From: "David A. Vandenbroucke" Subject: Re: SPI Compendium - Con't -Reply Lost Battles I've been waiting for someone with more experience to say something about this game, but none has stepped forward. My playing experience is a couple of decades past, and I haven't read the rules in over a year, but if no one else is going to comment I might as well. LB really should be in your collection if you have an interest in the history of wargaming. It's like one of those strange creatures that were found in the Burgess Shale but never seen again. It was an early attempt to do operational combat, above the level of "Panzerblitz" but below "Battle of the Bulge." The subject is our old favorite, the Eastern Front. The counters are covered with rating for combat strengths against different kinds of targets, target ratings, road march size, and whatnot. Artillery can engage in observed and unobserved fire. The most memorable rule is the one that goes with the road march size rating. In order to use road movement, the road must be clear for that number of hexes in front and behind the unit. Thus, a unit with a rating of "0" takes up only its own hex. A rating of "1" means you have to keep the adjacent hexes clear. So far so good. But Soviet artillery units have a rating of 6! When they hit the road, a total of 13 hexes are closed to any other unit's use: Six in front, six behind, and the one occupied by the counter. The point of this is to show how a unit gets squeezed onto the road like a tube of toothpaste. IIRC, the whole thing didn't add up quite right, and certainly there are no other games in the "Lost Battles System." But it's worth a look just to see the ideas that came bubbling out of SPI at the time. --Dav davanden@capaccess.org