Monday 10 July 2017

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 20th century warfare (where Musket & Saber, for instance, covers 19th 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.

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