TacWWII Tactical Cards

For the recent Stary Boleslav game I created some cards players could play to help them in key moments. I thought I'd describe them here in case others would find the idea useful.

The intention was to give players an additional tactical option. Something that might help in a key moment, perhaps mitigating the effects of a poor die roll, and maybe adding a little narrative detail. At the same time I wanted to avoid making the cards too powerful. No one wants their carefully crafted plans destroyed simply because their opponent played a "Thousand Bomber Raid" card!

I created the cards in Pages on my iMac and printed them onto 200gsm card.

The cards were intended as one-use and were allocated randomly between the player groups. The Soviet command teams got four cards per team while the Czechoslovaks got six across their whole defending brigade. With some duplicates the cards were as follows:

Ace Pilot - You can re-roll one die in aerial combat.

Heroic Speech - You can re-roll one morale check die roll.

Skills and Drills - One of your companies can re-roll one failed Tac-roll-to-change-Mode.

Shortcut - One of your companies can treat an area of Heavy Going as normal ground for movement purposes this turn.

Friends in High Places - You can elect to re-roll one air support die roll this turn.

Molotov Cocktails - One infantry platoon is treated this turn as if it had assault engineer kit.

Excellent Staff Work - You may write a new order and attempt to transmit it this turn.

Superb Junior Leadership - You can reorganise the combine two companies into one without the need for a Tac roll.

Panzerfaust Cache - One company has plentiful supplies of anti-tank weapons. This turn, if they are in Defence Mode, they can fire at hard targets in phases A, C and E.

The last card is described as I should have designed it. In reality I didn't make it clear that the card was meant to be used just the once and I accidentally increased the range of a Panzerfaust. I don't think this had game-breaking results, though.

Stary Boleslav - the rules reviewed

I thought it might be interesting to review the Stary Boleslav game in the context of how the TacWWII rules performed. 

For those of you new here, the idea is that following a failed coup d'etat by Czechoslovak Communist Party members in February 1948, Soviet forces have invaded to establish a friendly regime in Prague.

Stavka (or whatever its post-Great-Patriotic-War equivalent is called) has determined that the Czechoslovak city of Stary Boleslav must be captured as soon as possible. Two Red Army infantry divisions are in  positions east of the city and Stavka decides that some inter-unit rivalry will spur the troops on to greater exertions. Whichever divisional commander captures the city will be rewarded; whoever does not can expect to see his career significantly hampered. That chemical weapons facility in Uzbekistan needs a guard commander!

Each division forms a Forward Detachment consisting of two motor rifle battalions, two tank battalions, and a heavy self-propelled gun regiment. To support this the Soviet players were able to purchase reinforcements. To simulate other demands on available resources, I had the two Soviet teams competing to choose their reinforcements from a limited list.

The Czechoslovak forces guarding the two highways to Stary Boleslav take the form of a single large, mixed brigade - four infantry battalions and two small tank battalions, again with the option to choose reinforcements.

Before the game I wanted to pay some attention to the political situation in Czechoslovakia between the attempted coup in February and the invasion the following summer. I did this by creating three tables that represented the Czechs' actions in three areas: the activities of Czechoslovakia's intelligence services, efforts to purge communist sympathisers from the armed forces, and seeking help from the Western Allies. 

I rolled three dice to get scores of 1, 3 and 5 and asked the Czechoslovak players to allocate them between the three areas of activity without sight of the table and just knowing that "high is good, low is bad". The results they got in the end are shown in turquoise in the table.

The deployment of Czechoslovak battalions at full strength simplified the administration burden on the day. Bonus! Dicing for morale saw the Czechoslovak 9th Infantry Battalion deploy with Poor Morale but despite this they seem to have fought well on the day. Finally I think the slightly increased probability of fighter cover helped. Certainly Stuart and Ned's Cossack cavalry didn't enjoy the ministrations of low-flying Spitfires!

Understanding the Rules

I think in general the rules mechanisms were picked up pretty quickly. Having “Who can fire in each Fire Phase, A though E” charts on the wall helped considerably.

Where people did struggle, I felt, was in understanding the process of sending and receiving orders and artillery requests. I paused the game at one point to try to explain this better and I think this helped. A revised example of how this works is something I'll add to my next revision of the rules.

Speaking of which, in my "version 1.5" I proposed a change in terminology to bring TacWWII in line with the later Arc of Fire set that’s familiar to many of my regular players. This was to replace “Default Mode” with “Confused Mode”. As several of the players were referring to copies of the original version of the rules, this was potentially confusing. Also “Engineers have to be confused to do engineering tasks" got a few funny looks! 

Given that the effect of "Default Mode" in TacWWII is not identical to "Confused Mode" in AoF, I'm inclined to revert to the original.

Artillery Support 

Given that we had plenty of time for the game I wanted to experiment with a set of rules to capture the peculiarities of Soviet artillery doctrine. This involved them plotting a limited number of pre-registered targets:

• Six on the first table
• An additional three on any table(s) if they purchased the pre-game aerial reconaissance option, and
• An additional one on any table on which they deployed a Spetsnaz unit.

Having selected the targets, each Soviet team could design up to 18 fire missions. Each of these specified the target, calibre of weapons firing, ammunition type, number of tubes firing, duration, and schedule. The 'schedule' entry for each mission could be a number (e.g. 2 means "arrive on game turn 2") or it could be "X" meaning "do this when I request this specific mission".

This approach seemed to work well in capturing the limitations of Soviet doctrine. Certainly by the end of the game, the southern Soviet team were reporting they could see the advantage of including the heavy self-propelled gun regiment in the base force - it gave them significant anti-infantry firepower where they needed it at the time rather than where they thought they might need it later.

The southern team also did a good job of plotting their fire. Two woods targeted in the early game turns proved to contain Czechoslovak defenders.

One further thing that came up in play and that I think probably warrants inclusion in my version 1.6 is that I'm assuming a battalion HQ requesting brigade-level guns will be able to send a request directly to the guns, without having to go through Brigade HQ. I'm not sure if this was the rule-writers' original intent but the alternative is, to my way of thinking, too damned slow.

The northern Forward Detachment's SU Regiment has
a company forced to retire (white marker)

Targeting Headquarters

There was some concern that it was too easy to target battalion headquarters elements given that knocking one out would cause:

• degradation of the battalion’s Tac score, and
• a Battalion Morale Test for loss of a company.

My proposed solution prior to the game was that you need to pass a Tac roll to preferentially target HQs but if you fail you can fire at a nearby non-HQ element instead. This was felt to be not strong enough. 

At the same time some late-war German tank battalions are so weak that the battalion HQ is a significant proportion of their available firepower and they shouldn’t be immune to incoming fire. I propose to tweak the rule to something like:

“A battalion headquarters element can only be targeted by direct fire if the firing element makes a successful Tac roll. If the Tac roll is failed, the element doesn’t fire at all in the current Fire Phase - it is deemed to have spent the time unsuccessfully trying to identify the right target within the enemy formation.”

Obviously if your headquarters ends up under an artillery or airstrike template that's just too bad.

Unit Data

It's been usual in published TacWWII scenarios to "stat up" units as, for example, Panzer IV D, Medium Tracked, AC 1, Short 75mm gun. This means the players refer to the generic weapon categories on the Direct Fire Table.

As many of my players have played Cold War Commander before, I decided to provide full "stat lines" for each unit type:

This seemed to work OK and I think I'll stick with the approach in future games if time allows.

Tactical Cards

Finally I created some cards that enabled commanders to make occasional one-off special actions. I'll list them in a future post as this one's getting a bit long.

Overall I'm pleased with how the game went considering all but one of the players were new to the rules. Several of them expressed a desire to play TacWWII again, which I call a win!

Crisis Point - a first report

So Crisis Point came and went at the weekend and I think it's been a great success. We took over Dungworth Village Hall for the weekend and managed to entertain and feed fifteen participants for the weekend. 

I'd originally planned for three games with the deliberately vague theme of "Invasion" but we were unfortunate in losing one of the games due to family commitments and then, late in the planning process, losing its hastily arranged replacement due to illness.

Despite this we managed to comfortably accommodate the players we had and all of them seem to have enjoyed the experience. A nice side-effect of the cancellation of our original third game was that in the end all of us were playing in the same alternate-reality setting; a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in Summer 1948.

The first game set up was my Stary Boleslav. As regulars here will know, this involved two Soviet Forward Detachments (mixed brigades) advancing on the eponymous Czechoslovak city. The defenders had a single, somewhat disorganised, brigade to resist them across two axes of advance.

I'll put out a later post describing how my planning of the game worked out in detail but for now you need to know that on both axes of advance the Soviet forces found themselves up against a stiffening Czechoslovak defence along the line of the major river. In both cases the Soviets pushed forward with tank units leading and tried to bash through the built-up areas along the river.

In the south Jamie C and Matt Z ran into a few problems by advancing faster than they expected. Their lead Soviet units were so fast that they ran into their own pre-programmed artillery fire.

The southern table, looking toward Stary Boleslav

The first southern table with the town of
Albrechtice top right and Dobruske village
top left

Arthur W and Richard P as the Czechoslovaks fought hard and forced back some of the attacking units before a strike by Soviet Pe-2 dive-bombers took out the headquarters of the infantry battalion defending Albrechtice.

Pe-2 strike on Albrechtice

Both sides had had the option to purchase supporting forces before the game. Jamie and Matt invested some of their points in arranging for the presence of two spetsnaz units in the Czechoslovaks' rear area. One of these, deployed near the airfield, successfully called in a medium bomber strike by a flight of lend-lease B-25 Mitchells somehow kept flying after the end of the Great Patriotic War.

The bomber strike would have been ideally placed to delay the arrival of a Czechoslovak Army "tank" battalion (actually Hetzer self-propelled guns) but delays in getting the message through meant that the strike served only to crater the road near the Dobruske bridge.

The road to Albrechtice turned into a major traffic jam as the Soviets' second echelon passed the parked trucks of the motorised rifle battalion that had supported the initial tank attack on the town.

Infantry are hard to winkle out of towns but repeated artillery and air strikes and the close-range intentions of T-34s and Soviet infantry eventually whittled down the defenders of Albrechtice and Dobruske.

In the north Stuart A and Ned W pushed their Soviet units towards two river crossings; the railway bridge on the right and the medieval stone bridge in Blatno, which was ably defended by Tom Z. 

The northern table, looking west towards
Stary Boleslav. Blatno is the large 
built-up-area on the river.

The old bridge at Blatno with Czechoslovak defenders on the left

Beyond the river was an old castle into which Matt C deployed the only anti-aircraft guns in the game - a couple of troops of 88mm Flak-36s! Being dual-purpose weapons they were able to engage Soviet tanks. Unfortunately for Matt they spent most of the game ineffectually firing at extreme range at heavily armoured T-44s.

The castle - a Kibri Z-scale kit expertly
assembled by Richard P

Legend has it that Field Marshal Sir John French once said, "The machine-gun has no stopping power against the horse." I've been unable to confirm the accuracy of the quote but I can now confirm that if the machine-gun in question is mounted on a low-flying Czechoslovak Spitfire, French is incorrect.

Stuart's Cossack battalion had made good progress and was in the process of crossing the railway bridge when first a strafing attack from Spitfires and then a Czechoslovak artillery barrage stopped their advance.

By the time we reached two o'clock on Sunday (an hour before our planned finish time) it was apparent that a Soviet breakthrough was imminent on both tables. 

In the south the defenders were reduced to a few infantry cowering in the ruins of Albrechtice and some engineers strung out along the highway behind the town. Jamie and Matt Z had husbanded their heavy self-propelled gun regiment and an attached heavy tank regiment as a reserve. They were ideally placed to exploit the hard-won breakthrough.

In the north a similar situation applied. The T-44 company attached to the Cossacks had done much of the hard work capturing the railway bridge and artillery and airstrikes had suppressed the defenders of the castle. A T-34 tank battalion was ready to move into the enemy rear.

We assessed that if we played for the additional hour two things would happen. Firstly the Czechoslovak players would get to see their final forces destroyed or routed, and secondly the Soviet players would get about halfway to Stary Boleslav.

We therefore called the result a tactical Soviet victory but a marginal strategic victory to the Czechoslovakians. There wouldn't be any medals for the Soviet commanders but they'd probably avoided being sent to guard a chemical weapons facility in Uzbekistan!

I'll do another post shortly reviewing how the TacWWII rules worked for this event.

-oOo-

Meanwhile on the other table, Andy T and Neil M were running Czeska Skalice, another game in the same 1948 setting but using the Cold War Commander rules. 

I didn't get to see what was going on in detail but Rob C, Dex M, Phil G and Ron P seemed to be having a great time. For more details see referee Andy's report here.

Richard P also has some fine reports on the weekend: Part one - the set up and Part Two - the games. 

Just a week to Crisis Point

This time next week I'll hopefully be setting up the terrain for my Stary Boleslav game at Crisis Point. 

At this stage I'm pretty much ready in terms of game design and sorting out the models I need. I've knocked up some fleeing civilians:

And I've created some more markers to avoid the need to use the little cardboard ones that come with the TacWWII rules.

Instead the main job at the moment is cooking. I'm feeding 18 people at lunchtime on two consecutive days. The great advantage of switching Crisis Point to the village hall is that we have access to a fully fitted kitchen. 

Rather than spend time cooking each day I'll be reheating previously frozen meals. So far I've done two vegetarian curries, two big pans of scouse, and a massive chilli con carne. 

The chilli - it's a powerful one!

Cooking on the day will be limited to large quantities of rice to supplement the various bread products I'll be acquiring the day before.

Crisis Point has been such a focus of all my efforts over the last few weeks that other stuff has go one hold. Don't worry about the absence of updates on the Muddy River Blues campaign. That'll be up and running again once Crisis Point is out of the way.

Stary Boleslav - more preparation

Preparation for the Stary Boleslav game continues. The Czechoslovak players have chosen their support options and the Soviet players are well on with theirs. This gives me the chance to start sorting out the models for the various units.

I don't think it's giving away too much important intelligence when I say that the picture below shows a large proportion of the Soviet forces.

One of the Motor Rifle Battalions needs a few more trucks. At least one of the players can provide these but I'm also running off a few with the 3D printer in case of last minute cancellations.

Another MRB was just one short of the requisite number of trucks. I decided it was not impossible that in 1948 they might have kept a single SdKfz 251/1 captured during the Great Patriotic War. 

The two Soviet player teams are submitting their competing choices for support elements. When that process is done I'll print off a couple of sheets to organise those additional units.
 

It's fascinating to see what the Soviet teams are picking. I can't wait to see how the choices play into their plans on the day. I shall be urging all of the players to remember that "A piss-poor plan violently executed is better than no plan at all!"

Stary Boleslav - plan of action

With less than a month to go before Crisis Point 2024 I'm well on the way to having everything in place to run my game Stary Boleslav, 1948. It's a game for 4 to 8 players set during a fictional Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1948. 

This game sees two Soviet command teams racing to be the first to reach the Czechoslovak city of Stary Boleslav. For the winner there’s the prospect of being awarded the Order of Suvorov (Second Class), while for the loser there’s the very real possibility of being appointed to command the security detachment of a chemical weapons research facility. In Kazakhstan!

Meanwhile the Czechoslovak command team will be tasked with defending two major highways converging on the city. But with what forces? The political situation is confused. Have pro-Soviet elements been successfully purged from the Czechoslovak Army? 

We’ll be using the TacWWII fast play grand tactical rules. They are easy to learn - no previous experience necessary and put players firmly in the seat of the brigade commander while still giving a decent impression what’s happening right down to platoon level.

Having a whole weekend available should allow us to play the game properly. Too often with just a Saturday afternoon (or a club evening) available we rush to get a game set up and running. This inevitably means we skimp on things like writing orders, pre-plotting artillery targets or even having a proper plan of attack. We can also end up calling a halt when one or more players' time runs out rather than when we've reached a genuine conclusion to the battle.

This time I hope to fight the action to a conclusion. This means:

Preparation

I'm trying to cover as much as possible before Crisis Point weekend. This means getting the two sides (three really) to pick their optional supports in advance. emails are currently flying back and forth and it's interesting to see which choices are being made.

In addition, I set up a little pre-game political phase for the Czechoslovaks. I rolled three six-sided dice and told the Czechoslovak players the scores. They knew that 1 was bad and 6 good. I asked them to allocate the dice as "political effort" in three areas - "Intelligence", "Purging Communists from the military", and "Seeking Western support". I can't share the results at this stage but I can tell you that results have impacted things like troop quality, deployment and weapons availability.

When the weekend rolls around I hope to start early on Saturday with the tables laid out and mapped in detail and the forces laid out on unit sheets.

Scenario Balancing

Any attack-versus-defence scenario needs time pressure if it's not to degenerate into a static shooting match where the attacker tries to destroy any visible enemy units before daring to advance. But how much time should we allow the attackers? This is where the race-between-rival-attackers approach comes in. By awarding the win to the first Soviet brigade to reach the objective city of Stary Boleslav we set a time pressure that has nothing to do with the umpire's estimate of what constitutes "fast enough".

Where the umpire's estimate does become relevant is in the relative strength of attackers and defenders. If I make the Czechoslovak forces too strong, the race between Soviet detachments won't matter; they'll both be bogged down unable to break through the initial enemy line. 

There's probably no substitute for experience and what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl in this case.  All I can say is that every time I've thought to myself, "Maybe I've made the Czechoslovak forces too weak", I've stifled that thought. Far better to have the game end early and have to set up another game to fill time than to end the weekend with both Soviet teams frustrated by their inability to get close to victory and the Czechs bored by fighting a successful static defence.

Another way we'll balance attack and defence and encourage mobile warfare is is by restricting the defenders' deployment options. Details are still confidential, of course, but "political and logistic issues" mean that they won't be able to stack the front line with defending battalions.

Managing the Battle

Experience shows that having two or more players sharing command of the same force slows play down. Neither player wants to be seen to dominate the decision-making process so every decision gets discussed in excruciating detail. 

The obvious solution would be to divide the player teams such that one player runs the front-line battalions and the other looks after reserves, artillery assets and air support. I do plan to do that but it might not be much fun for the guy who gets to play staff officer. So that approach will be modified. 

Firstly the roles of "staff officer" and "front-line commander" will swap as soon as the advancing forces move from the first table to the second. 

Secondly, in addition to his administrative duties, the staff officer will be responsible for movement and die rolling for an element of the front-line force. This way when he takes over command he'll have a handle on the rules and a feel for the relative strengths of units. 

Learning the Rules

This is a tricky aspect. Only I and one of the players have tried TacWWII previously. Fortunately I've been able to share my version 1.5 adaptation of the rules in advice. Depending on progress with the above we may be able to get in a little teach-in before we start the game proper.

New arrival

The stand-alone version of Shot, Steel and Stone arrived from Amazon today.

I've been experimenting with these rules for a few years, since they were first published as a chapter in Henry's The Wargaming Compendium. I hope they can become my rules of choice for using my 6mm scale Great Northern War collection.

Up to now usage has been limited because of (a) the inconvenience of using the rules from within Henry's brick-like book and (b) some uncertainty about the wording of the rules.

My considered assessment is that the rules will work fine if you get to learn them directly from Henry or from someone who's played with him at, say, the Ayton gaming weekends. Learning them in isolation from the rules-as-written is more of a challenge.

Fortunately, though, Henry has started a series of Youtube videos demonstrating the rules in use. Building on these, I've exchanged some messages with the author and taken on the unofficial role of "dumb user"; identifying confusing parts of the rules and trying to reword them as a way of resting my understanding. I figure if I can say "Here's an alternative wording, is that what you meant?" we might be able to arrive at a helpful FAQ document.

After we get Crisis Point out of the way I hope we can get the forces of Zheltarus, Yesilkara, Tservonsk, and Blåland onto the wargames table for a proper game.