Hey,

This past weekend, I went to HAVOC. HAVOC is a historical miniatures convention held in Shrewsbury MA. This year I played in two games, both set in WWII at a very low tactical level.

The first game, on Friday night, was Cat Hunt -- our band of brothers was being sent out to blow up a pesky German Tiger that had been giving command fits. The game ran on "Behind Enemy Lines" a quasi-RPG system for WWII that had originally been published by FASA and which was then taken over by a smaller outfit which has since gone out of business. So it was quirky throwback time. Our mission was to take out a German Tiger tank that had been giving command fits.

There were only 4 of us, so we each took two characters. I took both the corporals. One of them had a BAR and the other had a satchel charge to be used on the Tiger. The plan was that the guy with the bazooka would immobilize the tank (the odds of us actually killing it being kind of low) and then my guy would run up and satchel charge the thing. We had a set of open fields marked off with boccage that we had to make our way through in order to set up a flank/rear shot on the tank. About the only thing we knew for sure was the rough location of the tank and that darkness was falling. Beyond that it was anyone's guess.

The character sheets were kind of awesome. You had a collection of stats that included things like Hearing and Smell (and a catch-all Perception stat) all of which were based off of good ol' 3d6 (although they said 13 was average so it was tweaked a bit). Then you had a suite of skills which covered your shooting/stabbing/etc. There were two different types of resolution in effect. Sometimes (like when sighting an enemy), you would roll 3d6 and add it to your relevant stat (sight...or maybe perception). High rolls (north of 25-28) were usually successes. When you tried to shoot someone, you would roll 3d6, subtract your skill and try to get under your relevant stat (I believe you had a shooting things stat). Luckily, that was about as complex as the system ever got so despite the divergent sub-systems, it wasn't too hard to work with. The only other weird thing was the movement. You could crawl 2" but run up to 12" and there were no fatigue rules so you could run for as long as you wanted. So it only made sense to run. But once darkness hit, you'd be checking vs. your Agility not to fall down (and maybe hurt yourself). So it was a real slow push near the end.

We made our way forward without too much difficulty (although it got very slow as I mentioned earlier). We all froze when an officer pulled up in his kubelwagen and scanned the area. But he didn't spot us and left. Once we reached the final line of boccage next to the tank, we could hear some digging going on. My two guys got there early and pushed into the hedge. The guy with the charge spotted one of the digging Germans and decided to creep out to give the bazooka guy a chance to get in and find the tank, but he slipped going through and alerted the digger. The German came over (under the watchful gun of my other guy hidden in the boccage). He called over another soldier to help him search the corner where my first guy was pretending to be dirt.

Just then another player stepped through the boccage and calmly slit the first German's throat. Here's how great close combat is in this game: the character's body weight vs. that of his opponent forms a modifier. The second soldier, realizing too late that his buddy had just been replaced with an American whipped out a pistol and shot at him. That's when I opened up. The German went reeling back and the American caught a bullet, but it wasn't enough to keep him down and he followed up with a second lethal attack.

While all of this had been going on, a couple soldiers had worked their way down the boccage and had located the tank. One of the troopers had a rifle grenade and it was his intention to try and use it like a mortar to bring down a grenade on the engine deck and perhaps get the tank. This caused a bit of an argument about how it would give away our position which was true, but in games like this, you kinda have to let people do their own thing. Anyway, he held off until the stabbing started and then decided it wasn't going to get any better. So he makes a perfect shot and while it doesn't do any real damage to the tank, it completely disorients all the Germans who'd been taking cover on/near the tank.

At this point the bazooka guy takes his shot. It goes right through the side of the tank and sets it alight. At this point, my two guys consider it mission accomplished and we book out of there. The bazooka guy takes a second shot at the half-track into which the Germans had fled, but he missed and it drove off into the night. Still, it was a mission success.

Other highlights included:

* The soldier with super stealth and knife killing skills who wasn't very strong, or agile, or perceptive. It wasn't clear how he was supposed to be able to find targets to stealthily sneak up on them.

* Only a minor war crime. The Sgt. used his Thompson to gun down a line of guys...who turned out to be Eastern European labor conscripts. Oops.

Overall it was a fun game. I had a good time.

The second game was "The Rule of LGOPs". LGOP = Little Groups of Paratroopers. The ruleset was a home-brew system called point blank. Here we commanded a squad of men rather than an individual trooper. The real interesting bit here was the chit-draw activation. The GM draws a chit. If it's American, we get to activate two guys. There are two leader types in each squad and so if you activate them, they can auto-activate guys within an inch. Great for moving groups of men, terrible when a grenade hits. I like chit-pull better than "you go - I go" systems, but it does mean you can have weird set-ups where you go and go and go, and it also means there are times when you just sit there while they go and go and go. I got caught out by that twice and it can really suck. I think the real problem is that I don't normally play a lot of games with that system so I forget about covering my butt for bad runs of luck.

In this scenario, we arrived on random board edges and our job was to take three bridges, a manor-house and neutralize an 88cm flak gun. Well, it was Sicily and we were facing a lot of Italians. The dicing meant that we mostly wound up on the same half of the board, so that was convenient. Only one team was radically out of place and it had a good view of the house. My guys started out near a small building overlooking the south bridge point. We trotted up to the back of the building (again, maximum movement was 4" per impulse and even though we got 5 impulses a turn, it seemed really slow). This is when we noticed the Italian half-squad and machine gun in the yard taking a shot at another team moving through the fields. Since they failed to spot us, we rolled in a couple of hand grenades and bayoneted the ones who were left. Meanwhile, we dumped another grenade into the building (where the Italians and conspicuously failed to notice us). We took a few pot shots, but only manged to suppress them. At this point, half of my team went around to the front to storm the building through the front door and take them out. This is when the chit system bit me the first time. In my haste, I had not noticed the two Italians behind the stone wall across the road. They threw their own grenades and then blasted the rear guy with a shotgun. Then they got a second chit and did it to me all over again. Luckily, their grenades and shooting were for crap and only one guy was really incapacitated. The other half of my squad got into position and blew them away with the heavy machine gun. Finally, I went inside and mopped up.

Leaving the wounded guy behind to cover the bridge, the rest of the squad pushed on to try and help take the house or the far bridge. We made good time and I was headed towards some vineyards. I knew I was going to have to spend a lot of time slowly pushing through the vineyards (I'd be in rough terrain and that would slow us to about 2"/impulse). Luckily, I didn't have to worry about it too much because a tough, veteran German squad had been crawling through the other way and were there to intercept us when we arrived. The grenade didn't do much, but it did stun most of us and when they drew another chit the next turn, they just cut the squad down to a man.

Obviously, I preferred the first game over the latter because I "won", but the second game seemed a little more "fiddly" for some reason and less engaging. I really liked the chit-pull system, but that was about it. Shooting was kind of complex (you roll some d10s in groups, first group you check to see if you jam, subsequent groups get penalties so you're looking for different target numbers all the time). It just didn't seem to flow as well (although close combat vs. stunned guys was a lot easier than in the first game -- no idea how a straight up melee fight goes). But it wasn't a terrible experience and up until I died, I was really doing pretty well.

So that was HAVOC for me.