Anybody here played the S&T Sedan game? Played it last night, it seems
like an excellent, tense, simple, and swift game. Time and map scale are
well chosen to show the way in which both sides' armies moved - in columns
that could cover significant distances before the other side could react.  
Since there is too much space to completely cover all avenues of approach,
one constantly feels one is a single successful march away from victory or
defeat.  Both sides' different capabilities are fairly elegantly
encapsulated in the Fortunes of War table (which in another age would have
been Joe Miranda's stratagem chits), and other rules (for example French
movement values keep decreasing throughout the second half of the game, as
the French army's inferior organisation and morale problems themselves
felt).

The only problem is that the victory conditions make the key to French
strategy how to best retreat into fortresses and await the last turn, when
historically these maneuvers were what sealed the French defeat. Here the
fortresses are turned from the historical death traps for beaten armies
where the Germans just need to wait for capitulation, into hotbeds of
resistance that have to be taken inch by inch. Metz, the Stalingrad of the
West... in fact the game map makes it a two-hex metropolis running along
the Moselle for 15km, not much different from the 20km length of
Stalingrad. Our conclusion was that this is an artefact of the game system
- they doubled it in size to handle its historical "stacking ability" in a
system without fortress or supply rules.

Unfortunately it's the lack of such rules means the game can't handle
sieges without including such concepts, so while these places historically
surrendered by the end of the game on their own accord, the game now makes
the Germans attack them in a frenzy to slice and dice the French troops
inside by the historical deadline, a strange inversion of the historical
campaign.

An amusing side aspect is a designer's note, in a passage pointed out to
me by John, that says the French had no logistical system, they just
foraged chaotically from depots, villages, and farms. Now, I'd be the last
to defend 1870 French logistics, but I guess whoever wrotes that thinks
a "depot" is a special kind of mushroom growing by the wayside.

However, it certainly is a fun game, twice in an evening is not
impossible, and the opening and mid-game do represent the nature of the
historical stabbing in the fog very well; a mistake can mean defeat for
either side.  I can see this being taken out again a few times as a change
of pace from Up Front.  But if you want to learn anything about the
campaign, play Joe Miranda's game from the Imperial Age series instead.

Markus

Last 3 games played: October War, East Front Solitaire, Sedan 1870
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"Bakayaro! Bakayaro!"  ("Stupid Bastards!  Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral 
Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942