Raising a little HAVOC

Hey,

So this weekend I went to HAVOC, a wargaming convention put on by Boston Battlegroup every year in late March/early April. It's a fun time and a chance to try a bunch of new stuff, do a little shopping and I've been going pretty steadily for the past few years. Also, this year a number of games were being run by the guys at Boston Trained Bands who I usually game with on Saturday monrings. I didn't run any games or help the guys with theirs, although I did help them playtest stuff they were doing.

So what did I do?

On Friday night, I played in Hill 112 -- a WWII game centering on the tank fight in Normandy for the titular hill. I took on the Germans with another player and we faced off against a team of three guys commanding the Brits. I picked this game because of the ruleset it was using called Panzer by James M. Day. It's gone through several iterations as a boardgame, a miniatures game and GMT will be republishing it in boardgame form soon. I'm on the pre-order list for the GMT version and the rules seemed a little...complex. As you might guess from the name, the game focuses on tank battles in WWII where each tank model is one tank and each stand of infantry is a squad of guys. The focus on individual tanks means that every kind of tank is modeled with different armor in different places and there are a fair number of charts and modifiers and stuff. So I figured I'd try the game to see if it was actually worth picking up.

The short version is -- I think so. Once you work out the modifiers for a given shot, it probably won't change a great deal unless both you and your opponent radically change you positions relative to each other. So you look up on the chart what percentile you need to roll under to hit. If you hit, there are a number of follow-on d10s to roll to determine where and what you hit and if there's any extra "oomph" to your shot. So what you do is roll a handful of d10s of different colors each time you fire. It's soon very easy to tell if your percentile dice obviously hit or obviously miss and only in a few situations will you have to actually fiddle with the chart to determine the precise to-hit number. If you have hit, the follow-on dice have already been rolled and you're good to go.

So the system is good, how was the game? We had four Panzer IVs and three Tigers. Some PaK 40 artillery pieces and a few infantry squads. We also had a bunch of dummy tanks and troops to keep the Brits guessing and two lines of dense smoke laid down by off-board artillery to make shooting us tougher (although it worked against us as well). Facing us were about 12-16 Sherman tanks and trucks/halftracks loaded down with infantry. We were wildly outnumbered. I was also saddled with a co-commander who was more interested in his iPhone than the game and constantly suggested rushing out of our prepared defensive positions and down the hill into the teeth of the enemy.

Despite this, he could roll low when it counted and we soon turned the plains of Normandy into a Sherman tank junkyard. The Shermans were basically built to help out infantry and not duel other tanks. They certainly weren't ready to take on late-war German panzers and tigers. Every time we got a hit, a vehicle died. Their shots kept going wild and even when they hit, our heavy armor, prepared positions and uphill location meant the shots never did anything. They did get one lucky shot with an up-gunned Sherman firefly that knocked out a Tiger and their artillery managed to take out a Panzer IV, but those were our only real losses. We destroyed or severely damaged about 10 of their tanks and the assault ground to a halt. The game got called on account of time, but it was clear we had the upper hand.

In "real life" of course, the Brits would just retreat and show up the next day with another 20 Shermans to make a run at us. The Germans wouldn't be replacing their losses and eventually Hill 112 would fall to the Allies.

The next morning, I was in a homebrew game by the Two Ed's involving Lithuanian partisans fighting the hated Soviet occupiers in the late 1940's. Apparently Lithuania was a lot like Chechnya -- guerrilla actions against the Soviets trying to free their (formerly) independent state. Their rebellion eventually came to a close in the mid-50's when they were out of guns and an amnesty was announced.

This game used an interesting command and control mechanism. There were a number of pawns on the board. During any phase of the game, if you had a guy within 4" of a pawn who hadn't already acted that turn, you could take the action on that phase (supressive fire, movement, grenades, etc.) and then mark him as having acted. Some units were leaders capable of activating themselves and 1-3 other guys (even guys who had already acted that turn). So you could chain leaders together to get large groups moving and firing. At the end of a turn, you could move the pawns up to 12". So you would string together a line of pawns because if you ran a bunch of your guys forward where none of your pawns were, then the rest of the guys were stuck and unable to do anything. Of course, the total number of pawns was limited and there were three guys to a side so you need to be careful about where you put the pawns and how you moved them so that everyone would be able to do stuff. Fun system. Took a little getting used to and some guys were still thrown by it.

So, I was on the Lithuanian side. We had lots of objectives. We were raiding a bio-mass electrical plant that supplied Lithuania with what little electricity they had. The plant was being visited by a party official (kill or capture), guarded by a Lithuanian police garrison (traitors! kill them!), grab any cool Soviet weapons we come across, raise the official Lithuanian flag over the police HQ. We had a lot of stuff. The more we accomplished, the better we were doing.

"That's a bio-mass reactor?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Ed, "they create methane gas and store it in that huge tank there. Then they burn it for electricity."
"OK," I said. "Anything else?"
"Yeah, you guys have a panzerfaust to use on any armored cars the Soviets have."

So. I've got a shoulder-launched anti-tank rocket that pierces armor and blows up.

There's a huge tank of methane gas that generates the electricity.

I'm supposed to take out the electric power station.

Dear Reader, what would you have done?

So yeah, concentrate on the side closest to the power plant and dash in. Our group on the right flank got pinned down by Soviet troops in the center and we had a bit of a tussle from a machine gun as we got into the plant, but we got into position, I pulled out the panzerfaust and pulled the trigger.

Apparently, neither of the Eds had considered the possibility that someone might be crazy enough to try this. A quick conference and I rolled 3d10. It came up 9-9-9 -- so a 28" blast radius that set off the smaller benzene tank, destroyed the power plant and injured just about everyone inside. The only fatality, however, was the Lithuanian hero who fired the panzerfaust and blew up the plant. Luckily the Lithuanian medic survived and was able to quickly get just about everyone back into the fight within a turn or two.

It was all over but the shouting. The troops in the center barricade we couldn't quite root out although we were slowly whittling them away. The local Soviet official, we did manage to kill off and we terrified a Soviet film crew who sadly lost all footage of our glorious assault in the fire that burned down the guard tower they were in. We also managed to eliminate the NKVD officer who was limping away from the flaming destruction. While we hadn't really hammered the police barracks or raised our national flag, we had pretty convincingly achieved most of our victory conditions and in spectacular style.

At the end of the game I got "player of the game" so I got a free bonus button/bade from HAVOC. It was fun.

Finally, in the afternoon I played "The Bear went over the Mountain" a Force on Force game set during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since I was on a roll, I figured I'd keep playing the insurgent force even though I knew it was going to be an uphill slog.

The thing I like about Force on Force is that when you're done, both sides feel like they've been through the wringer. From our standpoint, the insurgents aren't as well trained as the Soviets and our guys just died and died and died. "Victory" consists solely of how many Soviets we can take out before they kill us all. The Soviet player just has to deal with wave after wave of insurgents and he's always outnumbered and always taking fire and every time one of his guys dies, it really hurts his performance.

So in the event, we died and died and died and traded 6-8 of our guys for every one of theirs. They had a Hind attack helicopter strafe us a couple of times, but then a random event card caused that same helicopter to accidentally hit their own guys killing a couple more and grounding the chopper. My troops were pretty well protected and we caused a couple of casualties, but my crowning achievement was popping up and hitting the Soviet's BMP with my RPG and wrecking it. Shortly after that it was just my guys left on the board and we slipped away into the night.

Final tally, we lost 20-25 guys, the Soviets lost 6-7 and one BMP. So we totally won. It was a good time. Force on Force is a fun ruleset and I'm looking forward to doing more games at Hobby Bunker.

I also replenished my mountain of lead. I picked up an army pack of 100 modern Soviet troops that I can use for Afghanistan and WWIII games. It was a good deal and while I don't have total control over what I got, I definitely have enough to form the core of a Russian army and it should be easy to round it out with other stuff to get a good fighting force up quickly. I also picked up some old RAFM boxed sets. These are "adventuring party" sets from the early- to mid-80's and they've got a lot of that Old-School D&D flavor to them. They should be fun to paint up. They also appear to be "true" 25mm so they probably won't be much larger than the gnomish barbarian I have. It'll be interesting to work in such a "large scale" when I get to it.

Anyway. That was HAVOC and it was fun.

later
Tom