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 This is the second game I’ve got to help playtest (the third if you count a friend’s hereto unpublished zombie survival miniatures game), and it always involves a mix of apprehension and excitement, often in varying measures through the course of the process.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.

 

 

State of Play: playtesting Great Northern War – Part 2

  

   

You can read part 1 here, but it’s not absolutely necessary (unless you're into DIY prototyping on a budget). Also, Great Northern War’s designer, Ray Weiss, posted a short video up on YouTube offering a visual tour of the final product, which you can watch here.

Great Northern War (CSL, 2024) is an operational-level game depicting the first decade or so of the war prosecuted by Russia and her allies against Sweden and the newly crowned, eighteen-year-old King Charles (or Karl VII). The conflict came to be known as to as the Great Northern War, or the Third Northern War (or, in some countries, confusingly, as the Second Northern War). The war began in 1700 and ended in 1721, which the game covers in just six turns. This is what I should have led with in my last post. You know, for context. Great Northern War is a novel, small-footprint game that’s out now (you can order it direct from the publisher here), and I got to be a part of the playtesting team.

I wanted to be involved in the playtesting to see how the game worked, but Great Northern War had a steep learning curve for me because I’d never played anything like it before. Many of the constituent parts of the game are familiar – point-to-point movement, action bidding, dice-roll plus build points (a pre-selected card) for a combat value, cards that create rule exceptions, adjustable hand-size, and taking penalties now for benefits in later turns. The biggest hurdle for me was the trick-taking mechanic. It’s so simple, I kept looking for the complexity. Let me tell you – there isn’t any, mechanically, at least.

Leading tricks

To lead a trick in Great Northern War, you declare your intention – say, to move a Leader a couple of locations, or to try to activate one of your reserve leaders onto the board – and select a card from your hand to lead with, then your opponent selects a card from their hand to respond. It their card is lower in value than yours, you can proceed with your action. If it’s of a higher value, or of the trump suit, you can’t do that thing you wanted to do, and your opponent gets their turn. It’s such a brain-crunchingly simple way to give every decision more weight, I don’t know why more games don’t use it (maybe they do, and I’ve just been living under a rock).

Each time you try to activate a unit, you have to ask yourself, “how badly do I want to do this?” and “How hard is the other guy going to try to stop me?” The first couple of rounds you’ll just be gathering your forces, maybe trying to move to strategic advantage, but as soon as you get the measure of your opponent and start to get a sense of their operational imperatives, every choice becomes frustratingly, deliciously difficult. The trick-taking mechanic forces you to think about what you want to achieve in the round (which could run to nine or ten turns each) with the incomplete knowledge of what cards you’re holding at the moment. The game should play out inside of two hours, but if you or your opponent are prone to analysis paralysis, add another hour or two to that count.

Mistakes were made

 

When I first got the files, the game was nearly there, but still a little raw. It wasn’t a brain dump – most of what was on the page was coherent and made sense - but not everything was clear from the rules. There were a couple of crucial details left out. This isn’t a criticism of the game – it’s one of the reasons you get bunch of people to playtest your game for you before releasing it on an unsuspecting public.

I broke one of my own dictums early on in the testing, which is something my father told me more than once; “There are no stupid questions, there are only stupid people who don’t ask questions because they don’t want to look stupid. One of the missing pieces was that there were Russians and Swedes and there were allies of either the Russians or the Swedes. The rules didn’t spell out from the get-go who here whose allies. The first draft of the rules said simply that there were 27 leader discs (13 blue Swedish and 14 Green Anti-Swedish). It left the Ottoman leaders out altogether in the component description, only picking them up a page or two later. The Swedish were easy to pick, as we the Russians and their Polish allies. The rest were a bit of a mystery. So, rather than asking the question, I tried to work out which were which from the numbers. For my first two playtest games, Swedes played with the Saxons in cahoots, while the Russians had the two Georgs. It sorted itself out eventually, but I should have sort clarification when it first came up. One way to help the designer or developer of a game you’re playtesting is to ask a lot of questions. I wasn’t the only person working on the game, and another of the other testers must have brought it up with Ray, because the next rules iteration had the above handy explanatory pi

As I said in the previous post, I was never taught card games really as a child, so the whole trick-taking mechanic was new to me. I understood the random draw of a trump and the role of the trump for the turn, but I didn’t quite understand the power of the trump. In Hitler’s Reich (GMT Games, 2018), the suits represent nationalities or coalitions – two represent the Americans and the Commonwealth (and Free French, Free Poles, etc.), while the other two represent the Germans and the Italians. The neat trick with Hitler’s Reich is, when each player plays the same value card, the Germans always win ties, but the Italians always lose in a tie. Without exploring further, I assumed that a played trump card would win ties, but beat any other suit as is the case. In this instance I did ask the question, and Ray cleared it up for me. A short explainer made it into the rules for any folks unfamiliar with the like me.

The acquisition of cards took a little working though as well. The jokers, face cards and aces in GNW are separate from the draw deck, and they have escalating powers. You can try to “purchase” them, one at a time, by leading a trick. If you’re successful, you can pick up the card and use it or hold on to it, depending on what it does. Some cards begin the game in front of one or the other player, being solely for their use, subject to certain game conditions being met (this wasn’t perfectly clear in the initial rules version I saw, but it should be obvious enough for new players in the printed rules).

After the first couple of plays, the Decision cards were making a lot more sense. I don’t think every single one came out across the playtest games I played, but I grasped the potential of each one to add to my game or to foil an opponent’s intentions.

The process

This wasn’t my first rodeo; I’ve done a bit of Role-Playing Game proofing work and some playtesting in the past, but this was my first wargame. Everyone has their own way of doing it, and I suspect different designers or developers may be looking for different things from play-testers. Some might have a form to fill out or a specific set of questions they’re looking for answers to. In this case Ray Weiss offered the rules and components and said have at it. I think he was already confident he had a workable game but was looking for some finessing. I can late to the playtesting, so I don’t know how radically the game had changed from what it was in the beginning; what I received was a really well-balanced game already (either side could win and did, and with fortune smiling on your card draws, you might even be able to snatch victory in the third or fourth round).

Early playtest game. Saxons mistakenly in service of the Swedes.

I like to think my contribution to the game was probably more in the presentation of the rules than in the game itself, but that’s my skillset (though it may not seem so reading this). The game mechanics had been stress-tested before it got to me; all that was left was the polish. I confess it was nice to be able to work with Ilya Kudriashov’s gorgeous map rather than a typical function-over-nice playtest board.

Playtesting forces you to think differently about a game. These days I look at the dames I play differently because I’m thinking about how to present it in a review. Playtesting pushes you to think about a game another stratum or two deeper, looking at why a particular mechanic is fashioned the way it is, and whether it accomplishes what it sets out to do. And whether it might be better done in another way, or ignored altogether.

After this experience (you always remember your first), I’d be happy to step up to the plate and take on another playtest. Ray has mentioned on Facebook working on a solo game about John Brown’s raid on the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry, so that would be interesting. Meanwhile, a new iteration of the DAMOS series rules should be coming through sometime soon.

Great Northern War is now available directly from the publisher and decerning purveyors of fine wargames.

 

 

State of Play: playtesting Great Northern War – Part 1

 

  

I’ve been taking some time away from my regular playing and writing lately because I’ve been working on something that I didn’t feel at liberty to write about. But it’s now out in the world, and I can now talk about a new game from designer Ray Weiss and his company, Conflict Simulations LLC, Great Northern War (CSL, 2024). Let me say at the outset that this isn’t a review, because I haven’t seen the finished product, but this is the kind of game that might be lost in the maelstrom of neat games from small publishers, so I wanted to highlight what I think makes Great Northern War special. I’m going to look at the game in two parts. Here, I’ll show you what my kit-bashed prototype looked, and talk a little about how it all fits together. In the second part I’ll talk about the playtesting process, the inevitability – and the virtue – of making mistakes, and how we (probably) helped make a really good game a little better.

I’d been proofing the system rules for Afrika Army Korps, the next game in Conflict Simulations’ DAMOS series. CSL has three DAMOS titles out currently, Army Group North (CSL, 2019), Army Group Center (CSL, 2019), and Army Group South (CSL, 2019). These can be played in one grand campaign game with combined maps.

While I was going through the DAMOS rules, the Great Northern War rules arrived. Ray had set up a Table Top Simulator module for playtesting and asked if I’d help out, but I’m a klutz when it comes to technology and could not get it to work.* But taking a first pass at the rules, I was intrigued; this was a different beast to any wargame I’d come across before. I really wanted to see how this would work, so I asked Ray for the artwork, and he forwarded me the files.

Build me a game

DIY Control Markers (not pretty, but functional).

After a trip to Officeworks for the colour printing, I set about building my own copy of Great Northern War. The result wasn’t pretty, but it was functional. The game components are cylinders labelled with the unit facings, like a Columbia block game, but for ease I used left over Commands and Colours: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) blocks, the spares you always get in the sets. French (navy) and Russian (green) blocks with allies in other colours matching as close to the instructions as possible and glued the printed-off leader labels on them with a glue stick. I used wooden blocks from another game as the supply dump tokens and used some blank 9/16ths chits as reversable control markers. The play map I printed at A3 size – about 140% larger than the actual board, partly to compensate for the oversize pieces, partly because I’m old and big enough to admit small print can be a challenge.

DIY Leader markers (Ottomans not mounted yet).

I had a cheap set of playing cards and some spare Avery label sheets and made my own Decision Cards (face cards, aces, and jokers). The game is influenced by the Event Cards of Hitler’s Reich (GMT Games, 2018) that can be purchased by the player for a one-off or on-going benefit, at the cost of a card from their hand (sometimes two), reducing their temporary hand-size. Hand-size is something I’ll swing back to in a minute. The 10s are also separated out. These can be purchased as well, and their virtue is you can play them once per round, but they stay with you (they don’t go back into the draw deck), and they don’t count to your hand-size.

DIY Decision Cards (and tens, Black suits for Swedes, Red for the Coalition).

How it works

The remainder of the deck – the twos through nines, minus the drawn trump card – make the draw deck. Each turn, the players are dealt a hand each, according to their hand size (this is a crucial factor in the game; again, like in Hitler’s Reich, if you can manage to reduce your opponent’s hand-size to zero, you get an automatic victory – and control of trade in central Europe for the next twenty or thirty years). When to play a trick, or respond to a trick from your opponent, you’ll be using a card from your hand. Each time a trick is played, both players draw a replacement card from the draw deck. When the deck is empty, all the cards are reshuffled, the turn marker moves up, and a new trump is drawn.

Trick-taking is the driver of the game. Whatever action you want to take, you’ll probably have to lead a trick. If you win, you get to do the declared action; if you lose, play goes to the other team.

Initial set-up, with Turn and Diplomatic Appeals tracks, and 

blue cubes (off-board) for Swedish supply  depots. 

Each turn, a new trump suit is drawn and marked on a track on the board. When playing a trick, the higher-value card will beat the lower one, but a trump suit card will beat anything except a higher-value trump. Before Great Northern War, I’d never played a trick-taking game before – growing up we never even had a deck of cards in the house – so this was all new to me.

Both sides begin with some of their Leaders already placed on the board. Leaders represent the military leader and their associated strength of numbers. To deploy a reserve Leader, first you’ll have to win a trick. To activate a Leader for movement, you’ll have to win a trick.

Combat is a little different. When you engage in combat, attacker and defender will each choose a card and place it face-down in front of them, to be revealed simultaneously. The card value will be added to the command value of the Leader engaging in the battle, along with any modifiers, then each player rolls a pair of dice, and that result is added to the total. The higher number wins (draws to the defender), but the margin of victory is where things get interesting. A margin of a couple of points might see one or the other side have to retreat a space or two to avoid a loss point, but a big enough margin could see the losing side’s troops removed from the board, and if a recovery roll goes badly, even permanently from the game.

Setting up an early game (Hand-size tokens missing, Anti-Swedish
track-marker at wrong end of track).

There is a lot going on in Great Northern War. It really is a simple game to learn and play, but it’s strategically deep, with multiple pathways to (a potential) victory, and the brinksmanship with the trick-leading driver adds a constant undercurrent of stress. As does the general hand-management required to ensure you’re not caught out cardless. Taking your opponent’s capitals will reduce their hand-size (there’s a handy hand-size reminder on the right-hand side of the board) but taking them and keeping them is harder than you might think. Combat is swift and often brutal. And every time you want to take an action, even something as simple as waking up a general and getting him to haul ass to the neighbouring town or set up a supply dump, there’s a good chance that your intentions will be frustrated by the turn of a card.

I’m trying hard not to write a review of the game – I’d feel weird about reviewing something I was involved in developing, even this tangentially – but I will go a little further into what I think the game gets right and who it will likely appeal to.  Here I've tried to offer a glimpse at how the game works, in pretty broad brushstrokes. In Part 2, I'll take a deeper look at the game's internal interactions, as well as some of the dumb mistakes I made on the road to learning all of that, and what came out of it in the end. 

 

* This was all on me. In truth, we replaced the old desktop a month or two before Christmas, and I’d simply forgotten to install it on the new machine. If You have access to TTS, I believe the playtest module may still be available; search for Great Norther War on Steam.