I've sadly neglected this blog, neglect that I hope to repair in the coming year. However, given that 2015 is almost behind us, I thought there might be time to do a few quick wrap-up posts.
For one thing, my last post was a review of what was happening in the war on the Western Front in spring 1915. So a post to review what major events took place during the year, on the Western Front and elsewhere, might be in order.
Since I'm an avid wargamer, it seems that there should be a word or two about the score or more of wargames and game modules that came out in 2015.
If I had the time and resources, I'd like to post on the Great War books that hit the shelves in 2015. I certainly don't have time and space to review even a portion of the; I wish I could even point the way to some decent reviews, but that's bit too much to aim for at this late date.
So, Games...
In 2015, going by Board Game Geek's records, publishers released 19 new games on the Great War, as well as 12 modules or other supporting material.
Six of the items in the supporting material category were new aircraft for the popular flying game Wings of Glory. I can't say much about them, as I haven't played the game much this year, and I've not played with any of the new figures, but they certainly look as gorgeous at those models usually do. Four are new fighters or ground-attack aircraft: the Hannover CL.III two-seater, the Macchi M.5 seaplane, the Nieuport 28 biplane fighter, and the Fokker E.V monoplane fighter. The other two are a bit of a cheat to include for 2015, but they're tremendous news: the "Giants of the Sky" aircraft--the British Handley Page O/400 and German Zeppelin Staaken R.VI heavy bombers. These ginormus twin-engine bombers have joined the WoG tabletop game by means of a Kickstarter campaign that raised six times its original goal. The aircraft models are rumoured to have arrived at the publisher's from the manufacturer a week before Christmas and may be flying around the world even as I write, but I'm not entirely sure they count as being relelased in 2015.
Five more of the "ad ons" are information books for the Great War at Sea system. Since they are all alternate-history products, I'm going to pass on by them. I'm also going to pass on two tactical modules for Critical Hit's "ATS" system (Blasted Woods and Tankschreken!)
So, on to the actual games. Six are repurposing of existing systems or republications, in whole or in part. The imaginatively titled Great War (complete with expansion, cleverly called Tank!) is the latest implementation of Richard Borg's card and miniatures system familiar to players of Memoir '44, BattleCry, Battlelore, and the Commands and Colors series. They're always entertaining games; they don't often feel as if they have more than a passing relation to the history they purport to be about, but in the tired refrain of excuse-makers everywhere, "Any opportunity to get people playing history-themed games [or watching execrably unhistorical historical movies] is a way to teach them about history, right?" Well, yes, but often all it teaches them is wrong. I can't speak to Great War, but I played a lot of Memoir '44 back in the day and, while it was a great deal of fun, I can't say that it seemed as if it taught anyone anything about the history of World War Two except (possibly) the names of some of the battles. Just going by the photos on BGG, this looks to be the same, with opposing trenches right on top of each other, tank on tank combat, artillery deployed on the board, etc.
Another reimplementation is Great War Commander, a repurposing of the Combat Commander system from Chad Jensen and GMT. I have tried several times to like Combat Commander but failed every time.The disconnect between the total randomness of the card-draw system and what it is supposed to represent creates an impassable gap in my willing suspension of disbelief. I have no problem with the use of cards in GMT's other CDGs like Paths of Glory, where they represent the scarcity of operational or strategic resources and cause players endless fits of indecision as they try to spread too few assets over too many problems. But in a tactical game like this, the inability of troops to take a perfectly normal action when in no way hindered by the enemy simply because they don't have the right card...I know I should wave my hands and say "fog of war" and "imperfect command and control" but it just breaks for me. Doesn't for others. De gustibus.
Also in the republication category are First Battle of the Marne from Turning Point (a repub of One Small Step's Miracle on the Marne) and In the Trenches from Tiny Battle Publishing (republication of the game of the same name from Grenier Games). And SPW has published Tannenberg: The Introductory Game as an envoi to their Die Weltkrieg Series. Splitting off Tannenberg from their original Tanneberg/Galicia game pair and selling it as a ziploc with a weblink to video tutorials, SPW looks to give new players and easy way in to their complex (but rewarding) WWI family of wargames.
In a way, even 1914: Serbien Muss Sterbien is almost a reimplementation, as it uses the same system developed for 1914: Offensive à outrance (itself related to 1914: Twilight in the East. But each volume in this series has tackled a different topic; here designer Michael Resch approaches the smaller (though not small) topic of the Austrian war on Serbia, instead of the opening phases of the Great War on the entire eastern or western front. I've not had a chance to play this yet, but I'm very much looking forward to.
Finally, there are the thirteen entirely new entries for this year. Four are strategic in scope (The Lamps Are Going Out, 1914: Germany at War; Balance of Power; 1WW: The First World War); four are operational (Lettow-Voerbeck: East Africa 1914-1918; The Russian Empire Strikes Back: Lodz 1914; Fateful Days: Marne Campaign of 1914; Gallipoli 1915: Churchill's Greatest Gamble); four are essentially tactical and almost Euro-ish (Wipers Salient, Les Poilus; Les taxis de la Marne; No Man's Land); and two are intriguingly hard to fit into other categories (I, Spy and Wings for the Baron). Tomorrow I'll take a look at these.
Showing posts with label Tannenberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tannenberg. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Tannenberg--lumbering closer
The Labor Day holiday weekend didn't give me the time I hoped it would to prepare for this campaign on paper, as a friend of my partner's was visiting us, and my game table is in the basement, which also serves as our guest room.
Nonetheless, I'm plowing forward (slowly) with preparations for our triple-blind simulation of this opening East Front campaign. I took a look at the rules for The Cossacks Are Coming and its successor, 1914: Twilight in the East, and decided to go with a simpler option, Clash of Giants: Tannenberg. While I can simplify a great deal of the information management for the players, they need to be able to grasp the mechanics even if they don't see them all, and the mechanics of the other games are complex and will slow things down too much. So my next step is to put together a precis of information (basic parameters of the game system, how the refereed version will work, starting order of battle and positions) and share it with the players.
In the meantime, I've found a nice image of the starting positions on the map at Boardgamegeek; I hope the poster, Kevin Moody, doesn't mind my using it as an illustration here.
You can see the full-size image on BGG if you log in there (membership required, but free).
The map depicts East Prussia and some adjoining sections of Russia (including Poland, at the time a part of the Russian Empire). If you look closely, you can see the thin broken brown line that represents the border. In the northwest corner of the map is the Gulf of Danzig, a southerly projection of the Baltic Sea. Also visible is the Frisches Haff, now called the Vistula Lagoon, the large inland sea that lies between Danzig (to its west) and Konigsberg (at its eastern end). Spreading southeast from the Haff is an area of forests, hills, and other rough terrain, in the center of which are the Masurian Lakes. These are over two thousand large and small bodies of water, formed when retreating glaciers deposited piles of debris that blocked rivers and streams and many of them later linked by canals to provide transit across this dense terrain. Further south and east is a large body of marshland. This rather forbidding region is the area that lies, roughly, between the advancing Russian First and Second Armies.
The Second Army starts with much of its force on the board, along the south edge. Most of the First Army is just about to arrive--it's stacked on two entry points on the east edge of the map.
One part of German forces begin scattered in a defensive screen, some distance back from the southeren border, many of them in fortified positions or guarding railway junctions. Guarding them to preserve them for German use, rather than protecting them from Russian capture--Russian railways used a different gauge to German ones and were useless, for the most part, to Russian forces during the campaign. (This makes that thin broken brown border line we looked at earlier rather important.)
The main field force of the German Army in East Prussia lies in and around the town of Gumbinen, near the northeastern border and directly in the path of the slowly arriving Russian First Army.
Another part of German forces is guarding the East Prussian capital of Konigsberg and its extensive defensive network. They include troops standing along one of the main German rail lines (more important for supply than movement), which runs from the border to Konigsberg and then southwest to Marienburg. Another line runs roughly parallel through the center of the province, and a third runs more or less through the lake district. These, too, connect eventually at Marienburg and lead west to Berlin, though there is also a line through the fortress of Thorn to the southwest towards Silesia.
I mention the rail lines not only because the Germans will rely on them for supply, but because the Russian objectives lie most of them along the northern and central lines (as well as at the Frisches ports of Konigsberg and Elbing and the university town of Braunsberg).
The iron cross counters show victory locations that start under German control. The Germans will gain victory points for these if they hold them at the end of the game. Small red dots forther north and west are locations for which the Russians will get points (IIRC, some locations covered by German troops at deployment are also Russian VP hexes).
The game's sequence of play is fairly simple. Both sides check to see which, if any of their forces are out of supply. Then the Russian player places any arriving reinforcements or replacements, moves first one army, then the other, and resolves any combats. The the German player brings in reinforcements and replacements, moves his troops, and conducts combats.
One unusual mechanic exists in this Clash of Giants series. Both sides roll for the movement points of their armies; all units in an army (or, in the case of the Germans, their Eighth Army and the separate I Corps) receive the same amount of movement (exception: cavalry always receive a fixed amount), but it can vary from turn to turn from as few as one movement point (essentially slwoign the army to a crawl) to as many as six.
Another twist to this mechanic in the Tanneberg game is that, starting on Turn 4, the German player--before moving his troops--nominates which Russian army will move first in the next turn and watches the Russian player roll for movement points. Thus the Germans know while they execute their move which of the Russians will move next and how far. (On Turn 1, only the Russian First Army moves--the Second Army is still assembling itself in this period.) This advantage tot the German player is the designer's simple way of reflecting the superior intelligence the Germans got during the campaign when the Russians, outrunning their hard-wired telegraph network and short of trained radio cryptogrpahers, were forced to transmit most of their military communications between armies by wireless with no encoding. German radio operators simply listened in and copied down the orders being transmitted.
I'm going to brief the players now and, with any luck, we should have the first move underway soon!
Nonetheless, I'm plowing forward (slowly) with preparations for our triple-blind simulation of this opening East Front campaign. I took a look at the rules for The Cossacks Are Coming and its successor, 1914: Twilight in the East, and decided to go with a simpler option, Clash of Giants: Tannenberg. While I can simplify a great deal of the information management for the players, they need to be able to grasp the mechanics even if they don't see them all, and the mechanics of the other games are complex and will slow things down too much. So my next step is to put together a precis of information (basic parameters of the game system, how the refereed version will work, starting order of battle and positions) and share it with the players.
In the meantime, I've found a nice image of the starting positions on the map at Boardgamegeek; I hope the poster, Kevin Moody, doesn't mind my using it as an illustration here.
You can see the full-size image on BGG if you log in there (membership required, but free).
The map depicts East Prussia and some adjoining sections of Russia (including Poland, at the time a part of the Russian Empire). If you look closely, you can see the thin broken brown line that represents the border. In the northwest corner of the map is the Gulf of Danzig, a southerly projection of the Baltic Sea. Also visible is the Frisches Haff, now called the Vistula Lagoon, the large inland sea that lies between Danzig (to its west) and Konigsberg (at its eastern end). Spreading southeast from the Haff is an area of forests, hills, and other rough terrain, in the center of which are the Masurian Lakes. These are over two thousand large and small bodies of water, formed when retreating glaciers deposited piles of debris that blocked rivers and streams and many of them later linked by canals to provide transit across this dense terrain. Further south and east is a large body of marshland. This rather forbidding region is the area that lies, roughly, between the advancing Russian First and Second Armies.
The Second Army starts with much of its force on the board, along the south edge. Most of the First Army is just about to arrive--it's stacked on two entry points on the east edge of the map.
One part of German forces begin scattered in a defensive screen, some distance back from the southeren border, many of them in fortified positions or guarding railway junctions. Guarding them to preserve them for German use, rather than protecting them from Russian capture--Russian railways used a different gauge to German ones and were useless, for the most part, to Russian forces during the campaign. (This makes that thin broken brown border line we looked at earlier rather important.)
The main field force of the German Army in East Prussia lies in and around the town of Gumbinen, near the northeastern border and directly in the path of the slowly arriving Russian First Army.
Another part of German forces is guarding the East Prussian capital of Konigsberg and its extensive defensive network. They include troops standing along one of the main German rail lines (more important for supply than movement), which runs from the border to Konigsberg and then southwest to Marienburg. Another line runs roughly parallel through the center of the province, and a third runs more or less through the lake district. These, too, connect eventually at Marienburg and lead west to Berlin, though there is also a line through the fortress of Thorn to the southwest towards Silesia.
I mention the rail lines not only because the Germans will rely on them for supply, but because the Russian objectives lie most of them along the northern and central lines (as well as at the Frisches ports of Konigsberg and Elbing and the university town of Braunsberg).
The iron cross counters show victory locations that start under German control. The Germans will gain victory points for these if they hold them at the end of the game. Small red dots forther north and west are locations for which the Russians will get points (IIRC, some locations covered by German troops at deployment are also Russian VP hexes).
The game's sequence of play is fairly simple. Both sides check to see which, if any of their forces are out of supply. Then the Russian player places any arriving reinforcements or replacements, moves first one army, then the other, and resolves any combats. The the German player brings in reinforcements and replacements, moves his troops, and conducts combats.
One unusual mechanic exists in this Clash of Giants series. Both sides roll for the movement points of their armies; all units in an army (or, in the case of the Germans, their Eighth Army and the separate I Corps) receive the same amount of movement (exception: cavalry always receive a fixed amount), but it can vary from turn to turn from as few as one movement point (essentially slwoign the army to a crawl) to as many as six.
Another twist to this mechanic in the Tanneberg game is that, starting on Turn 4, the German player--before moving his troops--nominates which Russian army will move first in the next turn and watches the Russian player roll for movement points. Thus the Germans know while they execute their move which of the Russians will move next and how far. (On Turn 1, only the Russian First Army moves--the Second Army is still assembling itself in this period.) This advantage tot the German player is the designer's simple way of reflecting the superior intelligence the Germans got during the campaign when the Russians, outrunning their hard-wired telegraph network and short of trained radio cryptogrpahers, were forced to transmit most of their military communications between armies by wireless with no encoding. German radio operators simply listened in and copied down the orders being transmitted.
I'm going to brief the players now and, with any luck, we should have the first move underway soon!
Friday, August 29, 2014
in the works: Tannenberg 1914
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| Ludendorff explains the 22.5 Königsberg Corps rules to von Hindenburg. |
As a quick introduction, I can recommend this four minute overview of the events from The Complete Landmark Television Series' World War 1 in Colour. Though the documentary images are indeed colourized in a rather flat, washed out way, the footage is itself still interesting, and the map animations simple but clear.
For a longer description of the battle, I can recommend Wikipedia's article, which covers the operations in quite comprehensive detail (though it curiously fails to mention Russian Northwest Front commander Yakov Zhilinski), while the FirstWorldWar.com website's piece on Tannenberg contains links to biographies of many of the senior commanders, as well as accounts of the engagement by German 8th Army commander Paul von Hindenburg and Russian First Army cavalry corps commander Vasily Iosiforich Gurko.
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| Russian Bielozerski Regiment relaxing while awaiting the next blog post. |
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