State of Play: playtesting Afrika Army Korps - Part 1

 

  

Disclosure statement: I have play-tested one game for CSL previously (which I’ve written about here and here). Designer Ray Weiss and I friends on Facebook and maintain a convivial, if sporadic, correspondence (and have overlapping tastes in music), and I’ve now played a handful of his games in which I had no prior involvement. Ray included the playtest kit (maps, counters and PACs) for Afrika Army Korps in a delivery of CSL games I’d ordered during a sale. I’ll be writing session reports and reviews of these games as I get around to them (you can find my session report for the first of these, Mars La-Tour (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2020), here).

British Recce units make a Grand Attack on the Italian garrison at Siwa, who are
putting up a Steadfast defence.

I’ve been neglecting A Fast Game lately. Some of that has been due to things going on outside of gaming (family and health). But I’ve also been playtesting a new game, Afrika Army Korps (Conflict Simulations Ltd, ~2024). Army Afrika Korps is an operational-level WWII game covering the whole of the North African theatre, from the outbreak of hostilities to the evacuation of Rommel and a remnant of the Axis military presence. The game has a sand-boxy element to it; history is applied in broad brushstrokes, but there is a lot of latitude to try different strategies and approaches, within the confines of limited resources and the unforgiving environment.

The game isn’t new – it’s had a page on the publisher’s website for at least six or seven months, it’s at a mature stage of development, and I count myself lucky to be involved in the last round of playtesting before it gets offered up to the public. This is the second game I’ve got to help playtest (the third if you count a friend’s hereto unpublished zombie survival miniatures game), and it always involves a mix of apprehension and excitement, often in varying measures through the course of the process.

As with my last playtest experience, I’ll probably prepare another post or two about the process and my involvement. Here I want to talk about where the game has come from, where it’s at in development, and what it offers.

How we got here

I didn’t immediately put my hand up for playtesting Afrika Army Korps. Early in the year, Ray Weiss put up a request on a couple of Facebook groups requesting volunteers willing to play-test two games I development, a “monster North African game” using the established DAMOS rules from his East Front trilogy, and a different kind of game with a much smaller footprint covering the Great Northern War of 1700-1722. I didn’t feel like I was qualified to comment on a North African game, but I’d done some work in Northern European history in my degree and had an abiding interest in the subject, so I offered to help with The Great Northern War (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2024). I’m not a dab hand at Vassal, so Mr Weiss at CSL sent me the set of image files and the rules, and I made up my own playtest set of the game, using spare parts from other games and some other bits I had to hand.

My scratch GNW playtest kit. The final product is much nicer.

That went well enough, and I really enjoyed the experience, and I like to think I made a positive contribution. While this was going on, CSL had engaged with some other play-testers for Afrika Army Korps. All good. Except, for whatever reason, everyone in the initial playtest round backed out. When I heard abut this I went back and forth with the Mr Weiss a bit about stepping up. Around the same time, I ordered a handful of CSL games, and Ray added a playtest kit to the order. I’ve had the set for about three weeks now, and between illness and family issues, I’ve got maybe twenty-something hours of table time in, so I think I can talk about it a bit. I won’t be giving too much away, and in the pics the components are nearly there but not quite (I’ll note differences as they come up).

Game heritage

Afrika Army Korps is powered by the DAMOS system. If you’re unfamiliar, DAMOS is an acronym for Destroy All Monsters Operational Series. This ruleset first appeared in Mr Weiss’s Barbarossa Trilogy, Army Group North (CSL, 2019), Army Group Center (CSL, 2019), and Army Group South (CSL, 2019).

AAK runs on the same engine, but with a different fuel mix. While the Barbarossa trilogy covers just that, the period of Operation Barbarossa, from the last weeks of June to the end of December of 1941, the AAK trilogy covers the entire North African theatre, from Italy’s push into British-held Egypt with Operatzione E in September of 1940, to the surrender of the remaining Axis forces in Tunisia in March of 1943 (the game actually accommodates ahistorical play out to the end of May in ’43).

Game components

As such, the scope of the game taken as  a whole is daunting, with the eight contiguous maps covering the North African coast from Casablanca in Morocco to El Alamein in Egypt (Alexandria is off-map, but noted with an exit marker for the Early War scenario), the difficulty may be in finding a table of tables to accommodate the play area, and maybe a room to accommodate the tables.

The maps laid out. The theatre was linear, stretched out nearly the entire
length of Africa’s Mediterranean coast, but the action was mobile and kinetic.
This game allows for that at truly grand tactical scale.

Six of the maps are 22” by 17” – what I tend to think of a half-sized maps, but a common size for magazine games – with another two maps, coming in at 17” by 11”. When laid out together in sequence, the maps come to a length of almost precisely 3.5 metres, or a touch over 11’ 6”. Like I said, kind of daunting.

Here's a sample of the area around Tunis, from the map files. The playtest
set I'm working with is an earlier version with some of the detail absent;
the ports are marked but not the airfields. Tunisia has serious road and
rail infrastructure. Not so much in Libya/Egypt. 

Having said that, I really like the maps. These are, as I understand it, near final. Some details are missing from the hard-copy maps the play-testers received, but they still look quite amazing (although I’m sure they will ignite the ongoing argument among some gamers over the best way to represent desert terrain; this is inevitable – as it was, so shall it ever be).

On the other hand, the counter mix is on the lower side. Of the 240-counter (count for the game, only 134 represent units on the board, 55 for the Axis and 79 for the Allies. The rest are markers for mobile/static supply (supply is crucial in AAK), Out of Supply reminders, mnemonic markers for attack and defence commitments in combat, and an assortment of other tokens. The chits are 5/8" in size, so they are easy to read, and they are pre-rounded. Anyone familiar with one of CSL’s more recent releases will know the style of counters I’m talking about. They're secured to the sprue with a single nub

Axis Attack markers. DAMOS offers the aggressor a variety of attacks for effect,
but that's okay - defenders have options as well. Usually.

The three PACs include a Turn Track, incorporating a short track for managing Resource Points (I’ll look at this in more depth in a later post) and the Combat Matrix Table (which I’ll also talk about more in another post). The second card offers the Terrain Effects Chart (which is duplicated in the sea-region of the E2 map) on another, while the third is all business with the Combat Effects Table, Counter-Attack Table, Replacement Chart, and a Random Events Table. At the end of each turn, one of the players rolls two d6 to see if a random event impacts the next round. on a roll of a seven, there's no event, but other events can give one player an edge (such as a convoy making it to a friendly port) or may adversely affect both sides (like a Sandstorm, that halves everyone's movement).

The Scenarios and General Game Play

The DAMOS East Front games were released as three separate games, each with its own 22” by 17” map covering the area of operations for each Army Group, then as a deluxe set with a combined map into a single contiguous area (an upgrade kit is available for those who own the individual games). The current intention is to release Afrika Army Korps as an all-in-one set. 

There are three core scenarios out of the box. The Early War uses the three eastern-most maps, covering roughly the area from Tripoli in Libya to El Amiriya, a few dozen miles west of Alexandria, in Egypt. It runs through 1940 and most of 1941. The second scenario, Torch and Tunisia, covers the period from November 1941 and ending as late as May 1943, while the Campaign for North Africa combines the other two scenarios into a single, well, what it says on the tin. The British forces have make territorial gains against the Italians to create a buffer that they can afford to lose with the arrival of Rommel and the German reinforcements (a good band name right there) and hold out until Operation Torch distracts the Axis player from thoughts of an easy victory taking Alexandria and makes them focus on survival in the theatre. It's compelling stuff.

Commonwealth units preparing an assault to retake Sid Barrani.

I haven’t tried the Torch and Tunis scenario yet, but from what I’ve learnt playing through the Early War, combat is swift and sometimes unforgiving. The game runs quite quickly, leaving out the inevitable analysis paralysis that comes from wanting to do more than you possibly can with limited resources.

The big drawback to the game as it stands is that to play two of the three scenarios requires having the entire map set up, which requires nearly twelve feet of contiguous table space. We have an 8’ by 4’ dining table, and I think I can run half the map along one edge and the other half the opposite edge. We’ll look at how successful that is in the next post. But I can see AAK being a hit at war-gaming conventions, simply for the wow factor of the Campaign for North Africa (without the bookkeeping overhead of The Campaign for North Africa (SPI, 1979).

Early War scenario set-up. The Terrain Effects Chart, Replacement
Points Track, and Combat Matrix are reproduced on the two
eastern-most map sections. 

Once you get the hang of it, DAMOS functions quite smoothly. This is my first actual play of the DAMOS rules, though I had some familiarity with them from reading through them pretty thoroughly and offering some comments around the time of the Great Northern War playtesting. I grabbed a copy of Army Group Center from a FLGS one state over when it came up for sale (unboxing post here) but hadn’t had the opportunity to get it to the table before the AAK materials arrived, so I dived straight into that.

Getting back to the scenarios, how does one set up a nearly twelve-foot play area. I’m too old and decrepit to play the game out on the floor like a latter-day H.G Wells; but I think I can manage to fit it onto the table in two parts. I’ll report back on that in the next instalment. But the fact is, three maps might be the outer limits of what some people can accommodate on their preferred playing space. The necessity to lay out the whole eight maps to play the other scenario might be a deal breaker for some. It doesn’t matter how well a game plays it you can’t set it up.

Like this, but with croupier's rakes for the counters and
comfortable chairs (and a lot less clutter).

I can say that attempts are being made to address this issue. I don’t want to gild it too much but hopefully, when the game is ready to ship, it will include some shorter scenarios playable on just two or three maps. This should give the game even greater appeal.

I’ll leave it there, save some for the next post. I’ll spend some column-inches on how movement, combat and supply rules work in the game, and hopefully get some better photos.