A Fast Take: limiting Command and Control in wargames - part 3

  

 

This will make more sense if you have read the first two parts first. You can find them here and here, respectively. If you haven’t read them yet, go do that. Thank come back and read this as well.

"I would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good." - Napoleon Bonaparte
(Napoleon at Bay: the Campaign in France, 1814 (Avalon Hill, 1978);
picture courtesy of Tac Ope (BGG)). 

 

This is the final post in a three-part consideration of game designer Fernando Sola Ramos’s short essay entitled Mando y control en los wargames (Command and Control in wargames), which appeared in Josep Oliver’s excellent blog, El desafío de las Águilas. If you haven’t already, head over to las Águilas read Sr. Ramos’s article (linked above); I'll wait. Since I began this consideration series, las Águilas has featured a handful of other short articles by Sr. Ramos examining various aspects of how wargames try to simulate the realities of armed conflict. All of these are well worth your time.

In this final part, I’ll look at the last two of six methods Sr Ramos identified as used in wargames to mimic the limits of Command in Control (refer back to part 1 for the complete listing). The two models we'll look at here (along with Sr. Ramos's own exemplary wargame examples) are:

- Leadership-distance chain of command (Great Battles of the American Civil War series)

 - Limiting attacks to command formations (i.e. disallowing or limiting ad hoc formations). Sr Ramos didn’t single out a particular example here, but visually represented Mark Simonitch’s “ZoC-Bond” family of games.

In Parts 1 & 2, I looked at the first four models in the list, adding a couple of examples of my own. Here I’m looking at the last two model Sr. Ramos listed. I’m considering just one game for each. Some people might eve argue over whether the games I’ve chosen to represent each model. Many of the games I’ve looked at would sit just as comfortably under at least one more of the defined models.

 

Leadership-distance chain of command

Redvers’ Reverse: the Battle of Colenso, 1899 (Legion Wargames, 2016) is my pick for a game that effectively represents the tribulations of Command in Control over distance. It’s a solitaire game, so it won’t appeal to everyone, and like all good solitaire games, it’s bloody difficult to successfully meet all the victory conditions. It portrays the battle of Colenso, fought in December 1899, during the Second Anglo-Boer War. General Redvers Buller had been selected to command the British Army of Natal but had a mixed bag of commanders under him; some were exhibited apprehension in the face of the enemy, some were unduly reckless, and more then one believed he should have been in command instead of Buller. The board is an area movement map, and the units are brigade-level.

A den of vipers: Buller weighing up his options before the balloon goes up.

The game elegantly captures the difficulty of leading an ad hoc force that to a degree resents being led, or downright refuses to be. The first hurdle is the delivery of orders. The game allows a limited number of Command Points. These are used to place Objective markers unique to each ordered brigade on the board.

With distance comes uncertainty. Depending on how far a brigade is from Buller's HQ, an order may be delivered in the same turn, or the next, or two turns hence. Or not at all - with distance comes the possibility of the messenger getting lost or being unable to find the brigade commander for whom the order was intended.

The Send Orders and Receive Orders Tables from the Redvers' Reverse PAC,
bringing a little more uncertainty to your well-laid plans.

The next phase is where you see the initial outcome of your orders. Each Brigade Leader has a rating based on their historical performance. A leader may be Aggressive, Good, or Cautious. The player must roll for each unit ordered, and depending on the quality of the Brigade commander, they will either ignore the order, execute it as best as they can interpret (moving by the shortest possible path to the Objective), or Charge to the Guns (make their way to the closest Boer troops). In my experience it is not unknown for a brigade saddled with a Cautious commander to ignore one order in two or more, even as their more aggressively led brethren are being mowed down by Boer fire from the heights.

A little chaos - British forces struggle for find a way across the river.

This probably sounds to some like an awful way to run a battle. It is, but it also reflects the manner of difficulties the beleaguered Buller faced at Colenso.

 

Attacks limited to command formations

Dunkirk: France, 1940 (Worthington Games, 2018) presents an operational level situation at a minute scale. The game captures the whole of the German advance on France and the Low Countries. The game is a study in reductionism, covering the initial Western campaign on a twelve-by-twelve hex-grid and in a mere six turns.

The author's much-loved copy of Dunkirk.

The opposing forces are represented by blocks (each representing roughly a corps), and grouped into armies, except the German forces who are grouped into Army Groups A and B, each with its own HQ block. Each side also has a GHQ block which remains off-board, but records the extra orders that can be allocated during turns. Activation is by a chit-pull mechanism, or more accurately a block pull – each Allied formation has its own draw token, while the two Axis army groups have two each. The Axis player gets to keep one draw block in hand (for either Army Group) to kick off the hostilities, and he uses the double orders for both formations over the first two turns (there’s an optional rule to allow use of the extra orders for the third or even fourth turn, should it be deemed the Germans need a little extra help).

In their turn, a formation’s units can move and/or attack; Infantry units can move two hexes (subject to terrain conditions), and mechanised units up to three. Up to two units can occupy the same hex at the same time.

Dunkirk set up for play.

But this is where the Formation limitations kick in. It starts with set up; various hexes are marked as beginning locations for each formation. This means that they begin within command distance of the formation HQ. At the formation’s Activation, all the units in the formation must be within the Command radius of the formation’s HQ or suffer penalties: an out-of-command unit’s movement is reduced by one, it cannot move to engage in combat, and its fighting strength is severely impeded.

The Command distance for all of the Allied formations is two hexes, for the German formations it’s three hexes (to reflect the superior command discipline and forward planning of the invaders). It is possible for units from two allied formations to share a hex, but they must fight independently (and conversely must be attacked separately by enemy forces).

Army Group A's surprise attack from the "inpenertrable" Ardennes.

The whole campaign a tricky manoeuvre operation in a claustrophobic environment, and under severe time constraints. Forward planning becomes crucial to ensure each side’s ability to effectively attack or defend. It’s here that the importance of command distance shines: out-of-command units become sitting ducks, unable to prosecute battle, and ill-equipped to defend themselves, but in a crowded battlefield, it can become difficult to maintain command cohesion. While Dunkirk plays out quickly, it is always an intense and challenging game.

 

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So, that covers my quick and dirty look at Fernando Sola Ramos’s six Command-in-Control models in wargames. I’m very grateful to Sr. Ramos and Josep Oliver for the opportunity to respond to the article (just a reminder that there’s a link to the original post at the top of this piece). As I said in the first part, it’s something that I’ve been wanting to engage with on A Fast Game for a while, and Sr. Ramos’s piece offered an excellent entry framework. This is a concept that I’m deeply interested in and that I expect we’ll revisit in the future.

 

 

State of Play: Dunkirk: France, 1940

 

 

After an overseas jaunt, T was back last week for a game. He texted me earlier in the day, “Still okay to invade Poland at your house tonight?” I understandably took that as a provocation; I thought about pulling out No Retreat! 3: Polish and French Fronts (GMT Games, 2018), but it’s been so long since I read the rules, I didn’t feel confident presenting it to someone new to the system. So, I thought, of invading France instead.

I’ve been threatening T with Dunkirk: France, 1940 (Worthington Publishing, 2018) for more than a year now. Sadly out-of-print, this is a stripped-down version of the German invasion of France that brought an end to the Phoney War, the event everyone knew was coming but, nevertheless, nobody had adequately prepared for.

Initial game set-up. Draw cup on the other side of the board, coffee mug to the left
(to paraphrase Napoleon, this army runs on its java).

Dunkirk is a block game played out on a fairly schematised map of western Europe, which makes it into a tricky puzzle of manoeuvre and combat. Units have two-to-four steps, indicated by a series of numbers on the edges of the unit blocks. The strength values for units are interesting because they capture not only the unit’s functioning strength, but also its cohesion and morale, with both the potential for both the number of dice rolled in attack/defence and the target number (that number or lower counts as a hit) both dropping with consecutive losses.

Block example: this is a three-step French unit with dwindling strength. You start off
rolling three ten-sided dice looking for 3s or lower, but by the last step you're down
 to rolling a single die looking for a 1 or a 2 for a hit. The HQ marking indicates this
is the Headquarters division for the 1st Army.

The overall parameters of the game are pretty straight-forward. It is played over six turns. Infantry can move two spaces in unimpeded terrain, while mechanised and armoured units can move three spaces. Crossing a bridge will cost an extra movement point (this game-board has a lot of bridges), as will moving through the swampy area around Rotterdam. The play area is only twelve-by-twelve hexes, with regions cut out for the English Channel and the Maginot Line.

The neutral forces (the Netherlands and Belgium) begin in the cities indicated in their regions, one unit to a city. The Germans and French (and the BEF) have some flexibility in set-up, but the German A and B formations have to always be withing three hexes of their HQ (a designated block in the formation, marked with a white box in one corner). The French formations are smaller but must always be within two hexes of their HQ, reflecting the inferior communications of the Allied forces and the brittle nature of the French leadership.

The cauldron. Actually, it's an oversized coffee cup, one of a pair we received
as a wedding present, but the diameter and the curved interior bottom make it
a perfect chit-draw cup.

 

One of the delights of this game is the use of simple mechanics to reflect historical conditions. The order of play is dictated by a formation block draw – like the chit-pull system used in Blind Swords series games and others, but with wooden blocks instead of markers. In the first round, only the four German tokens, those of the French 1^st and 9^th armies and the BEF, and the German player gets to choose one token to be “drawn” first, so the Germans always initiate the aggression. Draw tokens for the French 2^nd and 7^th armies and the no-longer “neutral” forces are added in the second round, and the French Reserve formation in the third.

The game is focussed on the German player, in that only the German side scores points – through the Allies can act to mitigate the German’s score – and, to mix things up a bit, the German player will, in the normal run of things, choose at random one of six Strategy Cards outlining the Axis priorities in the coming game, i.e., the player’s Main Objectives, Bonus Objectives and Victory Conditions (the events or circumstances that will subtract points from the German players VP quotient). The target number in each scenario is a 10-point or higher threshold.

The drawn chits from turn 2, in sequence (Belgium is face down because, buy the time
it was drawn, there were no more Belgian troops to give orders to).

Anyone who has played a game with a chit-draw activation system will be familiar with the to-and-fro nature of the action, but this was T’s first experience of it. It’s not, in itself a difficult concept, but it’s a mechanic that hasn’t come up in the games we’ve played. T took to it pretty quickly, after a couple of early “Your turn” moments. By the second round we had got into the rhythm of the game. T’s Germans bulldozed through nearly all the Netherlander forces an a third of the Belgians in the first turn. As previously stated, the neutral countries have their activation tokens added to the mix in the in the second turn, but by the time the Belgian token was drawn there were no more troops left to order.

The German player earns victory points by taking control of certain towns and, depending on the Strategy being played, wiping out particular formations. In this case, it was the French 7^th Army, which showed more resilience than was historically true. In the south, the 9^th Army put a defiant show against the German A Group, sustaining heavy losses. Had we played through the full six turns, a German victory was probable, but certainly not a given.

The map is simple but offers a lot of detail, including set-up areas for the French,
British and German units.

On NOT fighting to the bitter end

Learning/teaching games always take longer, and T had arrived later than usual, so we called this outing at the end of turn 4. Looking at the board, I thought T would have been on his way to a likely win on points, in spite of a successful evacuation of all of my BEF troops (a four-point reduction to his score). But even with the leg up of not taking the second German A and B draw tokens out of the mix after turn 2, it wasn’t enough to secure victory.

At close, T had taken control of Dunkirk and Calais for four points, and Atwerp, Ghent and Brussels for another three. He had taken Eindhoven early in the action, but ignored Rotterdam, which was still held by the remaining Dutch division (one extra point) and hadn’t hadn’t yet reached Lille, though had the game played out another round, Lille would probably have been secured. He had four units out of the game at the end of turn 4 (one point lost for every two units out) but would probably have been able to bring most of all of them back into play if taken to the final turn. The escape of the BEF cost him another four points, but even without that imposition T wouldn’t have had enough points to reach the German Victory threshold of ten points.

Casualties of war: the end state at close of the fourth turn.

Being the first time out (it was my third or fourth run at the game, but first against another player), we weren’t taking the game too seriously. Next time no quarter will be expected.

Pressure on the centre: the French Reserve mobilises while the 9th Army's
Mechanised Division bravely stands against the tide of German armour. 

Mistakes were made

The decision to play Dunkirk was a last-minute one, and while I remembered a lot of the nuances of the game, there were two things that I forgot which would have benefited the Allies. While the Belgians have troops in the Eben-Emael fortress, they roll five(!) dice in defence, looking for threes or less. I played it as a straight Infantry defence and the Belgians melted away like a morning dew. The correct defence may not have lasted any longer, but may have shaved a little strength off of the mighty German war-machine.

Play is card-assisted with each side gaining a couple more cards each turn (like the draw token inclusions, there are reminders of the card-draw numbers on the turn track) Through the course of the game the German player draws a total of sixteen cards, the Allied player draws nine. There is a slim chance the German player may draw an event card that negates the Eban-Emael effect (an air assault that historically neutralised the fort). It a lucky draw of one of the Dynamo event cards in the second turn that allowed me to evacuate the BEW units from Dunkirk and Calais, but the Allied player can’t conduct the evacuation until the fourth turn.

Play is card-assisted. Players are restricted to one battle action per attack/defence,
but it just might tip the balance in their favour if it comes off.

The other mistake was something I only recalled at the end of our game – that the second A and B formation tokens were supposed to be removed after the second turn. The blitzkrieg tactics are eventually blunted by the stiffening Allied resistance and the stretching of their own supply lines. These however remained throughout our abbreviate game. Thinking about it, taking them out may have freed enough time to squeeze in at least a fifth round, but I think , having got to know the system and the terrain a little better, we should be able to put in a full game when we come back to it.

A typical roll: three dice, looking for 3s and lower.