From: Robert Laing Subject: Bittereinder review Bittereinder Review by Robert Laing Colonial wars are a neglected area of board wargaming. There has long been a gap for a game covering the largest of these wars, the Anglo Boer War fought at the end of 19th century and the Victorian era. This war cost Britain £350-million and 20 000 lives -- a shocking bill at the time, but which soon paled into small change next to World War I. The fact that wars like the Great Boer War have been ignored by commercial wargame publishers shows the importance of "Indy labels" like the Microgame Co-Op. I was so keen to get a board game on this war that I was tinkering with developing my own when I stumbled across Hjalmar Gerber's Bittereinder on the co-op's website members.home.net/co-op/index.html. Overall, I'm very impressed. My favourites are the "Seventies style" early Avalon-Hill and SPI games which synthesized everything down to an odds-ratio CRT and counters with just two parameters: combat and movement. Hjalmar has succeeded in packing in nearly every part of a very complicated war without straying too far from the basic structure of the "classics". Historically, the Boers were formidable defenders but weak attackers. One of the reasons for this is they didn't have a professional army aside from German-trained artillery men. It was a citizen's army in which men from each voting district were bundled into units called "Kommandos" headed by their local politician. And the average "Kommandant" was as useless as you would imagine the average politician playing soldier to be. They were strong in defence because as is often the case with frontier societies, the average burger's marksmanship and field craft was excellent. The strong defense, weak attack nature of the Boers is simulated elegantly by allowing the strengths of Kommando counters in an area to combined in defense, but only one counter's strength to be used in attack unless there is a general in the area. The thin leadership of the Boer's is made evident here by making only three generals available. Two of these are replacements which appear after the strongest counters the Boer player has at the start of the game -- the Natal Army and the Western Army -- have been eliminated. This simulates the way in which the Boer politicians with a knack for military strategy only emerged once the war was well underway. General Louis Botha starts the game "buried" in the Natal Army. Botha was a Transvaal politician who went on to become the Union of South Africa's first Prime Minister after the Boers had "lost the war, but won the peace" using the Bittereinder strategy from which the game draws its title. The Free State's Western Army similarly hides Christiaan de Wet who would become the Boers' most tenacious guerilla leader. The politicians who turned out to be the smartest generals tended to be those in the opposition faction who had done what the could to prevent Transvaal President Paul Kruger declaring war on the British. The only general the Boers start the game with is Koos de la Rey. Kruger had called De la Rey a coward for opposing the war, to which De la Rey prophetically replied that if war came, he would be in the field fighting long after Kruger had fled. Sure enough, Kruger "for the safety of his people and their future" moved himself -- and the Transvaal's treasury too according to legend -- to Holland after the Transvaal's capital Pretoria and the Free State's capital Bloemfontein had fallen while De la Rey continued to fight. Boer War fronts had a tendency of bogging down into stalemates. Neither the British commanders nor their critics in the London War Office and the press grasped the implications of long range artillery, quick firing magazine rifles, machine guns, trenches and barbed wire. The CRT in Bittereinder recreates that. One of the things that makes the Great Boer War an ideal topic for a wargame is that the generals on both sides were portrayed as incompetent by the journalists who covered the war and this tradition has been kept alive by contemporary historians. There have been no end of theories on what the Boers should have done to achieve an early victory or how Victorian Britain could have avoided it escalating into that super-power's equivalent of Vietnam. The Boers' historical opening play was to besiege every British town they could reach. The British docilely allowed themselves to get bottled up. In my attempt at designing a Boer War game, I got stumped on how to encourage players to follow the historical precedent here, so Hjalmar's solution really impresses me. The Boer player is enticed with the prospect of a victory on turn 3 if he can reduce the British Empire's morale from 7 to 0. The Boers had won a war against Britain 18 years before by winning a few skirmishes in the first round, and this gave them the idea they could do it again. Besieged towns have to pass a morale check every three turns, and there is a domino effect because if one fails it becomes more difficult for the next to pass. It's therefore tempting for the Boers to besiege as many towns as they can. All garrisons are worth one morale point irrespective of their economic or strategic value, so Mafeking - a hick railway depot - is as attractive a target as (then) diamond rich Kimberley. This may sound weird, but it simulates the history of the war accurately. The three famous sieges -- Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking -- will almost alway recur in the game because the British player must garrison those towns as well as Durban. The British player has the option of encouraging further sieges by placing three additional garrisons within reach of the Boers or well back. Kuruman, arguably the most pointless town the Boers besieged, is off-board in the Kalahari desert. It didn't play much of a role in the war anyway: the seven garrisons available for getting besieged in the game are more than adequate. The meek way in which the garrisons accepted sieges was contentious at the time, and the rules capture this. Victorian army officers were expected to be berserkers. While the British public elevated Mafeking's garrison commander Colonel Baden-Powell into the greatest hero of the age, generals like Kitchener had nothing but contempt for a cavalry officer who would rather run into town and eat his own horses than lead a suicidal charge. The game recreates the pros and cons of sieges well. When the Boers attack a garrison, the British player has the option of accepting combat or chickening out by placing a siege counter on his defending units. Both these options carry the risk of reducing Empire Morale. Opting to fight has the advantage of forcing the Boer player to expend some of his scarce War Commitment points. But committing garrisons to battle is a gamble because DR (defender retreats) count as DE (defender eliminated) for them and it brings Empire Morale down a point if they are eliminated. As in the war, British players in Bittereinder tend to be over-fond of getting besieged. Even in the late stage of the war when the Boers were outnumbered and on the defensive, garrisons got besieged. For instance, Roberts was prodded into promoting Baden-Powell to general by Wolseley, and then had to do some severe butt-kicking to get General Baden-Powell to budge from Mafeking. This task was given to Kitchener, who though a formidable butt-kicker, only got Baden-Powell to move as far as Rustenburg before he bedded down for his next siege. When Baden-Powell asked Kitchener for a command in World War I, he was told he was a far too valuable boy scout to be made a soldier. Fortunately, the British player doesn't have to deal with Baden-Powell in this game. To keep the British propensity to get besieged in check, Hjalmar has limited the number of siege counters to five. But before the Boer player recreates history by piling into sieges, he should consider the odds of winning the game this way. In my opinion, they are negligible because there's no chance of besieged towns surrendering unless Empire Morale has been brought down from seven to five by the third turn. Every turn, the British player has to roll three dice and if the result is less than the number of towns lost to the Boers, Empire Morale drops a point. There are only about six towns the Boer player is likely to be able to seize before the British hoard under General Buller floods in on Turn 3 -- and the probability of rolling under six with three die is less than 3% by my maths. Besides tempting the Boer player with a forlorn hope, it also manhandles history a bit. Getting those six towns means aggressively attacking the Cape Colony at the outset of the War. On Turn 1, the Free State and the Cape Colony were still at peace. Cape Prime Minister Will Schreiner did his best to keep his country out of the war, and the Free Staters respected Cape neutrality with the exception of Kimberley which they viewed as having been stolen from them by Schreiner's predecessor, Cecil Rhodes. When the Free Staters did advance into the Cape, it was to take up better defensive terrain at Stormberg where they defeated a British column headed by General Gatacre. There's a theory that the Boers could have won by aggressively attacking the Cape. But Hjalmar's game shows this is unlikely. The Boers' motive for advancing into British territory was generally to get a stronger defensive position. Hjalmar hasn't cluttered the rules with terrain modifiers -- he has achieved most of this work through the shape of the areas. Though the Tugela River is only on the map for cosmetic purposes, it poses many of the problems it did historically. Defending the river forces the Boer player to spread over three areas. Stormberg is a good area to advance into because it's an important node in the railway network. The odds of the Boer player gaining anything from a rush into the Cape are so small that it's best for the Boers to stick to the historical strategy of concentrating on the railway tracks to block the British advance. The low maneuverability of British infantry made their line of advance very predictable. But Roberts surprised the Boers with his "Great Flank March" whereby he took Bloemfontein. The Boers didn't expect an attack on Bloemfontein from the West because there was no railroad linking Kimberley to Bloemfontein. The reason for this was that Rhodes, in his bid to build his dream Cape to Cairo railroad, was forced to skirt the Boer Republics which hated capitalists in general and Rhodes in particular. The Great Flank March is simulated in the game by allowing the units stacked with Roberts a double turn once in the game. Players wanting a shorter game are presented with the "Bob's War" scenario in which the Boer Player has to prevent Bloemfontein and Pretoria falling within 12 turns. As I explained earlier, the Boers lost the war in the conventional sense in that the British seized the capitals of both republics. But they won it in that they dragged the war on until the British declared victory and gave the Boers everything they could have hoped for by winning -- the union of the Boer Republics and British colonies in South Africa under the rule of Transvaal generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. To prevent the Boers winning the same way they did historically, the British player has to try an eliminate nearly all the Kommandos by Turn 32. If the Boer player manages to keep at least 10 units alive, he wins. One of the reasons the Boer War hasn't been popularised much is that neither side emerged from it looking like "good guys." The British, under Kitchener, resorted to putting the wives and children of Boers still fighting into concentration camps where many of them died because the water made available to them was carried in by typhoid-infected iron carts. In defense of the British, they didn't do this out of malice -- the same carts were used to provide drinking water to their own troops and more of them were killed by typhoid than Boer bullets. Kitchener's ruthlessness is simulated in the game with "Barbarism" counters which are used to hem in the surviving Kommandos along with Blockhouses which the British player can "buy" with infantry units from Turn 16 onwards. Bittereinder fills a long neglected vacuum in this hobby. I have some quibbles -- for instance the Rhodesion Regiment should start in Rhodesia instead of Mafeking to simulate the small front Colonel Plumer opened in the North. But overall, this is an excellent simulation of the Great Boer War.