Another little round of Real Life Interference isn’t the only reason this blog has again been too silent for a span of months. I’d also like to blame a bout of temporary insanity.

The primary symptom of the insanity was a sudden onset of time-consuming wargame complexity. For some reason — or lack of reason, more precisely — I decided to indulge in complex gaming exercises that I’ve managed to avoid for quite some time while still having lots of gaming good times.

Ah. Now I remember why, with few exceptions, tactical games set in the Pacific consume an inordinate amount of time.

Here’s a quick list of the new, somewhat fiddly, terrain types that appear in ATS Peleliu: coral outcropping, palm groves, bamboo, elephant grass, flimsy huts, casuarina forest, beach, shallow ocean, coral outcropping/shallow ocean, palm tree/coral outcropping, coral outcropping/casuarina forest, special anti-tank ditch, mangrove swamp, ponds, the japanese headquarters building, water cistern building, fuel bunkers, cave dugouts, airfield, airfield debris, pillbox/tunnels, aircraft hangar and fuel drum emplacements.

Name that terrain in ATS White Beach One.

Each special terrain type gets its own special rules. They’re usually a sentence, but some of them rate several paragraphs of combat, movement and line-of-sight effects.

On one hand, I understand the need for special terrain types. Landforms in the PTO were quite a bit different from the landforms found in ATS’ more “stock” European settings.  On the other hand, I wonder if every single oddball terrain type needs its own specific blob of rules. If I played four or five PTO scenarios in a row, most of the terrain would likely become second nature. As it stands, though, I tend to flit from game to game on a regular basis, so the barrage of special rules means a lot of look-ups for me.

The terrain on the White Beach One map is also very close and cluttered. That means a lot of line-of-sight checks. When a number of stacks of playing pieces in close proximity are involved, those little sight checks can be pretty time-consuming as well.

Long story short, after one of my wife’s cats single-handedly defeated the Japanese defenders of Peleliu, I managed to get in a couple of short scenarios.

Then I really flipped the nutjob switch.

The next game to hit the table was “Birds of Prey,” from Ad Astra Games. Despite the fact that I’m a grunt at heart, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of air combat games. By “idea” I mean that I like all of the hardware, the sleek lines of beautiful jet aircraft and the mano-a-mano nature of play. What usually burns me out on them after a short spasm of air gaming is the complexity.

Yeah, I lost my mind for a while.

Birds of Prey is a very clever design that goes to great lengths to get the physics of air combat maneuvering “right.” It’s involved enough that I won’t even attempt a short description, but rather I’d invite you to look it up on BoardgameGeek if you’re curious.

I’ll just say that a lot of numbers are involved. A LOT of numbers. And some hefty 3-D imagineering using the game system’s “PHAD” (Pitch, Heading, Attitude Display). Once you grok the mechanisms of flight — which is enough of a challenge — you then face a daunting array of additional calculations in order to add in detection and weapons systems. Laminated play aids let you write out all of these calculations using a dry-erase marker. Individually, none of the calculations are that tough — but there are SO many of them. Even a “simple” one-on-one furball can easily take upward of 20 to 30 minutes to work through just one 6-second game turn.

I felt pretty satisified with myself when, after a couple of weeks, I got the whole thing to come together. After a few turns of serious dogfighting, however, it occurred to me that I was doing a whole lot of math and much less moving stuff around on a game map. The game is also very narrowly focused on only the “furball” aspect of air combat. Some of the more “grand tactical” aspects of air warfare that I really enjoy (hey, I wrote a series of college papers on electronic warfare…) are outside the scope of the game.

So back in the box it went.

Currently on the Big Table: “Semper Fi: Guadalcanal,” the PanzerGrenadier system sails into the Pacific. That’s something quite a bit less complicated. More on this one soon.

As the Great War of 1914-1918 opened, indirect artillery fire was just beginning to come into its own as a weapons system.  In the previous decade or so of technological development, many nations had devoted considerable attention to the improvement of explosives, propellents and fuzes. Advancements in steel-making enabled the creation of both larger-caliber and more portable guns. And modern industrial production methods allowed many nations to field truly vast numbers of artillery pieces supplied with large amounts of munitions.

Little wonder then that artillery plays an important role in two recent wargames that cover tactical combat in the Great War: Infantry Attacks, published by Avalanche Press, and Through Mud and Blood, the third installment of the In The Trenches series published by Jeux Grenier Games.

The games operate at different scales, so it’s no surprise that each treats artillery differently. They’re also set during different periods of the war. Infantry Attacks: August 1914 (as the title implies) focuses on the earliest stage of the Great War, specifically on the opening battles of the war in the East. Through Mud and Blood presents a number of ‘firefight’ scale actions set in various theaters and during different periods — although primarily the later war.

What is surprising, to me at least, is that neither game seems to get artillery quite ‘right’. In both cases I think I see what the designers are trying to do. Unfortunately, both seem to fall a bit short of the mark.

[As a brief caveat, please note that I claim to be neither a professional historian nor a trained historical researcher. I am, however, the grandson of a World War I infantryman and I've widely read and studied the subject for close to 40 years. In my distant and misspent youth I was privileged to sit many hours listening to my grandfather talk about his service in The Great War. Not that that gives me any extraordinary insight into the techncial aspects of artillery, but it did spark in me a beyond-ordinary interest in All Things Great War.]

Infantry Attacks presents artillery as a completely inflexible combat arm. Off-board artillery (my main focus here) is allocated in discrete firing concentrations of bombardment strength points that represent batteries/battalions of various calibers. Each player then lists his available concentrations on a roster sheet and then proceeds to make a turn-by-turn plot of the hexes each concentration will target. Artillery affects only the hex it impacts. ‘Friendly fire’ casualties are possible if friendly forces are adjacent to the impact hex, and there is also a minimalist scatter routine (as in the PanzerGrenadier series).

A player can cancel the fire plot for a given concentration at any time — but once a fire plot is cancelled, that particular artillery concentration can’t fire for the rest of the scenario. On-map artillery batteries can fire at whatever they can spot, and they can also move. But once they’ve moved, they can’t fire for the rest of the scenario, either.

I think I understand the goal of the mechanism. Artillery wasn’t very flexible in 1914, and there were frequent instances of fires shifting to the wrong places at the wrong times or not shifting at all. The mechanism in Infantry Attacks encourages careful planning (especially on the attack) and a scrupulous adherence to the pre-planned schedule.

Historically, even in 1914, artillery wasn’t completely inflexible. Most nations made some sort of attempt to put  tools in the hands of the infantry that they could use to communicate with the artillery. Sometimes communications worked in a limited fashion; often it did not work at all. The relationship between infantry and their artillery in 1914 wasn’t exactly a happy one.

For the wargamer, the question is whether or not Infantry Attacks’ fire plotting mechanism is an acceptable trade-off between process and effect. A system that used a couple of tables and a few dice rolls to attempt communications might have a better ‘feel’ to it – but such a system would need to include target reference points and possible pre-plotted fires for each concentration. ‘Real life’ artillery fire planning can be pretty complicated. So would the results, essentially, be the same — only for a lot more work and dice-rolling? And would such a mechanism increase the complexity of the rules?

I’ve only managed to get in a few plays of Infantry Attacks since its arrival here in the swamp. While the artillery mechanism feels very limiting and is at time frustrating to deal with, it occurs to me that the strict limits on how artillery can respond to the changing battlefield is one of the fundamental differences between Infantry Attacks and its parent system, PanzerGrenadier.

The games use the same core game mechanisms to simulate two very different types of warfare. At first encounter, I think a lot of players probably wonder how the same system can accommodate both ‘set piece’ infantry warfare and World War II’s mobile warfare. It occurs to me that one of the key differences lies with the artillery.

Since this subject is running a bit long, I’ll pick up the tale of the “In The Trenches” system in my next blog post.

Most wargamers are at least casual consumers of military history. An interest in some or another item along the rich, lengthy timeline of mankind’s most rigorously embraced and universal pasttime (i.e. finding clever ways, and even cleverer excuses, for blasting each other to bloody flinders) is typically what initially draws us in to our little corner of the gaming universe.

Whoa. Wait a second. I’m not trying to get philosophical here. What I’m heading toward is this: We’re all generally familiar with the ‘received imagery’ that characterizes past conflicts. But with the exception of a few of our most recent wars — fought since the introduction of film photography and serious, clinical methods of record-keeping — many of us (myself included) have a limited understanding of how elements found in many of our wargames ‘really’ worked in battle.

Napoleonic skirmishers, for example. Wargames that try to portray them nearly always screw something up. I’m not exactly sure how a skirmish line worked on the battlefield. I’m not that sure which armies used them (and when), how their usage changed from the 1790s through 1815, how many played a role in any given battle nor even (just being honest) what they REALLY did. But I’m pretty sure that the treatment they get in many wargames doesn’t quite square with history.

A British 60-pounder in action during the Great War.

Another iconic element that wargames (and wargamers) seem to struggle with is indirect artillery fire. I guess in this case I’m looking primarily at tactical and grand tactical wargames. It’s a vexing subject.

Given that a lot of gamers (and some game designers) have first-hand familiarity with the processes and effects of modern-day “off-board artillery” I think it’s interesting that so few games come even remotely close to getting it right.

Sometimes I think that designers trip themselves up when they convince themselves that their game is incomplete without some sort of detailed treatement of artillery. Games set at the ‘man level’ — like SPI’s old Sniper and Patrol games — should have skipped it entirely. In Patrol, at 5 meters per hex, the blast radius of a super-heavy artillery round covered nearly an entire geomorphic map sheet (usually about one-sixth of the map). It’s nuts to even attempt to ‘game’ something like that — you’re not calling 8-inch artillery onto the bad guys when you’re close enough to throw rocks at them.

In cases like that (and there are others) a designer just needs to admit his game is set after Arty has done its work and move on from there.

The time scale of the call-for-fire process screws up a lot of game designs. Even well-regarded ‘technical’ games like ASL and ATS struggle with it, principally because of issues with turn scale, time compression and predictability. A more chaotic process gives artillery a better ‘feel’ in the Combat Commander series of game. Still,  in all three games we’re really dealing with artillery being commonly used well inside the “danger close” engagement zones that battery commanders rarely approved.

Platoon-level games usually get closer to the mark. Their longer time scales and larger hex scales are much easier to square with a real-world call-for-fire process. First-generation games like PanzerBlitz and its various offspring struggled with implementing artillery terminal effects on different target types (armored vs unarmored), but elements like call cycle timing and engagement ranges always seemed more appropriate.

Keeping all of that in mind, it’s time for me to steer back onto my original theme: Gaming elements of warfare that seem familiar because of our passing acquaintance with history, but about which we have limited first-hand technical knowledge.

Just a camporee with cannons...

The popular history of World War One is clogged with the imagery of slaughter on an industrial scale. Machineguns mowing down rows of advancing infantry, massive artillery barrages burying entire trenches packed with grunts, gas rolling across the battlefield like a silent wave of horror. Particulary because of the general stalemate in the West from 1915-1917, the Great War has received scant attention as a topic for tactical gaming.

Tactical reality for the grunts of World War One, however, was far from a static, wait-to-die affair. Although the battlefield was indeed dominated by then-modern methods of technological slaughter there was still plenty for an infantryman to do.

A couple of fairly recent games add substantially to the Great War’s tactical wargaming library. In The Trenches is a series from Grenier Games — the third volume is shipping now — set at the platoon level with a hex scale of 100 meters and 5 minute turns. Infantry Attacks is a PanzerGrenadier spin-off from Avalanche Press that tackles things at the company level, with 200-meter hexes and 15-minute turns.

The games take distinctly different approaches to the topic of indirect artillery fire. Artillery was undeniably one of the dominating factors on the World War One battlefield, which means in both cases the artillery mechanisms are crucial components of the game designs.

In my next blog post (or two, maybe), I’ll be taking a more detailed,  side-by-side look at these two games. Tune in next time for my take on where these games work, where they don’t and how they address some of the foggier aspects  of history surrounding the world’s first truly industrial war.