REVIEW: Fire and Movement: Battle of the Scheldt: The Devil's Moat - by Eric R. Harvey and Christopher Cummins (Decision Games)

An Introductory Wargame

So – what makes an ideal introduction to wargames? Well, you'll need to define ideal, introduction, and wargames. I'm cheekily not going to it, but I'm going to say that Battle of the Scheldt: The Devil's Moat by Decision Games is, at least, a very good introduction to hex-and-counter wargames. I say on the basis that my wife played it and enjoyed it. She plays hobby games generally (and successfully), and wargames in amongst that, but her only hex-and-counter experience previously was The US Civil War (GMT Games, designed by Mark Simonitch). She simultaneously enjoyed it and found it bafflingly dense. My current campaign game of Rommel's War both bemuses her and takes up a lot of precious space in the dining room she could probably use better. But this worked.

Battle of the Scheldt, designed by Christopher Cummins and Eric R. Harvey, utilises the Fire & Movement system, one of a number of simple systems Decision Games use in their Folio Game Series. Fire & Movement covers 20^th century warfare (where Musket & Saber, for instance, covers 19^th century warfare); the main rulebook is 8 pages long, whilst the exclusive rules for this scenario are 4 pages long. The game also includes a 17”x22” map and 100 counters. All components are functional-to-good – the rule are pretty clearly laid out, the counters are alright (with nice national colour schemes), the map by Joe Youst is as simple and attractive as his usual work. But why is it good – at least as an introductory game?

Well, I suppose in one sense it has to be a good game, and we should address mechanics. But there's something about the “feel” - accomplished both by the core mechanics and the scenario chrome – which means that, once it's proven to function as a game proper, it can also function as a way to understand and engage with wargames as history and as conflict simulation (which are slightly different things, I'd argue, without desiring to prove why at this point).

A Short Mechanical Overview

A Fire & Movement game will consist of a number of turns, each of which will consist of one player taking their own turn and then the other player taking theirs. Each player turn consists of 4 phase – Movement, Combat, Mobile Movement, Mobile Combat. All units can move and attack in the first two, as appropriate; units marked as Mobile that have not already acted can move and attack in the Mobile phases. This allows armoured exploitation, which obviously fits the WW2 dynamic. Only one unit (counter) can be in a hex, though movement and retreat through friendly hexes is possible. There are soft zones of control (ie the 6 hexes around a unit), limiting but not blocking enemy movement, and affecting retreats after combat.

Combat is resolved by totalling the attacking units' Attack stats, comparing them with the defender's Defence stat, and then adding Support markers (on which more in a moment) to find a “differential” (the difference between the two totals). The attacking player then rolls a six-sided die and checks the result on a combat result table (CRT), with the column being the differential and the dice result being the row – the better the differential for the attacker, the worse the column's results are for the defender, and so forth. Fire & Movement does something quite clever with the CRT, integrating terrain into the CRT directly. You look at the top of the CRT, where the terrain is listed, find the right terrain row, and read along to the differential; this scales results in favour of the defender in a simple way. Of course that loses some of the delicacy possible with a separate terrain effects chart (TEC) – you can't have one terrain type double defence points whilst another just gives one column shift in favour of the defender.

Support markers replace specific counters for air and artillery assets, and are rated with a number which influences the differential (+2, +7, etc). In Battle of the Scheldt, you randomly draw from your side's pool of facedown counters each turn; in other games in the system your pool is fixed. You return all your counters at the end of each turn and draw again. These are used as part of a bidding mechanic in combat; the attacker gets to put one down first, or not; then the defender; then the attacker again; and finally the defender. There's a bluffing element in here (is he going to put down a marker or not? can I get him to waste a token for minimal cost?); there's a question of resource management (what other combats are going to happen this turn? am I going to attack in my player turn and so need to conserve markers?). This is clever and fun.

The other way you can use them – as part of an attack without an attacking counter, as part of a “bombardment” - is pretty lame. Not inherently, but the lack of restrictions on where bombardments can happen and the fact that if the attackers lose they have to damage their nearest counter (“friendly fire”) mean you'd have to houserule to make this worth the risk in most situations, and to ensure the breach in immersion isn't too extreme. In my two and a half plays, I haven't bothered doing that. No harm is done by leaving them out.

                                                       Initial Setup and Support Markers

The Feel of a Wargame

That question of immersion brings me back to what I in fact think is a great strength of the game and system. A good wargame, for me, isn't simply a good game (though it is that); it's a game which utilises the theme (war – and a specific war or battle) to engage the player in interesting decisions and to help them understand historical situations. Perhaps in a more nuanced sense, it combines the two so that players inhabit something like the historical decision space (or an interpretation of it).

This game achieves that. What's most interesting from a design perspective is that the game offers a relatively small number of big decisions. It offers any number of small decisions and tests of skill, but for the German player there's really only one big decision (seek to hold the Allies short of Beveland for most of the game, or defend the peninsula's neck whilst counterattacking further up the map to mess with the Allies). Indeed, for the Allies there isn't even a decision on that scale – the biggest decisions are about where to stick amphibious landings on a very limited coastal stretch.

But it is by limiting that decision space but making the management of it challenging, and adding in small bits of historical feel, that the game triumphs. The Germans have initially useful reinforcements and can even heal damage from some of their units early in the game – but they have very few counters and very soon their forces are in irretrievable decline. The Allies have a lot of units and a lot of replacement points, as well as useful batches of reinforcements later in the game, but they suffer from very real time pressure which makes every delay infuriating, whilst the need to cycle out weakened brigades and preserve their limited Mobile units means a lot of thoughtful management and manoeuvre. The scenario-specific movement rules and CRT help with this – moving through the ubiquitous Flooded areas is painfully slow, whilst the high likelihood of indecisive combat results in urban areas can make the Germans very hard to shift from their basement bunkers and church spires. Meanwhile, the Canadians landing in the Breskens Pocket in their amphibious vehicles or the special German 88mm Anti-Tank support marker (which can be played as a bonus marker against Allied tanks) are really nice small touches which make the era seem more real – this isn't just a wargame, but a wargame about World War 2. The scenario accurately depicts the superior numbers and firepower of the Allies, whilst also showing what a slog the campaign was – but in an enjoyable and immersive way. It does all this in a simple way, as well, which shows up many more complex systems.

A Primer for Wargaming

The relative obscurity of the battle and the useless Bombardment rule are the only downsides to this system. Those are trivial issues, and as a hex-and-counter to introduce a new player to, this is an attractive proposition. It does many of the things which the subgenre ought to do, and it does them well – from the tactile illusion of moving markers in a battlefield war-room to immersing the player in the nuances of the conflict through the big movement and combat rules and the little historical add-ons. It does them with simple and readable rules, running the same length as or shorter than some popular Eurogame rules (12 pages to Catan's 16 or Pandemic's 8). It can even play to more or less its stated length – 2 hours. No good wargame is, I think, going to be strictly “light”, but the clarity of the rules and the surprising depth of the simulation mean this feels to me like a great primer for people who might be interested in wargames but find them intimidating or inaccessible. There are other very good primers to wargames in other subgenres, but this is my favourite so far in hex-and-counter. Decision Games' Mini Series may be even better; I'll be playing some entries in that soon.

Conclusion

Aside from one rules niggle, and the general issues of sourcing non-GMT wargames outside the USA (Esdevium Games do have Decision in their catalogue, but it's a very spotty selection), this is a solid game, and potentially a very good primer for hex-and-counter wargames.

REVIEW: Battles of the American Revolution Volume V: Monmouth – by Mark Miklos (GMT Games)

I've played this once electronically on VASSAL (it's out of print), and I want to play it again. It was my successful test run for whether I wanted to preorder GMT's American Revolution Tri-Pack, a reprint of three early games in the same series. Suffice to say, I enjoyed it, and that's the essential conclusion here.

Let's dig deeper. This is a “hex and counter” wargame of a battle in 1778 during the American Revolution, with each side controlling armies of counters representing leaders, regiments/brigades of infantry and cavalry, and batteries of artillery, fighting on a map made up of hexagons. It's a pretty traditional game in that genre in most respects – units project a “zone of control”, making it harder for their enemy to do stuff near them; ranged and close combat are resolved by cross-referencing a chart based on the strength of the attack and the result of a ten-sided die; and so forth. There are lots of games essentially like this, so why is this worth playing?

Four essential components, which marry together well: mechanics, weight, decisions, and aesthetics.

Mechanics

This is a pretty old-fashioned hex-and-counter game, down to I-go-U-go turns and mandatory close combat. However, whilst pretending to be a staid design, this is actually quite an inventive series as a whole, with some clever twists to the specific iteration (the series has a unified core rulebook, with exclusive rules accompanying each game). Army morale, which decreases and increases over the course of the game based on combat results and special cases, affects initiative rolls at the start of each turn and modifies combat die rolls. Though players take turns moving and attacking with all their units at once – with no push-pull within the turn as in Great Battles of History with its Momentum and Trump rolls, for instance – the “passive” player is always engaged. Only the passive player's artillery fires each turn, followed by both sides having their rifle-armed units fire. This gives a sense of agency throughout, especially as successful defensive fire can be devastating to finely-tuned attacks.

Close combat is determined on an odds basis (e.g. if the attackers have a strength of 4 vs a defensive strength of 1, the odds are 4:1 and you check the 4:1 column on the Combat Results Table or CRT), but the die roll is modified by the net difference between the modifiers of the two sides – which includes leader quality, troop quality, terrain, and troop type. The CRT has a wide range of results, with a big middle ground of non-destructive effects which models the relatively bloodless field warfare of the era. For comparison, both sides combined suffered under 1000 casualties at Monmouth, which was the longest battle of the American Revolution, whilst at Pea Ridge in 1862 in the American Civil War, fought between very similarly sized armies, nearly 3500 men were killed, wounded, or missing. But Disruptions, Retreats, and Pins can all lead to counter-attacks, damage, and unit captures in future turns, as well as damage to Army Morale – and the relative bloodlessness makes the rare damage/capture results all the more important, as those give you Victory Points, which will very often determine the winner at the end, unless sudden death conditions are fulfilled first. An additional somewhat clever mechanic for close combat, which I didn't use playing solitaire, is the Tactical Matrix, where each player selects a manoeuvre in secret, and the two are compared – there's a rock-paper-scissors element to this, with certain options being good against other options, but boardstate and the presence of leaders permitting or barring some options from being chosen. This isn't actually, from what I can see, much more than a coat of paint over the creation of hidden information and a bluff microphase, but that's not a problem for me.

Finally, there are Momentum Chits, gained from outlandish results on the CRT. These allow rerolls in close combat and the manipulation of the Initiative roll at the start of each turn. A little like Tactics Chits, this isn't a terribly integral mechanic – and is marked as optional – but adds some swing and chance to the game. Chits definitely affected my game, and in a way that increased enjoyment.

The Monmouth-specific rules consist of two types: integral and historical “chrome”, which is more properly an aesthetic concern. The most important instances of the former concern the initial American commander's performance, and the extraordinary heat of the day – until George Washington relieves Charles Lee on the field, randomized American brigades are prone to freezing or retreating each turn. As the battle progresses and the day gets hotter, draws on the Initiative roll will cause the entire turn to be skipped unless someone spends a Momentum Chit, and Morale Checks are penalized. Both of these, especially the former, can really inform the flow of the game – Lee's poor-but-not-horrendous performance more or less kept the Americans in the fight in my play.

Weight

But despite all those complex things above, this is a surprisingly easy game to learn, and will, I think, be alright to teach. It's not an absolute beginner's game, but I'm confident of teaching the Tri-Pack when it arrives from GMT to some of my “lighter” gamer friends. The simple core of all hex-and-counter games is here – move your Movement Points somewhere you want to go, attack if that makes sense, use your artillery to break up the enemy. But the rules “on top” of that never feel onerous. Some flirt with beer-and-pretzels mechanics, such as Momentum Chits, but that's frankly a selling point to someone wanting a more lively game. Some are actually quite finely balanced and designed without being too onerous, such as the CRT (especially the delicate agony of the PIN result). The passive player is kept engaged both via the Fire Phases and via the Tactical Chit mechanic in close combat, and though both add complexity, neither is really heavy at all.

The comparison to other modern hex-and-counter games series is useful. This isn't as simple as Decision Games' Folio Series, not by a margin; but it's equally simpler by a good clip than any of the Great Battles of History entries, and simpler even than Musket and Pike. Some of this is due to elision of favoured concepts encountered elsewhere in the particular design tradition, such as facing – but only a little granularity is lost via this, replaced by a close combat penalty for being Surrounded combined with the well-tried mechanic of not being able to ignore multiple adjacent enemy stacks when attacking (i.e. not being allowed to bully one stack in the face of the others!). The rules are also genuinely well written, and the separation of series rules from module rules has its advantages, keeping the core rules to a svelte 13 pages including cover, sequence of play, and plenty of example pictures.

Decisions

The game has good mechanics without being too heavy, and this allows the key element of any wargame to shine: interesting decisions. The battle can develop along historic lines, or it can lead to entirely different conclusions. Some of this is down to specific design elements of the module – some reinforcements being luck-based (but manipulable by Momentum Chits), Heat Turns, Charles Lee's Command and Control problems. Some of it is down to the dynamic of an essentially meeting engagement which can spread in multiple directions to multiple natural lines of defence – between Monmouth and Overlook Hill, for instance, stretching to the north-west and south-east in a curve; well to the west where the historic denouement happened; or even distinctly north or south of Monmouth, if either army manoeuvres in strength and with determination. It's also down to a fine balance between the sides. The constant flow of reinforcements for both sides and the interesting terrain make it viable for either side to turn the tide til the very end, which makes it different from that other classic meeting engagement, Gettysburg.

Aesthetics

Finally, these decisions seems to matter all the more because the game is winsome. Its theme communicates. This is not some interesting engine for calculating moves on a hexagonal chess board. Nor is it even just a convincing simulation of 18^th century civil war amongst English-speaking peoples. It is a beautiful game, even on VASSAL – Mark Simonitch's map is right up there with his best. The game itself pre-empts Hamilton's take on Lee's malign influence (“Attack! Retreat!”), there are delightful touches thrown in that are nearly entirely thematic (“Molly Pitcher” auto-rallying an American artillery unit once per game, for instance), and the mechanics lend themselves to storytelling, especially in the to-and-fro interspersed with decisive moments. In my game Charles Lee became a casualty to artillery fire, whilst the Hessian mounted riflemen dispersed Washington's Life Guard in the very last breaths of the game – but not before Washington had relieved Lee and stabilized the American line at Overlook Hill, and not before a lot of the combatants had fought their last in the shaded, humid woods north and west of Monmouth, where the bulk of the fighting occurred.

Brief Conclusion

I would love to play this again, and would certainly buy it if reprinted. It's good at what it does; if you like that sort of thing, you will like this.