Waxing the Skis: Tinkering with the Winter Sports rules

So, after two games of Mud and Blood using the "Winter Sports" trench-raiding amendments, it became clear that something was broken. There seemed to be no way for attacking troops to reach the enemy trench without being repeatedly spotted by the enemy sentries.

Assuming that the defender positions his sentries evenly along his front line, which runs halfway across the 4' x 4' board, pretty much all the assaulting forces will be within the 24" automatic spotting range, even at start (see below). Night modifies the spotting chance down one, but any movement and the sentries' extra Action bump it back up again. And sentries' spotting areas will overlap; only one small area will be visible to all three, but only a small area will be visible to only one. So at least one or two and possibly all three sentries will be generating two Whistle Points (WP) per turn.

Using both dice, attacking groups would move, on average, about 7" per turn, assuming they moved across relatively passable ground (no minus for bad terrain). In theory that would mean they could reach the trenches in three turns. But in three turns of even two sentries successfully spotting, the defending officers are active; if all three can spot each turn, the general alarm will have sounded and the MG will be tooled up and ready to fire.

The Chinese Attack and Rat Imitation cards will block one or two sentries from spotting for a turn, but there aren't many of them (three at most, and odds were you would get some other cards among those three). A little respite may be gained by the provision that sentries can only spot at attacking units that have moved, in the same turn, but with the defender choosing which sentry to spot with when a Sentry card comes up, and the same number of sentries spotting as Big Men moving attackers, it's likely that each sentry will be able to spot every turn. And once the defender's Big Men are alerted and come forward to have a dekko, things move faster toward disaster.

One mistake we made in the first game came from the way an important piece of information is buried. The Snifter card is not part of the starting deck, as it usually is; instead, it is added to the deck when the defending Big Men come on deck. That was a critical change, because it meant that until the defenders reach 10 WP, the attacking units will all get to move every turn. In the first game, one British unit froze halfway across the board and did its best imitation of a dead stoat for three or four turns. No one could spot it, since it wasn't moving, but all the other British units were easy to spot, and it dragged out the British advance interminably.

One thing we tried in the second game was to spend one Action moving and the second Action taking cover, assuming that that would treat the crouching defenders as in light cover rather than the open. This had very little effect, as it made spotting only slightly less likely and it slowed the forward movement to a crawl (literally). Also a bit of a dead herring was the "false alarm" ploy. Having a Big Man take his entire turn to reduce the defender's WP by one seemed nearly useless.

Attackers in both scenarios felt as if they were tap-dancing across an oak floor in a spotlight.

So I talked to M&B veterans like Capt. Roundwood, Teniente Benito, and Sgt. Maj. Maxwell, who gave sage advice (they were also unstinting with their thyme). Between their advice and our own brainstorming, we came up with some changes.

First, the "false alarm" activity. To think about what it represents, taking it literally (an officer is making all the attacking men stand still) doesn't make much sense, since the men are actually moving forward. Also, most players seem to have interpreted it that this should be the senior BM; having a status III using up all his initiative to reduce WP by one while sentries are adding 4-6 per turn didn't seem right. So, what is one senior tactical officer doing that can make the assault more quiet?

Our conclusion was that it represents a BM expending all his attention giving guidance and direction to the moving sections, watching what sentries can be seen, what the wind is doing to cloud cover, and what can be seen or judged of the battlefield to find the least alerting path for the attacking sections to travel. So our modified rule, "You men, over there!" allows the senior attacking BM to expend all his initiative and reduce the WP by that amount. However, it can only take place on his card (obviously), it can only take place before the General Alarm (like False Alarm), and he can't combine it with any other sort of activity. Finally, he can only do it if he is in half command range (5" for a Status III) of all of his sections when he does so. He can hardly go shouting orders to everyone if he wants to keep things quiet!

We considered reintroducing blinds, or adding the Storm card to the deck. But Winter Sports are supposed to be a scaled-back version of the game, so we decided not to do that.

We decided to extend the +1/+2 spotting at night to 1/2/3: +1 would be reserved for nights with a full moon (when no officer in his right mind would lead a raid), with a partial moon being +2, and a moonless night being +3. And instead of treating "automatic" as 2 (which would be logical for an immediate success on 2D6), we treated it as 4 (one lower than the lowest other roll on the table).

So a sentry spotting a section moving in the open with two dice on a moonless night at 9" to 24" would need to roll 4 or higher (4 base +3 no moon, -1 for both actions used to spot -2 for moving with two dice). Not a huge challenge, but a little more difficult than "automatic". Add fog, some good cover, an officer pointing out the best approach route, and troops might actually have a chance of making it across without the entire enemy army being ready and waiting to greet them.

My own house rule for spotting is also to give veteran troops an additional -1 when spotting and green (to include exhausted and poorly disciplined troops) a +1 when spotting. Of course, the problem with a 2D6 roll is that it's a bell curve; -1 or +1 has a dramatically different effect, depending on what the base number is. Still, that can't be helped, and this made spotting just that little bit harder.

With those modifications in place, we tried another game. The account of that action will be next up!