Dear wargamers, If you are in the US, it's Thanksgiving today, so here's hoping you enjoyed a Happy Thanksgiving with your loved ones. And if you live outside the US, I'll still wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, because I think we all have lots to be thankful for. Now to the matter at hand, some time ago, I went looking for a review of the game, Bloody Keren, which had appeared in the Wargamer. I wasn't able to find anything online at Grognards, and so I thought I would write a review for possible inclusion there, which you'll find below. I hope the text is legible when you see it: my computer gave me some kind of jive message when I pasted in the review from a Word file, but we'll see how it comes out. Thanks for reading. John Best jlbest@advancenet.net Bloody Keren: A review by John Best Historical Background: The game depicts the British invasion (from Sudan) of Italian Eritrea in January, 1941. The British troops, consisting of the 4th and 5th Indian divisions, supported by other units, including "Matilda" tanks, made good progress initially against the Italians, whose forces consisted of Blackshirts and other metropolitan units, colonial units, and native forces. But when the British reached the Keren pass and began their assault on February 3, 1941, it was a different story. In the very rough terrain, (the photograph in the magazine reminded me of pictures of Afghanistan), the British had tough going against the well-positioned Italians. There was see-saw fighting for seven weeks until the Italians, deciding their position was no longer tenable, retreated on March 25. Game Background: Bloody Keren (BK) was created by noted designer Vance Von Borries. It was published in The Wargamer, Vol. 1, #59 (nominal publication date: November, 1986, 22 years ago). The magazine contained a well-written, detailed history of the campaign written by Von Borries, and a well-done supplemental piece by Jim Hind (VVB used the material in this article as the basis for the article he wrote in S&T 128 (Africa Orientale Italia), nominal publication date Origins, 1989). The cover price for the Wargamer issue was $9.95 US (I don't know what a subscription cost in 1986, but I would estimate in the $50/year range). I acquired the copy I used for this review from Kellie Gallagher, an Ebay seller. I paid $9.00 US for an unpunched copy in 1998. There may be some reviews of this game in print publications, but I'm afraid I haven't identified any. Physical Components and Appearance. The game consists of one 22" x 17" ("folio-sized") map, one 10-page rule book (which includes two pages of set-up charts, the CRT, a table of contents and Designer's Notes), and 100 die-cut counters. The map shows just about all of Eritrea and adjacent areas at 7.75 miles/hex. It is credited to Mary Rappazzo of EarthSurface Graphics (ESG). There is, or was, an outfit called Earth Surface Graphics of Los Angeles that was responsible for the maps in another VVB design, Rommel's War (Mark Goldman, and David L. Fuller were credited with the maps in that game). If you've seen the Rommel's War maps, you'll see an obvious similarity to this one, except that the BK map is nicer in my opinion. The clear hexes, of which there are a lot, are shown in the creamy beige tone that we all know. The varieties of rough terrain are depicted in tan, verging on gold, with a burgundy maroon showing the highest terrain. There are few jungle hexes that are basically just green blobby hexes, but the overall effect of the rough terrain is very "organic" and natural looking. The map is printed on the glossy paper (get ready for the glare). The typeface used on the map is clear, and the terrain features are unambiguous. In contrast to the florid but pretty map, the counters are rather staid. Joyce Gusner is credited with the counter design. All the counters use the standard NATO symbols perched over the typical Attack-Defense-Movement setup with the historical designations on the sides. Most of the counters depict battalions or regiments, with some brigades (the unit size designation is really small). There are several company level units depicted too. The 46 Italian counters are shown with black text on a kind of spring green. The 43 British (I'm using this term as a shorthand to describe the welter of nationalities and ethnicities depicted) counters have black text on bright red. The 8 irregular units who begin the game allied with the Italians have black text on dark green (bad news). The better news is that these guys can defect to the British; the reverse side shows them as white on red. There are two Out-Of-Supply markers (white on blue), and one Game Turn marker (also blue). The font size is squinty-small: I'm pretty sure that in 1986 I could have read the historical designations on the counters, but that capability is long gone now. With super bright light and magnification, I can read the historical designations, but, if you find yourself in a similar boat, it's ok, because the historical designations don't seem to matter much in game play. Overall, though I have seen more elaborate counters, these are clear and functional, albeit hard to read. System and Mechanics: The game has a mercifully simple sequence of play. For each side, there is an initial phase in which supply is checked, reinforcements are placed, defections are induced, that sort of thing. Then there is a movement phase. Then there is a combat phase. That's it. I found it refreshing, but for the first few turns, I was thinking there had to be more. There are locking zones of control, sort of. A unit must stop upon entering a ZOC (all the infantry units have ZOCs, artillery and some other units do not), but in the next turn, it can move through one ZOC to an adjacent empty hex. Combat is voluntary with the usual provisions about multi-hex combat and so on. Combat is resolved on a D6 CRT with step losses and retreats. There are expected DRMs provided by terrain, the small British air force present, the single platoon of Matilda tanks, and a few other things. Combat units have one, two, or three steps (VVB refers to them as "levels", but they're steps). A unit's third step is indicated by a generic "remnant" counter, presumably representing the destroyed unit's cadre. There are only a few remnant counters provided, but the rules are explicit about simply making more such counters if they are needed. In general, the British have better combat values, and almost all of their infantry battalions have three steps. The Italians have lower combat values, and only one of their units has three steps. There is an optional rule describing a very limited replacement procedure, but it too favors the British: They have four replacement steps over the course of the whole game, while the Italians have only two. Supply is traced in two stages, the supply route (over any terrain, for a distance of only four hexes), and then the supply road (which could be a primary, or secondary road, or trail, of infinite length), back to a printed supply source. Some units (artillery, tanks) have to trace over a road of some sort, and there aren't that many decent roads. Rules Completeness, Rules Length, Complexity, Organization: The rulebook for Bloody Keren is 10 pages long, but this includes a two page insert with the set up hexes next to a picture of each unit, the CRT, and the TEC. In addition, part of the overall rules length is taken up with a special section showing players how this game could be linked with several other VVB designs including Drive on Damascus, and O'Connor's Offensive. I can't imagine someone actually doing that, but I really appreciated the attempt to show the connection between these three different situations. The rules seemed complete to me; there were a couple of situations that I found slightly puzzling, but nothing that I couldn't figure out. I made some "rules mistakes"-realizing later that I should have been doing something a little different. But again, I don't think it was anything that wrecked the game. Bloody Keren was not a particularly hard game to play, but there is a lot to remember and a lot to keep track of. For example, it seemed to me that there was a lot rules verbiage to describe the defection process of the eight irregular units that begin the game belonging to the Italians. Similarly, there is a lot of text in the rules to describe the release process of the two garrison groups in Wolkait and Tigre provinces. A lot of that text is along the lines of "If the British do X, but not before turn 7, then the Tigre garrison is released, if Italian losses have reached level Y". Well, it's not quite as baroque as that, but nevertheless there were a lot of subroutines in the game that were a little overwrought, considering the basically simple game that Bloody Keren was striving to be. Game Play and "Feel": In evaluating any game, I like to read the designer's notes to see the designer's views on the problems he faced, and to see his decisions and solutions. Here's a quote from the Designers' Notes: "The overriding concern in the design was the combination of the questions of scale and scope." As he expands this point, VVB makes it clear that he did not want the game to show only the fighting at the Keren pass, but rather he wanted the game to show the entire theatre and thus explicate why the struggle at Keren came to pass. This design objective results in a couple of implications. The hex scale for the map is relatively large (7.75 miles/hex), but the unit scale is relatively low (lots of battalions mostly). Each counter is assigned a stacking value, but the biggest stacking value is "3" for the Allies and "4" for the Italians. And there are lots of units whose stacking value is only "1" or "2". The stacking limit for each hex is 13 points. This means that it is easily possible to create stacks of six or seven combat units in a hex (not that this will always happen). And the result of all this is that the game has a certain kind of feel: Each side can make a couple of "killer stacks", but only a couple. Moreover, the killer stacks can't be everywhere. That might suggest that the killer stacks of each side dominate a very local area, squashing the smaller stacks that get in their way. That does happen to a certain extent. On the other hand, because the terrain and road net are so confining in terms of supply, each player is going to have a pretty good idea about where the other player's killer stacks are going at different points in the game. This means that the big stacks with good units are likely to butt up against each other, and then combat settles into relatively low odds, which are mostly attritional. Fostering this attritional aspect is another design decision about turn length. Each turn represents 4 days. The entire game is 21 turns long, but the struggle at Keren pass itself lasted 53 days, or basically 9 turns. If the game plays out as the historical situation did, then for almost half the game, the somewhat fluid situation that occurs in the first half of the game disappears into a protracted head-butting trial occurring in a few hexes. That's not necessarily bad, but if you play without fog of war rules, then the battle at Keren pass becomes something more like a puzzle than a battle as you maximize the odds on the few defending hexes. The Allied player clearly has the initiative at the start of this game. I pretty much duplicated the Allied historical strategy, in terms of assigning brigades to their historical objectives, points of entry and so forth. The game actually tracked the historical outcomes pretty well. The historical article in the magazine strongly gives the impression that the Italians had a higher casualty rate all along compared to the British, and I found this to be the case. It was very hard to keep the Italians alive. Once the game entered the more linear phase that I alluded to above, it was hard for the Italians to attack at decent odds, and even in defense, the odds were usually against them. Part of this was due to the stacking values. The typical British battalion had a strength of 4-5-4, but a stacking value of 3 points. The typical Italian regiment may have had a 4-4-4 value, but it had a stacking value of 4 points. With a stacking limit of 13 points, it was possible for the Allies to get a lot more hitting power in their big stacks than the Italians could get in theirs. The result was the Italians were beaten up almost all the way through the game. At the end, the Allies had amassed 60 victory points (38 was the cutoff for "decisive victory"). The dead piles tell an interesting story: The Italians had a total of 37 units in their dead pile, counting six of the irregular units, who do not count for victory point purposes. The Allies had a grand total of one unit in their dead pile, and that was one of the irregular units who defected to them (and then the Italians managed to destroy it). Overall: This game was an interesting look at a little known campaign of WWII. I think the designer made a series of intelligent choices in the scope and scale of the game. The game uses a basic and easily learned system, but there is plenty of chrome to give the feel of the particular campaign. I don't know that I would ever come back to this again, but that's not a knock, given the number of games there are out there. I definitely had fun playing it, and that is most certainly a positive. _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list Consim-l@mailman.halisp.net http://mailman.halisp.net/mailman/listinfo/consim-l