Dear consim-l listmembers, One of the things I like to do, but seldom actually get the chance to do, is to take two wargames dealing with the same subject matter and play them, or "run" them in parallel to see what happens. The two games that I've chosen for this treatment this time are the old Avalon Hill game, France, 1940, and the considerably more recent game appearing in Command #42, Blitzkrieg 1940. My objective in writing about them here isn't really to offer a "review" or an "evaluation" exactly of either game, but more like a comparison of two snapshots to see if we can make any inferences about how wargames "evolved" (aged is probably a more neutral term) during the 25 years or so that elapsed between the two games. I'll start with some comments about the physical structure or properties of the two games. Physical Components France, 1940 is a Jim Dunnigan design that was published by Avalon Hill in 1972. Evidently it was a remake of a game that appeared in a pretty early issue of S&T. JFD is listed as the Research Director for Avalon Hill in the Designer's Notes. The bookcase style box contains a mounted map, 224 .5 inch counters printed on one side, an old SPI "fan fold" style rule book (maddeningly difficult to use), a design notes booklet, and charts. Although old, this game is readily available on Ebay--I bought the punched, but very servicable, copy I used for this in July 2002 for the princely sum of $4.49! The counters depict armor divisions and infantry corps, the time scale is apparently 2 days per turn, and the map scale is stated as 10 kilometers/hex. The Designer's Notes yield some very interesting insights into how the design process worked in 1972. I'm going to quote: "The size of the military units represented in the game is largely determined by the scale of the playing board. By using zones of control this gives a maximum "front" for one unit of 30 kms. This, oddly enough, just happens to be the fontage allocated to a corps (of three divisions) during that period. That solved a lot of problems, because to do the game on the divisional level would have meant over a hundred units on each side." In the Designer's Notes, the text I quoted actually came after a description of JFD's attempts to get the hex scale down as low as feasible, given the fixed size of the mounted map boards, so the off-handed, "oddly enough", what-a-lucky-thing tone in the quote may be a misrepresentation of what actually was a lot of work to get the map scale and unit scale to kind of mesh with each other. But the quote certainly gives the impression that matching unit scale to map scale wasn't much of a concern to a wargame designer in 1972. The text following the quote talks about the JFD's willingness to make some compromises with the actual composition of the various infantry corps. In the game, each nationality has cookie-counter infantry corps. The quote also shows that in 1972 the available size of the countermix was a tremendous constraint on the possible designs. Blitzkrieg 1940 is a Ty Bomba design that appeared in Command #42, whose nominal publication date was March, 1997--a quarter of a century after the AH game. This was a magazine game that came with a 20 page rulebook, two mapsheets (one standard sized, one about half that) and fully 560 .5" counters--a pretty impressive package for a magazine game! The map scale is 7 miles/hex; the time scale is two days/turn, and the units represent mostly divisions, but there are also lots of brigades and regiments. Basically, the two games match up as being pretty similar in terms of scale, except that Blitzkrieg 1940 (B40) takes the unit level down one notch compared to the AH game. Personally, I liked the Command game a little better in this regard. Although it took longer to set up compared to the AH game, and longer to play too in some respects, I liked having the granularity of the smaller sized units in the Command game. In comparison with the cookie-cutter approach to unit values seen in the AH game, the Command game features lots of volatile units--these have a plus or minus number on them. You roll a D6 and adjust this number up or down according the to the volatile number on the counter face, and that becomes the unit's combat value. Technically, the rules tell you to do this process each time the unit engages in combat, but that was too much wristage for me! I rolled the first time the unit was in combat and then used a current strength marker under the unit to indicate its strength in future combats. Except that for most of the Dutch and Belgian units, there usually wasn't a future combat because they tended to die pretty easily, but I'll talk about that a little later. Overall, in comparing the two games just on physical components and appearance, the Command game is big, bright, colorful and cool-looking, while the older game is a little drab and plain in comparison. Systems and "Engine" France, 1940 uses a system that appeared in many games in the golden age of wargaming. The sequence of play goes like this: German initial movement, German combat, German mechanized movement, followed by an Allied repetition of those three phases. In and around these phases, there are also several varieties of airplane movement (I'll discuss that in a separate section). There are ZOCs, and these are described as "semi-active" in the rules. Here's the deal: Every unit pays three additional movement points to enter a ZOC, and also pays two additional movement points to leave a ZOC. As long as you have enough movement points, you can keep moving past enemy units. But realistically, only the mechanized units have enough movement points to penetrate more than one hex into a front line covered with ZOCs. The CRT is a rather mammoth 13 column affair--odds based, going from 1-6 all the way up to 10-1! You roll a D6 (DRMs can take the roll down to -1 and up to 8) and results are expressed in whole hex results (eg, AR, BR, DX, and counterattacks--some with penalities imposed). From the several hundred word text of "Explanation of Combat Results", let me quote you a little bit, yeah, just to give you a little flavor of this CRT: "If the "CA" Result obtained by the original Attacker against the Defender has a number preceding if (e.g. "2 CA") then the Defender must subtract this number from the die-roll of his ensuing counter attack(s). This applies only to the original Defender's counter-attacks and never to the forced repetitions of the original Attacker's attack. If the Defender, in his counter-attack, obtains a "DX" or "BR" result against the original Attacker, the result is applied only to the original Attacker's unit which was the subject of the counter-attack, and not to those units which were not the subject of the counter-attack." I came up with an interpretation of this that I used--but my point in quoting is to raise another issue: Does the CRT really need to be this big, and this hard to figure out? Blitzkrieg, 1940 uses that "couplet" system that Ty used in other designs that appeared in Command, especially in some of the East Front games. In this system, each game turn seems to turn into two game turns actually. The first player turn couplet has a German operations segment, followed by an Allied operations segment. The second player turn couplet is follows the same sequence. Within each operations segment, the Germans and the Allies each have two phases; they can choose to move or fight in the first, and then they do the "other" procedure in the second. I think, but I'm not sure, in some of the games in which Ty used this approach, each player could move twice or fight twice, but not here. There are some other little twists you can work into the mix though, and Ty did that here: The Germans (but not the Allies) get a positive one column shift on their attacks if they choose the fight/move sequence. But the poor Allies get a negative one column shift on their attacks if they choose the traditional move/fight sequence. The combat system is itself is very familiar; it's odds-based with (mostly) negative column shifts for terrain, and a positive column shift for a "concentric attack". You roll a single D6 (no DRMs) and the the losses are expressed in steps. The CRT is not particularly noisy, and it seemed rather attacker friendly even at pretty low odds Although the rules say "Most of the ground units in the game have two steps", there are a few units who have four steps, and there are *a lot* of units (including just about the whole French army) who have but one step. The step asymmetry really creates some interesting effects--I'll try to explain that in a little more depth when I discuss playing the games. Most of the units exert a ZOC, and these ZOCs lock on contact for everybody, except the German mechanized units, all of whom pay *no* additional movement points to glide in and around and as far past the Allied units as their movement allowance will take them. In my opinion, this is the basic mechanism that the game uses to create the blitzkrieg effect. On the other hand, the Allies have to pay an additional movement point to engage (get into a ZOC) or to disengage (and the disengagement has to be to a hex not in an enemy ZOC.). Overall, B40 seems incredibly more fluid compared to the older game--given that the map and time scales are pretty equal, and given that, if anything the B40 units have even higher movement allowances than France 1940, the absolute lack of additional payment for them in ZOCs means that the armor units in B40 have the potential to fly all over the board compared to the sort of stodgy blitzkrieg that you are forced to wage in France 1940. I've noticed a similar effect in some of Ty's other West Front designs. If you have the chance to check out a relatively early design from Ty, Operation Dynamo, which appeared in the old Wargamer back in 1986, you'll see the panzers at play there too. If you look back at my comments on the CRTs, you'll see why I think the B40 is as complex as it needs to be for this game system, but no more so. And that is a Good Thing. In the systems and engine department, the uptick goes to B40. Operation Sickle Cut In the campaign, the Germans correctly perceived that the Ardennes Forest would not hamper military movement to the extent that the Allies, or at least the French, thought that it would. The Command game enables the German player to duplicate the maneuver with a somewhat lengthy and involved section of rules. Essentially, the German player gets to decide how many (up to a limit), and which units will participate in Sickle Cut. These units are placed in the Ardennes Forest on Turn One, along with any dummy units that the German cares to use (there has to be at least one real unit in a hex in order for a dummy unit to be used). Nobody can move into, through, or out of the Ardennes on Turn One. After that, the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais (or whatever their name was) are just scooted to the side of the forest, and the Germans are free to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting French. The AH game has nothing to match this. As the Germans in that game, you can get enter the Ardennes on turn one, and get through it pretty quickly too. But the Allies can also enter the Forest, and move through it with the same speed, which seems ahistorical to me. Given that this initial manuever was such an important part of the campaign, getting it right seems to be important, and I think the Command game represents a significant improvement in historicity over the AH game on this dimension. I was originally planning to cover a lot more ground in this first installment, but I see that that I have already written a boatload. In the next installment, I'll try to discuss how both games handle the following topics: Eben Emael and Paratroopers, and Air Power. Believe it or not, I've actually played a couple of turns of each game too ;-), and I'll offer my impressions of how the games seem to perform side-by-side. Until I get to that, thanks for reading. John Best jlbest@advancenet.net Dear members of the consim-l reading list, In an earlier post, I had described some elements of two games dealing with the 1940 campaign in France: France 1940, the AH game from 1972, and Blitzkrieg 1940, a game appearing in Command magazine in 1997--25 years later. My purpose in looking at the two games was to describe some of the changes that seemed to have taken place in wargaming over the 25 year interval, and also to play the two games sort of "in tandem" to see how each game played out. I hope to describe some of the game play in this installment. In fact I had hoped to describe the playing of each game all the way through, but for some reasons I'll describe later, I don't think that's going to happen this time out. I'll get to that, but first there are couple of other important issues in the campaign that I would like to describe. These include Eben Emael and the handling of paratroopers, the treatment of the Maginot line, and the "air game". Eben Emael: The Germans shocked the world when they succeeded in neutralizing the vaunted Belgian fortress Eben Emael with the use of airborne forces, and both games include rules for doing so. In Blitzkrieg 1940, the German player has the use of 5 airborne "coups de main" counters, each representing battalion to regimental sized forces. On turn 1, the German played decides how many of these he wishes to use, and then figures out where he wants the unit (counter, really) to land. There are some restrictions on terrain type, but they are minimal and the German player is permitted, or even subtly encouraged, to use all of them just about anywhere he wants. To deploy them, the German player places each counter in sequence, rolling a d6 for each one: The first unit survives its landing on a roll of 1 through 5, the second on a roll of 1 through 4, and so on. Any units who don't survive go right into the dead pile, with the loss of two German steps per counter. All you have to do to take out Eben Emael with these guys is simply survive the landing on top of the fort. Which I did with my first airborne counter--easy peasy. That's about all the paratroopers can do in B40 (oops, I guess I mean "coups de main" counters). They have no ZOC, and they can't move or attack (although they have a volatile defense factor of "0", which means their defensive strength is whatever is showing on the face of a d6 when they roll for that value). In France, 1940, there is a lot more detail in the paratrooper subgame. First, their use is covered in a lengthy optional rule in the AH game. In the background, for these rules, their actual numbers are listed as consisting of 6 battalions of airborne forces (parachute), and one airlanding division of 12,000 men consisting of four airlanding regiments. These units are actually depicted by specific counters in the game, giving a level of detail and accuracy not seen in the Command game. To give you some idea of the detail in these paratroop rules, I'll explain that the "map style" rulebook (it folds up accordian style like a map) consists of 10 "panels" of paper. Each panel is about 5.5" x 17" and is covered with, to my now aging eyes, a hopelessly small font size. Each of the 10 panels is printed front and back, to make an equivalent of 20 pages of rules. In that sense, the small size of the AH rulebook is a little deceptive. I wouldn't be be surprised to find that the word count of the AH rulebook is actually greater than the Command game. In any case, the paratroop rules take up one side of one panel, or about 5% of the total rules booklet, and these are mostly procedural, "how to operate the paratroopers" types of rules. In actual length, the coups de main rules in the Command game take up marginally more room (about 1 page out of 18 in the rule book), but they are mostly "effects" rules (like what happens if you land your coups de main units in Paris on turn 1--like that's going to happen). In France, 1940, the airborne operations are broken down into two stages. In the first place, the airborne battalions must land on a hex. You can land more than one battalion in a hex, but once you put the number of battalions you intened to land into a hex, you must roll for their landing (ie, the mission apparently can't be aborted if the first battalion to land gets wiped out). You roll for each battalion--on a 1-4 roll of a d6, the battalion survives, on a 5-6, it's destroyed on landing. So your expected value of surviving battalions is 2 out of 6. This isn't that much lower than the expected value of the landing units in B40 (which is approximately 2.49 out 5), but the battalions that land have simply survived, they haven't gone on to do anything of consequence yet. If you land your airborne guys on an occupied fortification (which Eben Emael was in the way that I set up the game), your Fallschirmjaegers destroy the fortification on only a 1-2 roll (and the paratroopers are always themselves destroyed in the process). The Eben Emael fortifications are represented by two fortified hexes in France 1940; I put one regiment (3 counters) on each fortified hex. One regiment failed to survive the landing process, and the other succeeded in wiping out one hex of the Eben Emael complex, although this regiment too was completely destroyed in the process. If you want to bring in the airlanding guys, they must be programmed to follow up on the hexes that the paratroopers have landed in and survived. I failed to realize this rule, and so my airlanding guys did not get to the battle (not they would have done anything as far as the fortress itself is concerned.). There's a lot of detail in the paratrooper rules for France 1940, probably more than I wanted or needed. It may be the case that the paratrooper rules are more "accurate" in France 1940, than are the coup de main rules and counters in Blitz 40, but overall, I think I liked the Command game better. The Maginot Line: The Maginot Line in Blitz 40 is represented by a host of counters representing something like the specific forts. There are two levels of fortifications, sometimes both flavors are stacked in the same hex. These counters have the same kind of volatile defense strengths as the rest of the French army. The "big forts" have a defensive factor of +6, which makes them very difficult to take out. Although the Germans can get some victory points by breaching the Maginot Line, it seems like asking for trouble. In France 1940 the Maginot Line consists of a terrain feature that adds "10" to the defensive power of the stack if the stack is attacked through the frontal hexes of the Maginot Line. Which makes it next to impossible for the Germans to get through. But wait: the Germans get some special artillery counters that work exactly like the artillery counters in the Napoleonic battle games of the early 1970s: They can add their combat strength into an attack that is one hex distant from their location. As wargaming mechanisms go, this is probably represents as good a solution to the Maginot Line problem as any. But after all the detail that was put into the airlanding subgame, the "artillery counter" solution looks and feels like a kludge. Both games seem to be intent on teaching the same lesson: In the historical event, the Germans correctly analyzed the situation and wisely avoided attacking the Maginot defenses directly. The "air game": There are wargamers who get a big kick out of running a given campaign's air war, and there are other wargamers who think it's a big pain. Your response to what I have to say next is probably conditioned on which kind of gamer you are. The AH game has a lot more variety and detail in the air war subgame than the Command game does. In France 1940, each air unit consists of two elements, the actual "airplane counter" and the ground support forces and base. You can fly the planes off this base at several points in the turn to accomplish any of five different missions (Close support, interdiction, CAP, air superiority, and interception). The Germans have 8 such units; The British have one, and the French have one. So you can see that the game is not set up to be balanced exactly, but rather to reflect what was probably a historical reality. Like the paratrooper rules, the air rules seem rather involved to me, taking up about one page in the rule book (which for the Allies, is about how to use your essentially 2 counters). The Command game is much simpler in this regard--basically, there are only 5 RAF Spitfire counters that the Allies can roll for and commit at the risk of 1 victory point for the German player. This rule comes with the following design note: "The five RAF Spitfire counters represent the only aircraft units for either side in both scenarios. The air superiority achieved by the Luftwaffe in the 1940 campaign is build into the mechanics. It's part of the Allied engagement and disengagement movement costs and helps account for the relative robustness of German units, reflected, particularly in the panzer divisions, in strength-steps and turn sequence flexibility." So the Stukas are factored into the game. Which of the the two approaches works better? It's a loaded question that I can't answer even for myself after playing a little bit of both games. I think it's interesting to note that that in the 25 year interval from the publication of France 1940 to Blitz 1940, the later game seems to be simpler than the earlier game in at least two of the three categories I described in this post (Eben Emael and paratroopers and the air game) and only marginally more complex in one category (Maginot Line depiction.) Playing the games: As I wrote above, when I set these games up, my intention was to play through each of them "in parallel" for 10 turns. According to my notes, I set the games up on July 28, thinking it would take me a couple of weeks or a month to play them. But then some other things happened, mostly the fact that our younger son (the only child we still have living at home) tried out for and made a premier level soccer team. So we (that is, he and I) had a lot more travel time to practice and more weekend travel to tournaments in other states. I'm not blaming him--campaigning with him and his team in soccer this summer and fall has been a blast, but it's also kicked my butt in terms of free time. So here it is, the end of October (or was when I wrote this) and I find that I've played a grand total of 2 turns in each game. I have done some other wargaming during this interval, mostly playing Dean Essig's sailing ship game, which I'm not sure I'm even allowed to mention, but whatever. (I guess I may lose my grognard status if I don't increase my playing time, but I sometimes think of myself as a former wargamer anyhow.) Anyway, I'll give you what I have on the first two turns of each game, but I hope you'll be understanding when I say that I have some other games and ideas that that I want to try and so I need to move on. Let me discuss losses as they occurred in each game through 2 turns: Blitz 1940 Turn 1 Turn 2 Netherlands 11 units (3 div. sized) 5 units Belgium 5 units (and Eben Emael) 3 units France 0 losses 12 units Great Britain 0 losses 1 step Germany 4 inf. steps plus 1 airborne 3 units (plus 10 add.steps) France 1940 Turn 1 Turn 2 Netherlands 2 units (all they had) 0 units Belgium 0 losses 2 units France 0 losses 2 units Great Britain 0 losses 0 units Germany 6 paratroop battalions 0 units In France 1940 the units lost were all corps size (except for the German paratroopers). Taking that into account, the loss rates were actually pretty similar for the two games. For example, in Blitz 1940 after two turns the Niederlanders have only 7 units left on the board, and there's a good chance they would be wiped out in turn 3. I did a few things to "help each game along". Thus for example, I duplicated Operation Sickle Cut in the AH game, even though it had no rules for it. In the Command game I played with all of the Allied one step units (which includes I think everybody except the British units) inverted. I kept them inverted them even from myself, because I think the concept of unknown strength really goes back to the great S&T game, Panzer Group Guderian where, as the Russian player at least, you didn't know what the quality of a given unit was going to be until you commited it to battle. My feeling is that the Allies were basically in a similar position in May and June of 1940. In some objective sense of duplicating the first couple days of the campaign, both games performed well. That is, in both games, the Germans were able both to whale into the Belgian and Netherlands forces, as well as effect the breakthrough battle at Sedan. I don't know how the games would continue to play out, but after 2 turns, both games look positionally very similar. In the subjective sense though, there were some big differences in game play, time and "feel". With regard to time, the AH game played *a lot* faster than the Command game did for me. Even with the rules look-ups, with the relatively few counters on the map, the AH game played in a fraction of the time of the Command game. Now, it's true that I didn't exploit the features of the AH air game that much--I pretty much used the German units for ground support, and that use is straightforward in the rules. But still, the difference in the amount time you would have to invest to play each game is striking. With an opponent who was reasonably familiar with wargames, I think you could play France 1940 to conclusion (10 turns) in 2-3 hours. I just don't see any way you could play the Command game (10 turns) in the same amount of time. It will be interesting to see if there are others who have different impressions on this issue. With regard to game play, I don't know quite how to explain this. There were some things I liked about the AH game--it reminded me of my 1970 VW beetle: It started and it got you there. In that sense, there was nothing wrong with the AH game; it seemed like a good fit between the model and the situation, and maybe you could learn something about the campaign by playing the game. The idea of the "paper time machine" seems very salient in this game: It seems designed to show you what happened, and within the restrictions of the format, why it happened. The Command game is another story. By gearing the units down one level, there is a lot more loss going on than in the AH game--this by itself created a certain visceral reaction. Plus there is this sense that the game is trying to tell you that all the Germans have to do is show up and bust a cap into any French division they want, and with one-step units, the French unit is just outta there. To me, that was very striking aspect of play in the Command game. Is it accurate? I don't know, but I was reminded when I was playing, and I am reminded now, of the discussion we had of "spectacle effects" in wargaming. Blitz 40 isn't just a "model" of what happened in what turned out to be a one-sided military contest. It also seems to be designed to show, using cardboard counters, what a contest between a modern military machine operating with deadly precision against hapless and hopelessly overmatched enemies, would look like and feel like. In the first installment, and a little bit in here too, I had been giving plusses and minuses to each game on its handling of different aspects. If you've read this far, I suppose I owe you an overall plus or minus on the two games. Really though, I think the experience of each game, although different from each other, was interesting and "valid" in its own right. It's true that I was a little partial to the Command game before I set them both up, thinking as I do, that Blitz 40 was one of the better Command games to appear among the entire 54 issue run. In comparison, France 1940 was less fun for me, but to be fair, I think it could still be a fun game played on its own. Well, this brings to a conclusion my little experiment in playing two games in parallel. I hope you enjoyed reading about the comparison; if you have any thoughts to share, I know I'd be happy to hear them. Thanks for reading. John Best jlbest@advancenet.net