From: Markus Stumptner Subject: [Consim-l] West Front (SimCan) John Nebauer and I took out SimCan's West Front for a spin on Sunday. That's a game system that has always intrigued me from the outside - small counter mix (army level), three month turns, but movement points directly keyed to supply, i.e., one gets a number of MPs per turn and can arbitrarily divide these between all units! That means one wants to make quite sure of one's ZOCs, otherwise a unit can move from Normandy to Berlin in one turn. Which, given 3 month turns, is not all that absurd, if the other side fails to put anybody in the way. So neither side can permit itself to slip. First, the number of units on the map is even smaller than it looks like from the countersheet, because units have multiple step loss counters. This due to a very clever mechanism, units lose steps and take replacements in two separate dimensions. Units either are full or half strength (front and back), but they also come in different morale/experience levels (different counters). The owning player decides along which dimension to lose or build up, except each dimension can only be built up by one step per turn. So a fresh infantry army could come in as a 5D unit (5 being combat strength, 'D' being the lowest morale level) the first turn, '10C' the next (two steps, higher morale), and '11B' the third (two steps, still higher morale). Set up, the Italian front has two army counters per side, and France about 4-5. Added to this are the headquarters. An army needs a HQ within 3 hexes (2 hexes in snow) for the army to be in command, and a HQ can only put as many armies in command as the rating of its leader (the leaders, rated between 5 for Rommel and 0 for Himmler, or 1 for Mark Clark) come as fixed reinforcements for the Allies and are pulled as chits by the Axis). Once placed, a leader can only be switched with a staff leader or replaced after losing two battles or being captured, killed, or wounded. HQs are only removed when advanced over - when attacked in movement they can simply retreat. However, as we found, such overruns are not unlikely. The sequence of play is fairly mobile, with movement, reserve movement, combat, tank army movement, tank army reserve movement, tank army combat. The saving grace (given so much movement on a small map) is that ZOCs stop movement, and unoccupied cities have a ZOC in their own hex. (As a result the Allied player has to make sure not to fall behind to reach the historical line by the end of the game.) There's air support and leaders can (at risk of being hurt) use their rating as a combat modifier. There are some asymmetric effects to the turn sequence making different operations harder to plan for different sides. (Shades of SimCan's Peloponnesian War here.) The rules are usual SimCan quality, which means that everything is said somewhere but only once, and with no crossreferencing it can be a pain to find. As usual the fixed width laser printer font gives the rules the dreary uniformity of a former Soviet bloc TV program. The one rule that we found lacking is the rule about hex control changing when a hex is "obviously" behind the front lines (smacks of FGA). Supply is checked for both sides at the end of each player turn and likewise traced to a HQ (but each HQ can place an unlimited number of armies in supply). The price for being out of supply is draconian: one step loss when you're in a big city, otherwise two. In our game, the Germans lost a HQ in front of Paris and that essentially spelled doom for any defense in France. The impact of Cobra brought home nicely. Overall this makes for a very fast and furious game. It can be brittle, which is OK given that major disasters should be able to happen within so long a turn, but we hope with experience there will be fewer than both sides saw on this occasion. (E.g, snow is pretty likely on a Fall turn in the central area and so one should not advance further than two hexes from a HQ at the end of summer.) We only played the D-Day scenario (4 1/2 turns) and that should be doable in two hours with experience. The full game (8 1/2 turns) is a bit more flexible; the game also contains Spanish counters if the German player wants to give Gibraltar a try, but it's clear that the really enticing thing would be to play this together with Lebensraum; sort of a card-free Barbarossa to Berlin. The elegance is hurt a bit by about three dozen "production centre" markers that are spread over German territory (mostly in cities), individually rated for Transport, Refining, and Production capacity. Unfortunately we were unable to find out what effect Production capacity has on the game at all, and both Refining and Transport only count once a certain minimum of points is passed by the Allied advance (which will most likely only happen on the last turn). (There is a possibility that we overlooked something - see comment on the rules.) As a result, the markers are placed (a major part of the setup effort) and then taken off by the Allies as they advance but have little other effect. In the next game we'll just note down the 2-3 easternmost Transport locations and leave the markers off. We do suspect the system works better for Lebensraum with the larger number of units, so we'll certainly give that one a spin later, perhaps then we'll see what the production markers are for. Markus Last 3 games played: Okinawa, Vinegar Joe's War, West Front --------------- http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ --------------- "Bakayaro! Bakayaro!" ("Stupid Bastards! Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942 _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list Consim-l@mailman.halisp.net http://mailman.halisp.net/mailman/listinfo/consim-l