World War III
Saturday I was too exhausted to traipse down to London for the Salute convention, so I invited Tim over for a game of Blood and Bridges, the latest in LNL's World at War series.
I've been interested in this game for a while, having been an avid consumer of Central Front tactical games back in the '70s and '80s. They were paranoid times. It was the era when I earnestly believed we'd see the Soviets roll across the Inner German Border within my lifetime and I'd pretty much pored over every simulation of the subject I could lay my hands on, from the theatre-operational (Fulda Gap; NATO Division Commander; The Next War; Central front Series; NATO; Air & Armor) to the tactical (Mech War '77; Mech War 2; Firefight; Air Cobra/Air Cav; Fire Team; Assault).
With the Cold War a distant memory, you'd think the subject matter dead and buried, but there's been something of a retro-revival in recent years. We've had Jason Matthews's global-political game Twilight Struggle and Ty Bomba's creditable Group of Soviet Forces Germany title for Strategy & Tactics magazine. I even have my own Zulu Alert title waiting in the wings, if only I can find a way to make it playable. And now Mark Walker's World at War arrives on the shelf.
This treads much the same ground as the MechWar and First Battles series. Platoon level combat with company and battalion-sized formations. It's schtick is to emphasize NATO command advantages, which it does through a chit-pull initiative system. Where NATO comes off better is that companies get two chits in the pool compared to a single chit for each Soviet battalion. In essence this is a crude mapping of Boyd OODA loops into the model that permits NATO forces to have a greater chance of activation and the possibility of two activations.
As a game mechanic this doesn't work too badly, even if as a model it stinks. One thing that saves it is the fact that there are 'end turn' chits in the pool that might end a game turn early. That second NATO chit is a fickle thing and might not appear at all before the turn ends.
Combat is built on a variety of the 'bucket of dice' system and in spite of the reliance on teeny-tiny combat values printed on the counters, actually works pretty well. An attacker shoots and then the defender rolls some saving dice representing armour and cover. I can forgive this because the combat results are a long way from the 0.9 pK values we were exposed to in all those old MechWar games. As I say, those were paranoid times and Jim Dunnigan and his SPI crew had bought into some wierd kind of 'Team B' ideology in which the Soviets were some kind of unstoppable robotic behemoth. The years since have given us some more data points, and though World at War's combat is still bloody, it feels somewhere in the ballpark, with enough allowance for microterrain and soft factors to have an impact. Not every battle is a rerun of 73 Easting and for that we should be thankful.
So, what we have is a game that is simple, plays very fast, is highly chaotic and has questionable modelling. However, it is also basic enough to be an armature which the Experten can modify. And now the system has progressed to its third module, we have enough kit to play all the big players. Blood and Bridges adds the British to the Germans and Septics and it was quite fun on Saturday to bimble about with a recon force of Scimitars against an armed recon company that seemed to comprise BMPs and T-80s. The game gives us Challenger and Chieftains to play with and I shall be checking those out soon.
I've been interested in this game for a while, having been an avid consumer of Central Front tactical games back in the '70s and '80s. They were paranoid times. It was the era when I earnestly believed we'd see the Soviets roll across the Inner German Border within my lifetime and I'd pretty much pored over every simulation of the subject I could lay my hands on, from the theatre-operational (Fulda Gap; NATO Division Commander; The Next War; Central front Series; NATO; Air & Armor) to the tactical (Mech War '77; Mech War 2; Firefight; Air Cobra/Air Cav; Fire Team; Assault).
With the Cold War a distant memory, you'd think the subject matter dead and buried, but there's been something of a retro-revival in recent years. We've had Jason Matthews's global-political game Twilight Struggle and Ty Bomba's creditable Group of Soviet Forces Germany title for Strategy & Tactics magazine. I even have my own Zulu Alert title waiting in the wings, if only I can find a way to make it playable. And now Mark Walker's World at War arrives on the shelf.
This treads much the same ground as the MechWar and First Battles series. Platoon level combat with company and battalion-sized formations. It's schtick is to emphasize NATO command advantages, which it does through a chit-pull initiative system. Where NATO comes off better is that companies get two chits in the pool compared to a single chit for each Soviet battalion. In essence this is a crude mapping of Boyd OODA loops into the model that permits NATO forces to have a greater chance of activation and the possibility of two activations.
As a game mechanic this doesn't work too badly, even if as a model it stinks. One thing that saves it is the fact that there are 'end turn' chits in the pool that might end a game turn early. That second NATO chit is a fickle thing and might not appear at all before the turn ends.
Combat is built on a variety of the 'bucket of dice' system and in spite of the reliance on teeny-tiny combat values printed on the counters, actually works pretty well. An attacker shoots and then the defender rolls some saving dice representing armour and cover. I can forgive this because the combat results are a long way from the 0.9 pK values we were exposed to in all those old MechWar games. As I say, those were paranoid times and Jim Dunnigan and his SPI crew had bought into some wierd kind of 'Team B' ideology in which the Soviets were some kind of unstoppable robotic behemoth. The years since have given us some more data points, and though World at War's combat is still bloody, it feels somewhere in the ballpark, with enough allowance for microterrain and soft factors to have an impact. Not every battle is a rerun of 73 Easting and for that we should be thankful.
So, what we have is a game that is simple, plays very fast, is highly chaotic and has questionable modelling. However, it is also basic enough to be an armature which the Experten can modify. And now the system has progressed to its third module, we have enough kit to play all the big players. Blood and Bridges adds the British to the Germans and Septics and it was quite fun on Saturday to bimble about with a recon force of Scimitars against an armed recon company that seemed to comprise BMPs and T-80s. The game gives us Challenger and Chieftains to play with and I shall be checking those out soon.