Stripped Down for Parts: Army Group Center (DAMOS)

 

  

Disclosure statement: I’ve done some playtesting for CSL in the past (which I’ve written about here and here), and the designer, Ray Weiss and I are friends on Facebook. I was in no way involved in the testing or production of this or the other two DAMOS Eastern Front series games (Army Group North (CSL, 2019), and Army Group South (CSL, 2019)), although I’m participating in the final playtesting round for the CSL’s upcoming Afrika Army Korps trilogy, which is also grounded in the DAMOS rules.

 

Army Group Center (CSL, 2019) is a compact, robust treatment of the German offensive against the Soviet Union in the second half of 1941, released, along with two companion volumes covering the northern and southern operations, by Conflict Simulations Ltd, a small wargame publisher operating out of New York. CSL has been pumping out some really interesting games for half a dozen years or more, covering some well-covered topics and some less visited by wargame designers. 

Army Group Center and its companion volumes represent the first iteration of designer Ray Weiss's DAMOS rules-set. DAMOS is an acronym from the series rules, the Destroy All Monsters Operational Series.  

The first thing you notice about the box is its size. Its roughly half-sized, or digest-sized; I don’t know what the technical term is, but it’s roughly the size of the original (“Classic”) Traveller (GDW, 1977) box-set release.

The box art is striking; it shares a trade dress with the other two games in the trilogy, and features a portrait of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who had operational command of Army Group Center from June to December of 1941, during Operation Barbarossa. The imagery is German (black and white), but the tenor of the box art is an enveloping Soviet red.

The box itself is on the light side, but not flimsy, the top and bottom separating easily and closing snuggly. All of CSL’s games are printed in the United States on a print-on-demand basis. Given the measure of its contents, there’s no need for it to be any more than it is. I should point out that (I’m pretty sure) all of CSL’s games are available in a box-free, zip-loc format, which will save you US$ in both cost and shipping (which is a consideration for us antipodeans).

The box back offers a brief description of the coverage of the game – if you know anything about the European Theatre of Operations during World War II, the name is probably a giveaway – and offers a picture with a sample of the map and a selection of the counters (shown at roughly actual size on the map pic; the markers at the bottom of the box are scaled up a little). The box back also lets us know that the Turn scale is roughly half a month, the map scale is 25 miles to a hex, and the units run the gamut from regiments to full armies. The game is recommended for one to two players, with a complexity rating of 8 out of 10 and a solitaire suitability of 6 out of 10. I would be inclined to peg the complexity at a seven myself, but the game does have some quirks that run counter to conventional Eastfront design wisdom (which I struggled with at first), so maybe the eight is appropriate. I’d also be inclined to be a little more generous with the solitaire-suitability rating.

The rulebook. Twenty pages of hard-to-read goodness.

I have a couple of issues with the production of Army Group Center (so, in all likelihood with the other two games in the trilogy as well). These all come down to trimming down the cost of production, which is of course a concern, but it’s been at the expense of player experience. The rulebook is comes out to twenty pages and is the size of a folded sheet of letter sized paper, which is what it is. This part I have no problem with, but the whole thing is set in a good, readable serif font, two columns with a good spacing between the lines. The problem happens when you do the formatting on a regular page-view, but then the whole thing is scaled down to fit a half sheet page, and your 12-point Garamond now comes out to about a 5 ½ point and not the easiest to read (if, like me, your best eye-days are behind you). I don’t resent the booklet-sized rules, but stretching them out to an extra sheet (24 pages instead of 20) would have allowed a much more readable font.

Sample page from the rulebook.

Don’t despair, though; with the upcoming release of DAMOS: Afrika Army Korps (CSL, ~2024), the latest iteration of the DAMOS core rules should be available for download from the publisher’s website, print off a copy of these and just use a magnifying glass for the scenario-specific notes.

The AGC map. This photo really doesn't do it justice.

Ilya Krudiashov was responsible for the maps for the three games in the series, and he has (as usual) done some really lovely work here. The map for AGC is really quite beautiful. The presentation is clear, the terrain features, cities and towns, road and rail links and national borders are clear and immediately identifiable without taking away from the scope of the game. The map is 17” by 22”, printed on good-quality, heavy paper stock (maybe 180gsm at guess), and covers the region from Warsaw to Moscow and from Riga in the north to Kiev in the south. The hexes are a little small, but the counters aren’t big, there’s a little corner spillage but it's manageable. Under plexi, this map will be a joy to play on.

Counter sheet. They're small but pretty.

The counters are only half-inch in size, but are still pretty readable for that, printed on really thick brown-core cardstock. Units are represented by NATO symbols, with two factors (the unit’s Strength value and Movement Allowance). The symbols are colour-coded by formation affiliation. The unit’s designation is printed along the side of the NATO symbol, and is a tad small, but clear enough to read when I remember to put my reading glasses back on (it’s been nine years – you’d think it would be second nature by now). The unit designations are important for cross-referencing with the Order of Battle displays.

German Order of Battle. You'll need copies of these to fill in during play.

The other gripe I have with the game (and I’m assuming the other two in the series suffer the same problem. The cohesion status of the units for each side is recorded on an Order of Battle sheet, one for each side.

Soviet Order of Battle.

The two unit status sheets are where you keep track of the hits a given unit has taken (via a handy tick-box system) are printed on a single half-sheet, front and back. A note on each side advising that these should be copied, which makes sense if you want to play the game more than once, but it would also have made sense to have printed these either on separate half-sheets or on a single folded sheet of paper to make it easier to copy both the German and Russian Orders of Battle on a single sheet.

The Turn-Track and PAC (make copies).

The single Player’s Aid Card is printed on a half-sheet of the same quality paper as the OoB sheet. incorporates the Turn Track, Terrain Effects Chart, Combat Matrix and Counter-Attack Table. It’s nicely laid out in black print with blue highlighting for the tables. The font is small but still quite readable, like the counters.

One of the quirks of DAMOS is the options for combat. The system allows the player four options for types of attack; Meeting Engagement (kind of a grand-scale equivalent of D&D’s attack of Opportunity), Standard Attack, Grand Attack and Penetration. These each have their own costs and circumstantial requirements, and offer the attacker various benefits. The Defender, in turn has three options for defence, subject to terrain conditions; Delay, Steadfast, and Counterattack. This makes for a really dynamic fighting state with crucial decisions for both sides in every incidence of combat. For this reason I’d advise running off a couple of extra copies of the Player Aid as you’ll be using the original to keep track of the game turns.

AGC also comes with three six-sided dice, a little small but serviceable.

This sounds as like I’ve done nothing but complain about Army Group Center. I don’t want to go too deep here – this is merely an unboxing – but DAMOS is a remarkably robust system for playing out operational-level actions at a relatively high scale in a relatively short timeframe (AGC would definitely be playable in an afternoon. For all my whining, I would still say Army Group Center (and by inference, the other two games in the series) is a game that would have benefited from a little more consideration around its presentation, but is nonetheless worthy of consideration.