacent to or in range of an enemy unit, If the target unit is adjacent, they’ll probably have a chance to fight back, which adds to the tension. The game is one by the side that accumulate the required number of victory points (marked in the game by the physical handing over of a Victory Banner chit to the opposing player); the scenario will specify the number of Banners required, but it’s usually between five and nine. This is handy if you have less time to devote to a game; you can choose a scenario with a lower banner-count. Banners are earned by vanquishing enemy units and leaders from the field, and sometimes meeting terrain or action objectives. First across the line wins.

From Top: Victory Banners (Sassanid in sand/ochre and Byzantine in
Purple/Gold). Bow markers for Cavalry (front and reverse). and an
Inspired Leadership token - in a scenario you'll start with two or more
of these and have a chance during the game to earn more
through card play.

The thing I’d heard people complain most about regarding the Commands and Colors system is how they can’t just do what they want when they want to do it like they can in other games (which leads me to ask what are these other games they’ve been playing that have no restrictions on a side’s actions), or they complain they never have the right cards for the strategy they want to pursue. To me, this is the game’s strength. Humans are predisposed to optimisation, achieving a goal with the least amount of effort. It’s what has led to most technological innovation. Sometimes people forget it’s the complications that make play so enjoyable. The card-order system in C&C games is meant to reflect the imperfect knowledge of the battlefield that any commander will have (fog of war), but it also there to provide complications to hinder the players efforts, forcing them to find ways to make do and to play, literally, the hand they’re dealt. Commands and Colors is often painted as a beginner’s game, or an entryway into the hobby, but I don’t think some folks give it enough credit as a proving ground for developing improvisational tactical skills in a dynamic, fluid environment.

If you’re familiar with Commands and Colors: Ancients, a lot of C&C Medieval will look and feel familiar. The same grades of Light, Medium, and Heavy troops and cavalry are present, with matching colour/shape markers to the earlier game, along with the white bordered Auxilia (light) and Warrior (medium) units. But there’s also another class on the block; the Super Heavy Cavalry (white bordered Red (Heavy) square marking). These function in much the same way as Heavy Cavalry, except they can ignore more melee (swords) damage than Heavy Cavalry, and in on a Cavalry Charge order, they roll with two extras dice instead of a single. They are still susceptible to Red Square rolls though, like any heavy unit; they are devastating, but mortal.

Inspired Action Reference Sheets. Just the edge you may need.

The main innovation to the game is the introduction of special orders for leaders. With the play of a Leadership order, the leader can give a special order or advantage in combat to a unit activated by the current order from a suite of options presented on the Inspired Action Army Reference Sheet (a double sided PAC, with Byzantine team orders on one side, with the Sassanid team’s set on the reverse’ not that some scenarios will require both players to use the Roman side, when the battle involves hereto allies of the crumbling empire), by spending an Inspired leadership token (the scenario notes will spell out how many of these each side begins with, and there are opportunities to gain more through card play during the game. The player is usually limited to spending just one in a given turn, but they can be spent to, say relocate a leader at the end of a players turn, or to add a die to a Close Combat or Battling Back roll. To be honest, I’m still getting used to this aspect of the game, and I don’t think I’ve ever made the best use I could of the Inspired Actions available in a single game yet. There’s always more to learn.

Bow markers. In the fifth century, apparently everybody wanted to be Legolas.

A game of C&C: Medieval will play out similarly to a C&C: Ancients game because the basic framework is so similar – the latter is the closest genetic match to the former. But it’s in no way a duplicate experience. There are different dynamics at play, such as the possibility of all cavalry on one side doubling as mounted archers; from around the Fifth Century, it was much more common for progressively heavier cavalry to carry bows as well as their melee arsenal into battle. Rather than duplicate forces (making the se both much heavier and more expensive), markers are included to define whether a cavalry unit is armed with bows or not. The scenario’s special rules will tell you if any cavalry units on either or both sides need to be treated thus. The cavalry bow capabilities are all treated the same – range of two hexes and two dice for stationary fire or a single die for moving, but I’ve played plenty of C&C games of all stripes when a single die could or has made a significant difference.

 

Appraisal

The full gamut of Medieval history (and arguably pre-Classical Ancient history) have been overshadowed in the wargamer public’s collective imagination by the sheer weight of games devoted to the much more sexy Classical antiquity (from Alexander through late Roman Imperialism), the same way the Napolenic wars tend to over-shadow the martial achievements of Marlborough, Gustav Adolph or Wallenstein. I studied mostly the Early Modern period at university, though I’ve tried to make up for that in my current reading. My point is this is all new to me. Each scenario or battle sequence (like the Lazic War, represented by five battles stretching over eight years) in C&C: Medieval is an education. Wargames in general tend to be the beginning of learning for me; I’ll play a game or a scenario, read the historical precis of the situation, get beaten (whether playing the historical losers or not), and go away to read at lease a Wikipedia page on the battle or its political and social context.

When two sides go to war (it can make for a diverting evening).

But exposure to history isn’t the only reason I enjoy C&C: Medieval. It’s also a lot of fun. This it has in common with all the Commands and Colors games I’ve played. I get it’s not for everyone, and that’s okay, neither is Country & Western music. The C&C family is planted firmly nearer the Play end of the Play/Simulation continuum, and it won’t scratch some folks’ itch for realism in a game. Play in any C&C game is swift and dynamic (well, once you’re accustomed to the way the cards, the units and the terrain interact, but it’s not a particularly steep learning curve either). Commands and Colors games tend to be both fast and good games, and there is an obvious need and desire for games like that in the wargaming space. Some scenarios seem weighted in favour of one or the other side, and that’s okay, as the historical situation depicted probably also tilted to one faction’s benefit. But the satisfaction of winning a game despite such hobbling is a sweet nectar form which to sup. As I’ve said in the past, if you really want balance, stick to chess.

Mid-way through the Petra Mountains Passes scenario. The Byzantines got the worst
of it that day (as evidenced by the purple pennants held by the Sassanids).

Commands and Colors: Medieval isn’t simply a different flavour of C&C, any more than any of the other iterations are. They all use a shared language, but each one is in a different dialect, And C&C Medieval is no exception. While the job is still to remove enemy units from the board (as with every other C&C game), subtle and not-so subtle differences make Medieval a different kind of challenge.

 

 

 

Stripped Down for Parts: Flanks of Gettysburg: Little Round Top, Culp's Hill – July 1863

 

Flanks of Gettysburg: Little Round Top, Culp's Hill – July 1863 (Compass Games, 2024) is a company-level game that looks in closer detail at the action of July 2, 1863 during the battle of Gettysburg, when Lee sought to turn and roll up the extended flanks of the Union line of battle. These two actions, both relatively small in light of the overall battle, were nonetheless significant, and could arguably have led to a reversal of fortunes if even one attack had succeeded.

Flanks of Gettysburg is a John Poniske design, and represents an evolution in his company-scale exploration of American Civil War battles, proceeded by Fire on the Mountain: Battle of South Mountain September 14, 1862 (Legion Wargames, 2022)  Belmont: Grant's Baptism of Command, November 7th, 1861 (Compass Games, 2017 – featured in Paper Wars #87), neither of which I haven’t yet got to try out, and Ball’s Bluff (Legion Wargames, 2015), which was my first experience at tactical ACW wargaming.

As usual, apologies for the poor lighting. This photo doesn't do justice
to the box art.

The first thing that strikes you about the box is the cover art. The painting chosen to adorn the front to the Flanks of Gettysburg is The Famous Charge of the Twentieth Maine 2 July 1863, by acclaimed twentieth-century American military artist and illustrator, H. Charles McBarron Jr. It depicts the famous bayonet charge by the Union forces against the hard-fighting and by then exhausted Confederate soldiers of Hood’s division at Little Round Top. The painting (actually only a partial representation, but it does deliver the point) sits below a partial map of the town of Gettysburg from the period.

Box back. It's a nice, sturdy 2-inch box.

I like Compass Games' approach to their back-of-the-box information. This hasn't always been the case, but they have exhibited a much more standardised approach to this in the most recent seven or eight games I’ve bought. The details cover the technicalities of the game, rating the game’s complexity (Medium, in this case), Time Scale (one turn is around 30 minutes of game time), and Map Scale (30 yards to a hex), Unit Scale (40-50 men here), then goes into the playability factors, including Number of Players (1-2), Solitaire Suitability (High), Average duration (2-3 hours) and Recommended Age (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wargame that didn’t suggest 14 or older).

The Rulebook for Flanks of Gettysburg is printed in full colour on a kind of half-gloss paper (not true matt finish, but not so shiny as to make it difficult to read). It technically runs to twenty pages, but the layout person has adopted the European convention of numbering from the page after the cover page. I used to work on corporate publications with a German layout and print-prep guy who always did this; it used to drive me nuts at first, but there are more worthy hills to die on*.

The Table of Contents offers the chapter numbers only, which is a tad disappointing – I personally prefer page numbers for finding a rule quickly – but I suppose it may be better to leave the page numbers off than to have references that don’t end up corresponding to the correct pages in the final publication.

Sample page from the rulebook.

On that point, I was watching the Compass Town Hall from October 3^rd, and I mentioned in the comments that Flanks was arriving that day, and Brittani-Pearl read my comment and mentioned live that I would want to download the current living rules before getting into it. Doing a quick and dirty comparison of the two documents, I can see why that could be a legitimate warning – some of the explanation have been tightened up and cross-referencing to other related rules is much more thorough, but I don’t think the rules as they stand would be unplayable. Anyone who has gamed for any length of time will have come across much more difficult-to-navigate rules-sets than this and and still managed to get a game going (insert the typical “Damn kids, get off my lawn” rant here).

I’ll just note one more thing here; the two games are essentially single scenario games. The scenario set-up details are chapters 4.0 and 5.0 of the rules (starting page 6), in a fourteen-chapter rules set (including chapters on Optional Rules and Designer Notes). This struck me as odd, but it actually makes a lot of sense, at least considering how I learn a new game. After giving the rules a once-over, I will tend to setup a game (usually the easiest scenario) and push some counters around with the rulebook open in front of me. The rules layout not only endorses this approach; it actively encourages it.

PAC (double-sided, left) and the Terrain Effects Chart and Unit legend (right).

The game comes with the following: one Player Aid Card (double sided), one combined Terrain Effects Chart and unit counter decoder, and two Set-Up Cards, one for the Union player and another for the CSA player. I’m a little disappointed with the inclusion of just one PAC to be shared between the players. It’s less impactful on me as I tend to do most of the rules-adjudication with most of my regular gaming partners, so it makes no odds.

The PAC is the only double-sided card in the package. The front incorporates an abbreviated Sequence of Play a breakdown of Firepower and its effects, a reminder about stacking (up to four Fire Points total) with examples, a reminder about Facing in the games (top counter-edge is the front and must face a hex-side square-on, either side is a flank, and the three rear hex-sides are rear and the unit cannot fire in those directions without first turning), an abbreviated table of Movement costs, and an action sequence for Melee combat. The reverse side offers instructions for Rallying unit, the uses of Officers, a breakdown of Victory Point values, and guidelines for Sharpshooter units, Headquarters chits, and for the Union player, the Engineer Warren piece, which I can’t wait to see in action.

The single Terrain Effects Chart is fine – in fact I’m surprised room wasn’t made on the map-sheets for a TEC, but that may become clearer when I actually get the game to the table The TEC also incorporates legends to explain all the details related on the various counters.

Set-up cards covering both games.

The Set-Up Cards do double duty for the two games. One end of the card serves for the Culp’s Hill scenario, while the other end serves for the Little Round Top action. At first glance, the cards can seem a little disorientating, but I think they will play well. The cards include details of when regimental chits are added to the draw cup through the course of the game. I'll come back to the draw cup and chits in a bit.

Culp's Hill map-board.

Now, to the maps. The two maps depicting the battlefields were prepared by the notable ACW cartographer and game designer, Rick Barber. Mr Barber, who passed away in 2021, knew Gettysburg well. He had rendered the landscape of the battle in map form for several games, including A Most Fearful Sacrifice (Flying Pig Games, 2022) and his own Summer Storm: The Battle of Gettysburg (Clash of Arms Games, 1998). These maps are hand-drawn, and remarkable documents in their own right.

Culp's Hill map (detail).Culp’s hill is the bigger battle of the two, with eighteen
regiments fielded across the two sides.

I’m a fan of Mr Barber’s work; he also created the map for Mr Poniske’s first company-level ACW game, Balls Bluff, and these two maps are works of art. It took me a little while to come around to his preference of colour palette, but I’ve come around to it. It highlights both sides’ counters on the board, and changes in elevation are clear without being too jarring. The starting points for regiment beginning on-board and the Objective hexes are also clearly represented on the map without being too distracting.

Little Round Top Map-board (apologies for the glare).

The maps are printed on a light card stock instead of the familiar heavy paper stock. I was a little concerned that they wouldn’t lay very flat out of the box, but they are really quite good, not needing any serious back-bending at the fold at all to get a workably flat surface, even without a plexi overlay. I believe Bill has said in a recent Town Hall that all of Compass’s unmounted gameboards would be printed on this material hereon in (leave me a note in the comments if I’ve got this wrong).

Little Round Top map (detail). The flags mark the set-up points for on-board-at-start
regiments, while the gold stars mark Victory Point locations.

The play here is a chit-pull system that lends itself well to solitaire play. Chits representing attendant regiments are placed in an opaque container (not included with the game – I use an oversized coffee mug with a rounded bottom, wide enough to get my whole hand into), and units are ordered in the sequence of their chit being drawn from the cup, when all the chits have been drawn, units ordered, and actions resolved, the round ends. The retrieved chits then go back into the draw container, along with the chits for any reinforcements appearing in the subsequent round, and the first chit for the next turn is drawn. A lot of games and game-systems use a chit-pull mechanic these days, but my introduction to this device came with Ball’s Bluff, so FoG already feels somewhat familiar.

Counter sheet 1.

Counter sheets 2 & 3.

The counters are 5/8” and both clear and attractive, prepared by another familiar artist, Bruce Yearian. The unit are identified by their colour (a lighter and a middling shade of blue for the Union and light grey and butternut for the CSA, to distinguish the two separate game sets), each with a coloured stripe under their company and regiment details to make it easier to identify their formations, while the leader sport little portraits. A nice addition is the visual historical note against some of the portraits denoting if that leader had been wounded or killed in the battle. 

Detail of Union counters, Little Round Top (pale blue, left), and Culp's Hill (darker blue,
right). Leaders and companies are marked by their matching coloured bands.

The counters are easy to read, with a single Force Points factor and a pip system for morale (most are two or three pips, with some at just one. The identifying colour band is replicated on the draw chits, making it easier to identify which troops are currently being ordered. All in all, a lot of thought has gone into making the game playable, so the functions of the play don't take away from the verisimilitude of the experience. 

The whole box and dice.

Lastly, Flanks of Gettysburg comes with enough dice to carry you through the game (eight in all, four white, four black). 

I’m a latecomer to tactical ACW games, but I haven’t yet met one I didn’t like, so I don’t think it will be long before Flanks of Gettysburg makes it to the table. Look out for a review in the next month or two (I have a bit of a back-log, but I can see this game sneaking to the front of the queue).

 

* I think this must have bugged somebody else at Compass as well because the Living Rules’ pagination begins with the cover page.

 

Review: Brief Border Wars

 

 

We need a short, victorious war to avert a revolution.

- [attributed to] Vyacheslav von Plehve, Minister of the Interior to Tsar Nicolas II.

 

 

Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020) is a set of four games using the same basic system, with exclusive rules for each game, to explore four little regarded modern conflicts (one, I‘ll admit, I’d never heard of before getting the game), which all occurred within my lifetime. The series rules for Brief Border Wars are based on Brian Train’s earlier game, Ukrainian Crisis (released in a double-pack with “The Little War” (Hollandspiele, 2017), which began as a response to the Russian “liberation” of the Crimea in 2014. I haven’t played Ukrainian Crisis, but I have played quite a bit of Brief Border Wars now, and I feel comfortable talking about it.

 

Appearance

The box-cover of Brief Border Wars is reminiscent of the old SPI quad games, with a picture representing each of the four conflicts featured in the set. The first “proper wargame” I ever owned – one that wasn’t a cience fiction or fantasy-based gamewas a second-hand copy of SPI’s Modern Battles II: Four Contemporary Conflicts (SPI, 1977), so his set off some nostalgia chimes from the get-go for me.

The game covers four limited conflicts; the So-called Football War between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, Operation Atilla – the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and the 1979 Chinese incursion into Vietnam, referred to as the Third Indochina War. Then we skip forward to 2006 for the Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon Second Lebanon War.

Initial set-up for Operation Atilla: the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, 1974.

In the box you’ll find one set of series rules, four sets of exclusive rules, four single-sided maps, and a deck of 54 cards (good quality, but since you’’ go through the entire deck every game, they probably warrant sleeving), as well as counters and two dice. The production values on all the components are very good. The maps are heavy, matt-finish paper. I’ve tended to play under a plexi-sheet, but they lay flat enough that you don’t need a cover if you prefer the naked surface. I’ll come back to the cards later, but I would like to take a moment to talk about the dice, because it’ my one fundamental issue with the came as it comes. I’m not the first to bring this up, but in a single round of combat it’s not unheard of for both players to be rolling ten or more dice. And the box offers two, one black and one white. These days, ten-sided dice are readily available from hobby stores and online. My advice would be, before you try to play any of the battles in Brief Border Wars, secure a handful of ten-siders – at least eight or ten of them, more if you prefer each player to have their own set. Nine or ten dice will cover most of your combat actions, though occasionally you may need to re-roll a couple of the unsuccessful dice to make up your quota.

The four maps are presented as topographical of the contested area; these may be actual photographs or doctored illustrations based on photographs of each contested area. Each map is divided into areas, usually with a national border segregating one country’s sovereign territory from another’s (with the exception of Operation: Atilla, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974). The game comes with a single sheet of counters for all four games. There are some administrative counters shared between the four games, and each side fields around sixteen to twenty-something units, depending on the battle.

Honduran forces meet Venezuelan units inside the Honduran border, (the Football War, 1969).
The bold red line is the national border, the dotted lines define areas for movement, while
the golden lines are roads, which may facilitate swifter movement for motorised units.

The base rules-set is a mere four pages – I mentioned its simplicity – printed on bi-fold cardstock, like a PAC.’ At first, I thought it was a curious choice, but with so short a rules-set it makes sense. The first couple of times we played, I found myself referring to the rules a lot, so it was really easy to find what I needed.  The exclusive rules are also presented the same way. Each set of exclusive rules included a Sequence of play on the back page, so they double as a PAC.

 

Play

Brief Border Wars, like many quad games before it, uses a set of series rules, which in this case amount to a mere four pages, and some exclusive rules (usually another four pages, five in the case of the Second Lebanon War). The rules are clearly prepared and easy to comprehend. My brother-in-law, coming to the game with very little background in hex-and-counter wargaming picked it up very quickly, and was holding his own by the second game (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention absolutely crushing T in our first game together, the Third Indochina War, but I maintain losing a game is the best way to learn a game).

Play is card driven. The card-deck is two matching suits of cards, each twenty-one-card suit identified on the back with a grey or white stripe. Each faction is delegated one or the other suit in the scenario instructions. In the Card Selection Phase, one of the players draws six cards off the top of the deck, and divvies-up the white and grey-striped cards. This random distribution means that there will often be a disproportionate number of cads going to one or the other player. Whichever player holds the higher number of cards goes first, and the players take turns playing their cards until the last card has been played. Sometimes this will mean a player is playing two or more cards consecutively to end the turn. This may lend a temporary advantage to the player in question, but given the nature of the decks, the advantage of numbers will swing to the other player in consecutive turns.

Exclusive rules folio for the Second Lebanon War.

The twenty of the cards in each suit have two values, Combat and Movement, and each card may be used for one or another of these. The numbers on a card dictate how many units may be activated by that play, either to engage in combat (with an enemy unit or units in the same area) or it the card is used for Movement activation, the number that can be ordered to move. As a rule, units activated for movement can move from their current area to an adjacent area. In some cases, mechanised units can move through one area and into a second in a single activation if a single road links the traversed areas. A unit entering an area with an undisrupted enemy unit must stop, nor can it leave that area so long as an undisrupted enemy unit is present (this can be useful for anchoring your opponent’s units in place). Units sharing an area with enemy units aren’t compelled to fight, but until all the units on one side are disrupted or have been forced to retreat, nobody is leaving that area.

Combat is simultaneous; both sides roll and establish the number of hits against the other. The units in Brief Border Wars have one big numeral (usually value 1-3) in the bottom-left corner. This is the unit’s Combat Value, and it equates the number of dice it will roll in combat. The instigator declares which units are participating (and they may be able to call in air support to add to their number, while the defender in the space can add the defensive value of the terrain in the area (as marked on the map; +1 die each for forest or mountains (these stack if both are present) plus another two if the area sports a city). The respective buckets of dice are rolled, and hits are garnered on results of 5 or 6. Distribution of hits on the units involved is decided by the side dealing the violence.

The Combat Value of a unit does double-duty. If a unit receives less hits than it’s Combat Value, it is flipped to its disrupted side, which shows a lower CV. While disrupted, it can’t move or attack. But it can still defend itself without penalty. If the unit received more than it’s CV, it’s removed from the area and placed in the faction’s Damaged Units box. It’s possible to get them back in the fight (rebuilding the unit), but you must spend your limited card resources activating it for movement, then roll a on a single die to move the damaged unit from the Damaged Units box to the Rear Area box, then another activation to get them back onto the map. While not a permanent loss, units sent to the Damaged Box may never see action again before game’s end. This can lead to some difficult decisions around force maintenance for both sides.

Who can tell what the future holds (beyond more uncertainty): Random Event Card.

The remaining card in each suit is a Random Event card. A random event table features in the exclusive rules for each game. When the Random even cart is played the drawing player rolls a d6 and consults the table. The random events add some uncertainty to the play and may affect one or both sides.

Each player also holds six Special Action cards. The player may choose to use one of these cards in lieu of an activation card. A Special Action card may be used to un-disrupt all the disrupted units in a single area (kind of a field refit and consolidation action) or all the disrupted units in the Rear Area. Like all nice things in Brief Border Wars, these are a limited resource and should be used selectively.

Vietnamese units (red) desperately try to stem the tide of Chinese forces streaming
over the border in the Eastern near the line of delineation (the red dotted line) between
the Eastern and Western Fronts.

The forces are asymmetrical, as was the situation in each historical case, and there is a definite sense of aggressor and aggrieved in each situation (in the context of the battle). As a rule, the aggressor has the upper hand in forces and materiel, but the defenders usually have the home ground advantage.

The game ends with the completion of the seventh turn (occasionally at the end of the sixth turn due to political pressures (a possible random event). Assessing victory is simple. The aggressor accrues Victory Points for holding locations – usually cities – with unchallenged, non-disrupted forces (i.e., areas with at least one functioning unit and no undisrupted enemy units present).

 

Appraisal

Brief Border Wars lives up to its name. The four conflicts represented ran from a few days to a couple of months in duration, and the consequence for each influenced relations between the antagonists for years or decades after.

Venezuelans and Hondurans both call in air support.
(Please forgive the sloppy unit placement.)

This game ticks a lot of boxes for me. One of the things I love about these situations is the low counter density. On a 17” by 22’ map (the game is not at all a space-hog) it can look a little busy, but the counters are manageable. This is one of the factors that make the game an excellent introductory wargame for newcomers.

Having said that, there is a lot of strategic depth to the game. As the antagonist, it’s a simple thing to see what you need to do; there is some flexibility in your approach, but you essentially have to take and hold a certain point-value real-estate to win any kind of victory. But you’re not only playing against your opponent; you’re also playing against the clock. You may have seven rounds in which to achieve your mission, but you can only count on six of them. And with twenty action cards in the deck, if you get an early run of your own cards, you know that is going to come back and bite you later in the game. Any of the scenarios in Brief Border Wars shouldn’t take much more than ninety minutes to play. Once you’re familiar with the dynamics and the, for want of a better word, the nature of the game, You should be able to get a complete game played inside of seventy minutes, including set-up time.

The situation in the Third Indochina War at the end of Turn Four.
(Please forgive the plexi-flare).

The battles are remarkably well-balanced. While the contesting forces are uneven (one side always has the advantage in men or materiel on paper, but the smaller force always has the home-ground advantage and can often run a mostly defensive response to the aggressor’s incursion and have a good chance at denying them their victory conditions. This and the intuitive rules (combined with the low counter density, and a healthy level of randomness in the combat and the twice-visited Events Table), all contribute to making Brief Border Wars my go-to game for introducing really green players to the nuances of wargaming.

Another aspect of the game is its awareness-raising value. Brief Border Wars presents four seriously under-represented battles. With each one, Mr Train offers a brief historical context, painting the broader geopolitical context of the particular conflict. A bibliography for each battle would have been nice, but I can appreciate that being left out for the sake of maintaining the brevity of the rules.

Brief Border Wars is still available for order through your FLGS, and can be purchased directly from the publisher (at time of writing, at a discounted price during the Compass Annual Catalogue Sale). There will be a Brief Border Wars 2 (Compass Games, ~2025) coming – probably as early as the first half of next year – promising more of the same, but with a difference; the battles featured in the second volume will date from 1913 through to the beginning of the Second World War, including the Italo-Greek War and the Battle of Khalkin Gul. For a challenging and satisfying wargame that’s playable in a shortish time, I can’t recommend Brief Border Wars highly enough. That it’s actually four games in one is almost gilding the lily.

 

2024 Q3 Report: Three steps forward, two steps back

 

  

The reactions of everyone at the table when I pull off some
ill-advised stunt that should never have worked.

October snuck up on me, so this Quarterly report is a tad late, and I’m writing it between other things so it will be shorter than my usual meandering musings. The simple fact is, there isn’t that much to report.

 

The year (so far) by the numbers

So far as the blog is concerned, I feel like I’m falling behind a bit. This year our household has been beset by infirmity and family travails. Nothing any reader could possibly also point to in their own life, but to quote Ally McBeal, “It’s worse because it’s happening to me.”

I had pruned down my goals for the blog this year to what I thought were reasonable, achievable parameters: reach 200 posts and post 20 game reviews – these were to two key planks. Not counting this one, I am up to 147 posts. To make 200 posts I’ll have to be posting something every second day, and some consecutively. This was a goal for the sake of making a goal. It doesn’t mean that much, I’d rather post something I’m confident is worth reading than running out – which I think I’m accomplishing – so I’m less concerned about that one.

The reviews are another matter. I really thought I’d be able to post twenty game reviews in 2024 Since the last Quarterly Report, I’ve posted two reviews (for Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) and Undaunted: Battle of Britain (Osprey Games, 2023), bringing the total up to seven this year. I have three more partially written, but I want to pull each of the games out again and refresh my thinking about them before completing the write-ups).

The reviews are funny beasts. In the first year of A Fast Game, reviews tended to be the more popular posts, outstripping unboxings and game reports by nearly 2-1 on average. This year the responses have been wildly disparate. The C&C Napoleonics review has been very popular, with over 400 views (it’s impossible to tell how many people are reading through to the end, or even just looking at the pictures), while the Undaunted: Battle of Britain review has only had a half-dozen reads (although, to be fair, the C&C Naps review was featured in the GMT newsletter, which reaches a much wider audience than I would normally find).

Another unboxing I haven't quite got around to yet: Imperial Bayonets: 1870,
Sedan - We Were Not Cowards (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2020).

Given the way the last three months have played out, I’m not confident of reaching the twenty-review target, but I will press on regardless. I want to post reviews of Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020) and Commands & Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019) in the next two or three weeks (for C&C Medieval, this will be in line with the release of the game’s first expansion, Crusades I: Mid-Eastern Battles I (GMT Games, 2024), which will cover 250 years of fighting in the eastern Mediterranean; Brief Border Wars 2 looks like it will get a first-quarter 2025 release).

I posted fifteen unboxings in the third quarter and look to match this number between now and Christmas. Some to look forward to are A Most Fearful Sacrifice: theThree Days of Gettysburg (Flying Pig Games, 2023 – I’m not happy with a couple of the photos I’ve taken for it), and Flanks of Gettysburg (Compass Games, 2024 – hopefully arriving in a couple of weeks) which also boasts maps by the late Rick Barber, as well as my GMT sale-scores and a couple of other bits and pieces. I went into hock recently to buy a second-hand copy of Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, 1482-1492 (Compass Games, 2021) for a surprisingly low price (not cheap, but not the kind of expensive that games with wooden components usually pull these days). I was even more surprise to find the game was still in its shrink-wrap. Granada is the spiritual successor to Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan (GMT Games, 2011), using the same model for combat resolution, but in a slightly more forgiving way. And word is it plays out slightly quicker than Sekigahara, which is totally in my wheelhouse.

 

Playing with statistics

I’ve wound back on writing up the session reports. This is partly because I’ve been playing less games of late. The group swung back into role-playing games of late on Wednesdays, and I’m missing as many Monday night games with T as I’m making. Lately I’ve been making T play games I’ve been reviewing (the last month it’s been C&C: Medieval), which he doesn’t seem to begrudge. All up, I posted twenty session reports over the last three months, which is a little higher than I anticipated. The fact is, however, these are consistently the least-read posts on average. I try to keep up an output of two to three posts a week (sometimes they’ve been a little more sporadic than that of late, but I think I’m getting back into the rhythm). It begins to feel like a waste of time to put a lot of effort into something only half a dozen people might read (or just click on, thinking it was something else). By and large, unboxings and reviews vie for the most widely-read accolades, with session reports languishing in the field. I’ll still write games up if I have something interesting to offer about them, but I can’t maintain the excitement for another cavalry stoush in C&C: Medieval.

Another cavalry stoush in Commands & Colors: Medieval

One of the downsides of gathering more games is the fact that I haven’t been keeping up with playing them all, or even most of them. A back-of-the-envelope calculation seems to confirm what I suspected; after getting above 35% of owned games played around the beginning of the year, I’ve likely dropped to about 28% with the newly introduced titles. The anecdotal evidence bears that out. In my Q2 Quarterly Report I mentioned receiving We Are Coming, Ninevah (Nuts! Publishing, 2023) and that I was looking forward to getting it to the table. This still hasn’t happened, despite the game having a robust solo mode. A more rigorous interrogation of the numbers – removing expansions from the count – might raise the result a percentage point, but the fact remains, I haven’t been keeping on top of playing the new games as rigorously as I ought. Admission is the first step to a cure, so I’ll redouble my efforts to get more games played, and maybe even report on the ones I like.

In keeping with this intention, I’ve finally dipped my toe into a greater world of online board wargaming with Rally the Troops. If you're like me and came late to the party, Really the Troops allows you to play board wargames online without having to install an interface, like VASSAL or Board Game Arena. You set up a user account and pick a game to play. If you haven’t got an opponent, you can post a game and leave an open invitation. There are no charges, no advertising. One notable aspect of the games of RtT is that the rules and game functions have been incorporated into the code; the game itself will only let you do what the game rules allow.

Something for Everyone: the current selection of games on Rally the Troops.

Rally the Troops began solely as the work of Tor Andersson, a Swedish wargamer and computer programmer, and a patron saint to shut-ins like me. The site currently hosts twenty-one games, with the blessings of the games’ publishers (so far, nine different companies are represented, including the likes of Columbia Games, GMT, Hollandspiele and Fort Circle Games).

A friend from a local wargaming group on Facebook – I’ll call him T2 – has been coaching me on the whys ands wherefores of Mark Herman’s classic, Washington’s War (GMT Games, 2010). I’ve been handed my hat once already, and I fully expect t lose the second game as well, but I won’t be so easily pushed aside this time. 

If anybody reading this uses Rally the Troops and would like a game, look me up (username: jonboywalton), so long as you don’t mind a slow progression maybe three or five actions a day. My first game with T2 took the better part of a fortnight because of conflicting schedules. But the game was had, the loss felt, and it’s left me eager to explore more.