[Consim-l] Playing one for Redmond (Part 2)

[John Best]

Dear Consimmers,
Last year, following the death of Redmond Simonsen, I went back into my 
collection to play a game on which he was listed as the Physical Systems 
Designer (or whatever title it was that SPI used.).  I intended my playing 
and writing about the game to be a kind of appreciation and tribute to his 
inventive genius in presenting wargames in a graphically appealing, 
functional, and clear way.  I did not intend it to become a regular feature 
here on consim-l, but this year, I reached a kind of natural pausing place 
on another project, and I found it appealing to revisit my collection once 
again to bring back an old game for comment.  The purpose here is really to 
talk about the physical characteristics of the game, although I will have 
some comments about the design and game play as well.
     I thought about a lot of games from what I personally think of as the 
high point of the SPI era (roughly 1975 to their sellout in 1984 or so).  I 
wanted to play a game from that time period that I hadn't played before, but 
none of my unplayed games from that time period were that appealing to me. 
So I ended up with a game we all know, Battles for the Ardennes, in which I 
set up for the Battle of the Bulge campaign game of course.  I have the 
boxed version, which includes all four folio games that made up the Bulge 
game (and there was also another campaign game in the box focusing on the 
German breakthrough in the Ardennes in the 1940 campaign.  That's a fun game 
although the French and Belgians don't have a prayer.).  The game is 
copyrighted 1978.
     One of the issues that has come to the fore in recent decades, with all 
of the color present in both the counters and the maps, is to select colors 
for the counters and maps so that the counters stand out on the map.  The 
problem is sometimes referred to as "hide out":  If the counter colors are 
not bold enough, then the counters will "hide out" (blend in) on the map, 
and that tends to be regarded as a bad thing these days.  When BftA is set 
up, it seems clear that Redmond was either not concerned about this problem, 
or deliberately chose to exploit it for his purposes.   Here's what I mean: 
There is a lot of terrain in this game, and there are relatively few clear 
hexes.  There are two levels of woods hexes, light woods (light green forest 
pattern) and heavy woods (dark green forest pattern).  There is also broken 
terrain shown in the dark tan color, and the usual SPI neutral beige is 
reserved for the clear hexes.  Visually, it looks pretty good, and it seems 
like a relatively accurate analysis of the Ardennes, but my point is that 
the Americans, in their olive green color, and the Germans in the field gray 
really do hide out on the map.  But dig this:  The Allies have fairly bright 
blue "March Mode" counters that stand out.  In addition, the blown bridge 
markers, bridge building markers, and improved positions are all shown in 
that standard bright yellow/orange color that SPI sometimes used.  Did 
Redmond really want the combat counters to hide out while the markers stood 
out?  Maybe he did.  In a way, if you think about the Bulge as a series of 
localized, relatively small-unit actions fought in close quarters, then the 
hide out "problem" actually supports that view.  Even with excellent light 
(and I have a lot of light blasting down on my table these days) I had to 
get really close to the map to sort of "see who was there".  I ended up 
enjoying this aspect of the game play.  Meanwhile, the blown bridge markers 
attact a lot of attention and turned out to be the focus of a lot of action 
on the table as the Germans fought to get elbow room on the constricted map 
as the Americans retreated and kept blowing bridges as they went.  I would 
like to add that I really appreciated the somewhat oversized hexes
     I would also like to comment on the font size used on the counters. 
It's really tiny.  I can't believe I used to be able to read the numerical 
designations on the counters.  Now I need to get out my magnifying glass for 
these counters.  In the errata, even SPI says that the engineer symbol in 
the armored engineer counters may be hard to discern (it's impossible 
basically).   The font size for the place names on the map is also rather 
small.  Once again, in light of the fact that the the map is intended to do 
double duty for the 1940 campaign, maybe it's a good thing that the famous 
place names of the Bulge do not just jump right out at you.  When I played 
Patton's 3rd Army last year, I commented on my interest in adding my own 
graphic element to the game, hopefully in a spirit that Redmond would have 
approved of.  I thought about making and adding some headquarters units to 
the German side, perhaps with some coordinating function that would help 
them in combat.  Actually, I really thought I would raid such HQ counters 
from The Gamers Ardennes game.  But actually, there are no HQs in that game; 
my memory was playing tricks on me.  What I decided to do instead was to 
create some additional fog of war for the German side by covering every 
Allied unit or stack with an appropriate marker that the Germans couldn't 
peek under.  So if it was a single American engineer battalion or a Combat 
Command holding a bridge, the Germans wouldn't know until they attacked.  To 
do this, I borrowed the the Allied "front line" markers from the old GDW 
double-blind Normany game.  For the Allies, these markers consist of a white 
star on a dark green counter.  Putting all the Americans under these 
counters didn't help the "hide out" problem that I alluded to above, but it 
didn't make the problem any worse either.  And I think Redmond would have 
approved of the colors involved.  It also helped my solitaire game play a 
little bit too.  Basically, if you view the beginning of the Battle of the 
Bulge from the German side, when they had the initiative, it makes sense 
that as the German player, you don't get to see the Americans.  But as the 
American player, you do get to see the Germans.
     I'd like to discuss the game play itself for a paragraph or two. 
Probably most of us have played this game at some point or another.  In my 
case, my notes indicate that the last time I played it was 1985, over 20 
years ago.  It's interesting to come back to a game that you haven't played 
in a long time and look at with a new perspective.  I remember enjoying the 
game quite a bit back in the day, but it seemed very "fiddly" to me now.   I 
think this is a term that we use in a variety of ways, but here I'm using 
this term to describe the sense that I had that there were a lot of rules 
seemingly "tucked away" in out of the way places.  This necessitated (for 
me) a lot of time spent in rules-look up, even after the point in playing 
most games where I feel confident that I'm playing the game "correctly". 
For example, the rules for the campaign Bulge game are basically handled in 
Section 30 of the rules called "Special Rules".  I think it is in this 
section that you can find out that as many German artillery units as you can 
bring to bear can fire in Turns 1 and 2 (or maybe longer), and they get an 
automatic odds shift up.  After Turns 1 and 2, the Germans are bound by the 
more general rule that only one artillery counter can support an attack. 
But then it is one of the other subsections of these rules,subsection 30.9 
which is just titled "Additional Special Rules" that you find out that the 
Germans get a "special initiative die roll" mod that keeps going for Turns 
1--6.  And then there's remembering that the Germans have to check on the 
Supply shortage table beginning on Turn 9, but they are never out of supply 
for Turns 1-6, even if otherwise they would be.  The turn record chart is 
mostly empty space, but this is an excellent place to orgagnize a lot of 
these turn-based modifications, instead of having to remember them.  In this 
case, I think this was an element of the physical systems that Redmond just 
sort of missed.
     In addition to being kind of fiddly (based on how the rules are 
organized), it's also kind of clunky in terms of its design.  The turn 
sequence enforces some design decisions that I don't understand.  Here's an 
example of what I mean:  There is no mechanized movement phase or anything 
like that following the regular movement phase.  If you want any units to 
exploit a breakthrough, or otherwise just "go fast", you have to put them in 
March Mode, which takes a special counter, and there are a lot of 
restrictions (like the counters have to be unstacked, and already on a 
road).  You can go into, or come out of, March Mode at no cost in movement 
points, but you can adjust the movement mode of a counter only in the March 
Mode phase.  In this game, artillery can be in can also be in two modes, 
firing (called "battery") mode (the unit has no movement capability) or 
movement mode (has no firing capability)--this is shown by flipping the 
counter (Artillery units have only one step).  The Artillery mode phase 
comes before the March Mode phase, and the rules are very explicit about 
following the sequence of activities exactly as listed.  Here's the effect 
that has on the game:  Artillery can come out of battery mode, get into 
movement mode and then take a March mode counter, all in one turn.  But 
artillery units cannot do the opposite of that in one turn; it takes them 
two turns to ditch the March Mode counter in the March Mode phase of one 
turn, and then wait until the next turn to flip the counter to battery side, 
because the artillery mode phase comes before the March Mode phase.  Does 
that seem logical to you?  Not me either.  So why was it done that way?  I 
think it's because during the 1970s, SPI just became too rooted in its own 
legalistic rules writing mentality.  Since then, there has just been a very 
healthy exploration of what design changes (including sequence of play 
changes) do to the actual game.  And the result is that we have a lot more 
flexibility in our designs today.  Sensing this, I simply conflated these 
two segments, plus the following movement phase.  Provided a unit had not 
yet moved, it could go into or out of battery, and take a March mode 
counter, or ditch one.  And the result?  That's right, it didn't "break the 
game" or anything, in fact, it didn't do anything appreciable to the balance 
of the game.  All it did, as far as I could tell, was make the game a whole 
lot easier to play.
    Well, Redmond really didn't have anything to do with the design I 
suppose.  All in all, even though I don't think that I will get this game 
out again for the rest of my life, I would still say that I had an 
interesting gaming experience with it, and I had fun.  I don't know that 
this was necessarily Redmond's greatest achievement in his art, but then 
again, it certainly looked very decent for an almost 30 year old design.  So 
Redmond, where ever you may be now, let me hoist a cold one in your memory, 
and let me say again thanks for all you did for our hobby.  And to the 
members of this list, thanks for reading.  (And Happy Thanksgiving, if you 
happen to be celebrating that).
John Best
jlbest at advancenet.net
Currently playing: The Big Push
Currently reading: Johnson, D. V., & Hillman, R. L. (1999). Soisson, 1918. 
College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press.
PS:  If this comes through twice, I'm sorry.  I sent it earlier, and usually 
I see everthing I send to consim-l pretty quickly.  When something doesn't 
appear in an hour or so, then it never does.  So I thought I would resend 
this again.