Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1991 13:50:54 EST From: "Robert S. Dean" Subject: Battlefield: Europe I had the opportunity to play Battlefield:Europe (BE) for the first time this past weekend. BE is published by Game Designer's Workshop, and is the fourth game in their "First Battle" modern tactical games series. "First Battle" mechanics are also to be used for "Stand and Die: Borodino 1941," according to the adver- tising I've seen so far. Several months ago, I played two scenarios of "Test of Arms", the third game in the series, against different opponents, and thought that the game system had potential, but that the scenari- os I had seen had major problems. Regrettably, after playing two scenarios of BE, I have roughly the same opinion. Now, I know that there are those of you that would say that it isn't fair to judge a game based on two playings, but I have to ask myself how much effort it is reasonable to put into a game that doesn't look like it is going to work, when I have a hundred untried (or known to be good) games on my shelf and a severe lack of live players to play against. The two scenarios we played were "Tank Duel", an introductory sort of game with a group of German Leopard IIs attempting to get across the board and off, opposed by a smaller group of Russian T-80s. The Leopards are better tanks, balanced slightly by the fact that the T-80s are given long range missiles. Of course, on the map used, the longest clear Line of Sight on the board is less than half the range of the missiles... Playing toward his victory conditions, my opponent, who had the Leopards, charged for the far side of the board and got off before I could get into a position to stop him with the T-80s. Hmmm...I'll admit that I thought it would be nice to use the opportunity fire/reaction fire rules. Maybe I should have just done the Charge of the Light Brigade on him. I chalked that up to learning the rules. The next scenario we tried was "Delaying Action", pitting a small group of Cypriots with a leader, nine infantry squads, two medium mortars, and a light recoilless rifle against a British force of two leaders, three machine gun teams, four medium mortars, nine elite infantry squads, four light tanks, and ten trucks. The first problem came when I counted the counters and realized that they hadn't provided ten trucks in the blue counter mix. I hate it when they do that. The second problem was that the Cypriot set up was such that they could not cover both edges of the map with fire. Thus, the British quickly won by probing one side, discovering that it was mostly covered by dummies, and barreling down the edge of the map and off. Given that the Cypriots can't cover everything (basically they can make a strong defense on one out of three reasonable advance paths, or a weak defense on two out of three, or a completely negligible defense on all three) this would seem to be a problem. The other thing that bothered me was mortar fire. In the real world, I am given to understand that the 'correct' response to incoming mortar fire is to disperse. In the game, a mortar can only hit one randomly chosen unit in a stack, so the best response is to clump up so as to minimize the chance that two or three firing mortars will hit the same target. It's also rather hard to delay elite infantry squads. With a movement factor of 2, all the British player had to do was move the infantry forward in trucks to the limits of the possible covered routes, unload, and run for the edge. It's hard to delay these squads in the woods--5 defense plus a 3 bonus for woods versus an infantry attack factor of 2 means that most attacks would be at 1-4, with the odds of getting a pin result a mere 20%. If four out of four tries have resulted in bad games using the system, I'm starting to think that this game and its siblings is going to the shelf for permanent storage (and/or cannibalization for its maps.) If anyone would like to post a counter argument, I'd be interest- ed in hearing which of the scenarios they played and liked. Rob Dean