BAOR: A review by John Best (Quasi) Historical Background: Those pesky Soviets just can't keep their mitts off of "our" West Germany! This time, it's the 1980s and the balloon goes up without so much as a diplomatic eyeblink ahead of time. NATO has no time to dilly dally around anyway with no fewer than 16 Soviet divisions (eventually) running it right up the gut on a 160 kilometer front in the heart of West Germany. What happens when the Pact puts the hammer down in a full-bore race to the Ruhr? Game Background, Reviews, Provenance of the Review Copy: BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) was Volume 3 of a truly ambitious series that SPI called the "Central Front Series Game System". As announced in S&T 82, the series was to have consisted of 10 games, each on its own 34" X 22" map, covering all of West Germany at a scale of 4 kilometers/hex. For those who want to dig into it, there is a schematic map on p. 15 of S&T 82 that shows where the 10 maps were to be located. At that time, only the first two games actually existed. And although we never saw all ten games, the result was ambitious enough, consisting of five games. I've listed the five titles, their original publication venue, and their publication dates below: Fifth Corps: S&T 82. (Sept-Oct, 1980). Hof Gap: boxed game. (November, 1980). BAOR: S&T 88. (Sept-Oct, 1981). North German Plain: S&T 117. (Feb, 1988). Donau Front: S&T 131. (Nov-Dec, 1989). But if you know anything about hex-and-counter wargaming, (and the fact that you are reading this review means that you know a lot about hex-and-counter wargaming), you know that the history of the Central Front Series was itself a tortured affair. With their publication strewn over 9 years, the games changed significantly over that time period. There was a designer switch: The prototype game, Fifth Corps, and the follow-up game, Hof Gap, were designed by Jim Dunnigan. The three remaining games were designed by Charles T. (Chuck) Kamps, who designed other modern warfare games for S&T in the 1980s, including Central Command. There was also a system-switch: Fifth Corps, Hof Gap, and BAOR all used what has come to be called the "Friction Point" system. But when Chuck Kamps came back to the system more than 6 years later, for North German Plain, the friction point system was ditched in favor a system that seemed to me at the time, much, much simpler. I own all five games. I subscribed to S&T during the entire time in question, so that's how I came by the four games that appeared there. I bought my copy of Hof Gap in April 2000 from Robert Smith, an internet seller, who packaged Hof Gap with another copy of Fifth Corps, (and a counter tray!). I paid $10.00 even for my punched, complete, copy (original price, $9.95). Wargames have seldom been good investments, and here is a good example of that (although, to be fair, I don't know what any of these titles are selling for currently.). Regarding the print literature on BAOR and the Central Front Series, if you go to Web-Grognards, you'll see there is a pretty extensive list of articles about them. Here are a few: MOVES Magazine Moves #59 - BAOR: The Enhancement and Standardization of the Central Front Series: Charles T. Kamps Jr. Moves #60 - Filling the Gap: The Central Front Gets Refreshed and Unified: Charles T. Kamps Jr. PHOENIX Magazine Phoenix #34 - Black Horse, Red Star: Central Front Series (SPI): Donald Mack (Review) FIRE & MOVEMENT Magazine F&M #25 - Breakthrough or Breakdown: The Central Front Series: Fifth Corps & Hof Gap: James M. Murphy (Analysis) A long time ago (I don't know when actually), I wrote a brief review of BAOR on this list and that also appears at the Web-Grognards site. After playing the game in the present, it was interesting for me to go back and see that I basically still agree with myself from before: I'll explain that comment when I discuss the Game Play and "Feel". Physical Components and Appearance. The game consists of one standard 22" X 34" map depicting parts of West Germany from an area north of Hanover, down to Kassel on the south side of the map (the long axis of the map runs East-West, so as the Pact front moves across the map as the campaign unfolds, the main line of resistance is across the short axis of the map. There are 400 standard sized counters. The combat counters show units of the USSR in a bright orangey-red that looks identical to me to the color of the Russians in Panzergruppe Guderian. The NATO Allies consist of British units in a dark olive, West Germans with dark red symbology on medium gray counters (unusual), and Belgians in black on light green. There has to be a mention of the Friction Point counters themselves (There are about 140 of them): Each counter is a single numeral in white on a black background. The counters use the standard NATO symbology, and with an attack and defense factor (all units have 12 operation points to expend which they can use to move or fight.). There are "historical" designations on the counters, which is part of the appeal as you lead the 8 units of the Soviet 207th ("Red Banner") motor rifle division on its quest to break through the 2nd Panzergrenadier brigade. (However, in a later section, I'll describe how these names, so redolent of their WWII counterparts, might conjure up images of swirling armor battles, but I really didn't see anything much like in my playing.) Graphically, BAOR is definitely from the SPI period that I call "high Redmond". You'll recognize many of the elements. The basic hex color is that creamy beige we all know. The hex field is surrounded by that dark gray border that was common to so many games. The map itself is pretty busy, with something like 10 or 12 basic hex types or hexside features, including lots of city hexes (lots of little brown "buildings" in a hex), the autobahn (bright red), rough terrain (chocolatey brown splotches), and black diamond "access" hexsides. Busy as it is, I thought the map was clear, and looking at it held my interest for the couple of months that I was playing the game. Scale, System and Mechanics: The hexes represent 4 kilometers; each turn represents 12 hours. The counters represent recon companies, battalions (mostly on the NATO side), regiments (mostly the Soviet armor and motor rifle units) and artillery brigade-sized units. The Soviets can stack three units, but only one of them can be a regiment sized unit (which means it's possible to stack two artillery units in there along with the regiment). NATO can stack only two units, and they have to be of the same nationality. ZOCs are rigid, and locking, but combat is voluntary (if you have the operation points available to do so after moving.) The Friction Point system is simple to explain in its basic sense, but its nuances are very complex indeed. The system works like this: At the beginning of the first player turn, each unit has 12 "operation points" that can be expended to either move (and some of the terrain is very consumptive of operation points) or fight. For example, a "prepared assault" will cost the stack 6 operation points. There is no movement phase, or combat phase. Each stack expends its own operation points and moves and fights on its own (basically, but there is one important exception.). The order in which each stack moves or fights is up to the player. Everything you do with a stack costs at least a friction point as well. Friction points represent "fatigue, wear and tear on equipment and personnel loss. A unit's 'front line' combat strength never changes. Instead, the Friction Point system shows the reduction (and replenishment) of a unit's depth." That quote is from the rules. Interesting isn't it? So the high concept is that Friction Points (FPs) are basically "soft" losses that affect a unit's cohesion and depth, but not its firepower or combat strength. Once a player has moved and fought with as many stacks as he wants, play shifts to the other player, who does the same things with his stacks. Then, play goes back to the first player again, alternating until both players pass (or until they have run all their stacks up to their max FPs), at which point the turn comes to an end. The CRT expresses all losses in terms of FPs (every unit in the stack must absorb the at least the first FP of a multi-loss result, but then the unit may able to retreat instead of taking additional FP losses.). At the beginning of the next Game Turn, players determine who has air superiority, and then each stack recovers a limited number of FPs, and starts the process all over again. But this is just the basic outline of the process; there is a lot more to the system, including direct and indirect artillery fire, engineers, helicopters, electronic and chemical warfare, mobile combat, airborne and airmobile units, etc. I think it's fair to say that it is one of the more complex systems that appeared in S&T during the Golden Age. Rules Length, Format, Completeness, Complexity and Organization: The basic system rules take up 12 pages (3 columns per page). The exclusive rules take up another 4 pages. Based on counting a few paragraphs and extrapolating, my estimate is that the basic rules are probably 15,000-20,000 words in length, and I believe that the exclusive rules could be another 7000 words in length. There is a *lot* of ruleage, and this means that BAOR is definitely not a "little game". The rules are organized in the well-known SPI case system, in which a rule such as "8.0 Combat" is followed by a general rule, a procedure section consisting of several paragraphs, and then the "cases" each of which is a numbered subrule. Each case may have a series of numerical subcases attached. The series rules consist of 19 such general rules (some of them, like the Introduction, are pretty straightforward). The 19 general rules have a total of 61 case rules. At the level of just eyeballing it, it looks like each case rule has an average of 4 or 5 subcases that each take up a paragraph or so. For example, the general rule 6.0 Zones of Control, has two cases. The second case, 6.2 Exiting Enemy-controlled Hexes, has no fewer than 5 subcase paragraphs. As this level of detail suggests, the rules seem very complete. But they are also very self-referential, with a lot of cases and subcases saying things like "(see 5.22)." The rules are also replete with exceptions. I counted 20 clearly marked exceptions in the series rules, and there are a number of additional implied exceptions, such as when a phrase like "However, see 7.33" is used. The length of the rules, the complexity of the system, and the number of exceptions combined to make the game very hard to learn in my opinion, despite the fact that the rules themselves seem pretty complete and well-organized. In my judgment, to fully master the Central Front system rules starting from scratch could easily require some months of study. Game Play and "Feel": In this section, I'll try to describe what it felt like to play the game and I'll drop in on some of my "field notes" that I made at the time I was playing (my laptop is always open now as I play.). I'll also try to provide a little bit of after action reporting in this section in terms of what happened on the table. First of all, in terms of game play and feel, two of the elements that I have been focusing on during his recent period of WWIII wargaming that I've been doing are first, the elements of Soviet doctrine, and second, the supply model used in the game. As others have commented, The FP system seems well designed with the Soviet "burn out" doctrine in mind. In other words, if you want to take any one Soviet division, assign it a mission type objective, and then push it, push it, push it, until its components reach the max FP level and the division becomes incapable of doing anything else, you can play that way, and indeed that may be one of the secrets to playing the Soviets successfully. Although there is no specific rule forcing players to keep the component counters of a Pact division together, there are some important positive effects if you do. For example, if a particular player segment begins with multiple stacks already adjacent to an enemy stack, then the phasing player can declare a multi-hex attack and get a positive odds shift for each additional stack attacking beyond the first (this the exception to the "one stack at a time" combat rule). For the Pact player to get this bonus, all of his units in the multi-hex attack have to belong to the same division (that is, for units that have a divisional structure; the Pact player has some units attached at the Army level, and these can always count for the multi-hex bonus.). It's a nice rule that gets divisional integrity to work naturally. One of the results of that rule is that, as the Pact player you'll always have some units that are more or less ready to move and fight, and other formations that need to cool it for a turn or more in order to recover. But it's also true that that a typical Soviet division will get worn out in continual combat very quickly. For example, a completely fresh artillery unit that has to move to get within range acquires an FP to do so. After moving, if that artillery unit goes on to fire in support of an attack, that's another FP. If the unit also wants to fire off some chemicals (which shift the odds up a variable amount depending on the game turn), that costs another FP. So for an artillery unit that began the turn fresh, now it has 3 FPs after a morning's work (not even a full morning's work actually). It's true that the arty unit might be able to fire again in the next Pact player turn, but that will take it to 4 FPs (5 is the max). And then, if you do try to take a unit to the max FP level, sometimes bad things will happen to it, as the following excerpt from my field notes shows: "The Pact is trying to wear down NATO, but I'm not sure it's really working. So in one case, the Pact rolled up a stack (maybe a motor rifle regiment) with an artillery unit that had three friction points on it (flipped to its FP side with a "2" marker). They rolled up and fired, taking them to 5 FPs--the max. In the attack, the Pact failed on its electronic warfare die roll, and that let NATO call in a lot of artillery for defensive fire, lowering the attack odds down to 4:1 in Broken Woods (which is bad news). The Pact rolled a "5" on the prepared assault column, getting a 1/0 result, which destroyed the artillery unit! I'm scratching my head. (This happened to the 37th Guards Tank attacking a stack of two German battalions.)" As the example implies, I was frequently at a loss as to what I should do to enable the Pact units to advance across the map. My natural style of play is fairly conservative and I'm risk averse with my units. For the Pact, that doesn't seem like an effective strategy in this game. The Pact forces outnumber NATO's, and it seems like the game is asking the Pact player to develop an attritional strategy in which he takes on additional FPs for the chance to make NATO units take a single FP "loss". But as the example above shows, units close to their FP levels are very brittle. It was a conundrum that I failed to solve as a player. If you'll recall, I've also been interested in exploring supply models in WWIII games lately. The Central Front Series has a supply rule too, but its effects are very muted in comparison to those of other WWIII games. The Central Front Series uses that two-step supply sequence that we've seen in lots of games: The first step is a limited movement point trace back to a road; the second step is a trace of unlimited length along a road to an off-map supply source. The only supply effect is that a unit or stack that is out of supply in the supply phase cannot reduce its FP level. That's it: there are no supply effects on ZOCs, movement or combat. In terms of game-play, once the Pact breaks through the NATO covering screen, which it can do in only a couple of turns, the Pact advance seemed to seriously bog down for me. The terrain in this part of West Germany strongly favors the defense, and I should point out that the CRT is very punishing for the attacker. Even with a prepared attack (your best shot), 4:1 odds against a West German stack in Rough Woods, for example, is not going to dislodge them. Conversely, the attack values for most of the NATO units are laughably low against the Pact defensive values; NATO will not enjoy very many counterattack possibilities. In addition, electronic warfare effects can really change the dynamics of any combat set-up. Unfortunately for NATO, the Pact is better at jamming the radios, and for most of the turns in the game, they have many more opportunities to do so than NATO does. For me, this meant that the player turns were very asymmetrical: The Pact has a lot of work to do to figure out how to allocate different divisions and army-level assets to specific missions, make a number of attacks, figure how and where to advance (if they get a chance to advance) and so on. For NATO, each player turn consisted of shuffling some units around in the line, and keeping a mobile reserve to ready to move to threatened sectors (which was not very hard). The density of the counters seems very high for a WWIII game too. And in addition to a dense FEBA (with units very close to their partners on the front) the map is dense with units behind the line too. Inevitably as elements of a division acquire a lot of FPs, I decided to leave them behind for a turn or two to catch their breath. This means that as play advances, each division is going to have some units a few hexes behind their front. Some of the artillery will also find itself there, and so will the helicopters. So that creates a battlefield with a lot of depth. In fact, in most places the distance from the "back" of the NATO position to the "back" of the Pact position was something like 10-12 hexes. That kind of battlefield depth seems to be congruent with the reading I've done regarding a projected WWIII campaign in Germany-but nevertheless, the game just looked a little different than I expected. In terms of how the game came out, I'm going to go back to my field notes for the last turn (Game Turn 10). In these notes, I used the expression "impulse" to describe the alternating player turns. In other words, the reference to the Pact third "impulse" is actually their third player turn of that game turn. Let's see what happened: "5/9/2012: Beginning with Pact third impulse. Except that really, there's not that much that they can do. The units on their friction point side, many of them would take themselves to the max to do anything, and then if they incur a loss in some low odds attack, that would be the end of them. So the Pact passes. And back to NATO. Having won the game, NATO promptly passes too, thus bringing this to an end. In terms of Victory, NATO controls 55 city hexes, but they did bring in both British "field forces" as reinforcements, so that knocks 10 city hexes off their total, taking them down to 45 city hexes, for a NATO marginal victory. Positionally, the main line of resistance is centered on a line of hexes, xx29 (about the middle of the board). The Pact does have a stack in supply in hex 1121 (their western most stack), but that is still five hexes short at least of how far a Pact unit would have to advance to qualify for a marginal victory. Positionally, it looks like more than a NATO marginal victory to me; it looks like they have the Pact stopped pretty well. The Pact never completely cleared out Hanover for example. There's still a West German stack in one of the city hexes (pretty shot up, and surrounded, but still there). Overall, this is a very hard game to learn and play well (I'm sure that's true of the other Friction Point games as well). Here's how the losses look (although units lost play no role in the victory conditions): Losses (dead pile) Belgians: 5 units British: 7 units West Germans: 24 units Total NATO: 36 units Pact: 4 units" So there you have it; the Pact was putting NATO units into the dead pile, but NATO still had plenty of units by the end of the game. Positionally, the Pact advanced only about half way across the long axis of the map in five days of simulated time: There would be no rapid advance to the Ruhr in this sector. Overall: BAOR is a complex game involving a complex system. It's a hard system to learn at all, and, I think, a hard system to learn to play well. It also takes a long time to play; the player's notes say that you can expect to spend 15 hours on the 10-turn campaign scenario. I spent at least that much time with it. I think the Central Front Series pushes the complexity of a paper and cardboard instantiation of a game out to just about the frontier of what you can reasonably people to do for entertainment. There were a couple of things that were somewhat disappointing about the game. For example, the helicopter counters represent the "bases" of the helicopter units. The helicopters themselves seem to function more like super-long-range artillery than anything else. You don't really see the helicopter counters "in action" in the game, and that meant that helicopter strength points in any given combat didn't function differently than any other kind of strength points. I guess that criticism could be leveled against the other counters too; there was no real combined arms benefit. Finally, there is a bit of a theoretical puzzle in the sense that after absorbing the first, and sometimes first two losses in FPs, units can retreat away from further FP losses that have been inflicted in combat. Despite all these factors, though, there were a number of things about the game that were interesting. For example, there are very few wargames that represent the wearing down of a unit as a problem with the unit's depth, rather than with its frontage, but that's what's going on in the FP games in the Central Front Series. It takes a little while to get your mind around that: if you think of the Friction Points as just the same thing as strength point losses, or steps, I think you could be in for a rude awakening as a player. When you add up all these points, it might seem like I'm going to go negative on my summary statement. But actually, despite the complexity of the system, it was a great mental workout for me during the two months that I had the game on my table. It was hard to learn, but there is a difference between being hard to learn, and being frustrating to learn-in this case, I enjoyed the challenge. If you're looking for a detailed look at possible operations in West Germany at the beginning of an armor-intensive conventional WWIII, I think this game will prove very satisfying to you. As always, I'm interested in hearing your comments, in agreement or otherwise, and in either case, thanks for reading. John Best jlbest@advancenet.net _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list Consim-l@mailman.halisp.net https://mailman.halisp.net/mailman/listinfo/consim-l