After some false starts, the Wednesday night group down at Club Dave have finally managed to get some serious counter pushing and actually start the Battle of Tannenberg scen in the GMT Games monster, '1914: Twilight in the East'.
As hard core blog fans may recall, some weeks ago an attempt was made to play this game using the training type scenario to blood the newer players. Unfortunately, real life got in the way somewhat, and Scen 1 was canned, cleared and Tannenberg was setup and started. This scen, as the name suggests, is the Russian First and Second Armies advancing into Germany at the start of the war only to be seriously mauled by the German Eight. It is a one map scenario, uses about a third of the counters and runs for about a third of the total game turns. In short, it is probably about a ninth of the total experience of the Grand Campaign(tm).
To recap briefly, the Twilight in the East system uses a turn sequence of A Moves, B React Moves, A Attacks, B Attacks, Swap sides. Reaction moves are at half movement points and the other big advantage is that during the 'A Moves' phase that player can spend MPs for units in position to declare a 'Prepared Attack'.
These 'black attacks' (as the markers placed are black compared to the white 'normal' attack markers) have the three advantages of a column shift in combat, VP to the attack (as at this time in the war everyone loved a brave attacker and engaging the enemy was the standing order of the month) and perhaps more importantly, it locks the target units into the combat.
This last bit is more important then it sounds. Remember the sequence is A Moves, B Reacts, so if B isn't ready to fight they may shuffle back. Alternatively if they are ready to fight they may bring up their friends as after A declares and resolves all attacks, B gets to do the same thing with anything still adjacent.
What this means in the game is a surprisingly interesting shuffling and feinting as the opposing armies approach each other. Unit scale for the most part is the division and for both sides the Army was typically eight or so infantry divisions plus some cavalry divisions. The Russians were not fully ready to advance at this stage and so are faced with the trade off between getting their supply train in order and getting stuck into the Germans while they are still somewhat spread out.
The other interesting thing that may differ for most boardgamers is the style of the combat system. The units are divisions and under the time scale, did not normally get smashed within the period of a game turn. Hence each unit has several steps, with most divisions having about 10. They also each have an off map tracking chart for their 'Combat Effectiveness' (think 'morale'). What this means is most divisions can go head to head for several turns until the unlucky one collapses, and when they do finally collapse, it isn't pretty for the owner. Judging just when to pull back to recover before this collapse happens is clearly designed to be part of the game and show all indication as to being tricky to master.
The group managed to get one and a half turns completely during the gaming night which included a full set up and minor counter sorting, a 'are we ready yet? Right, what happens now?' last minute rule re-check and a partial reset and remove after it was suddenly realised the Russians could and should have moved their army level supply depots during their first move.
Based on this play speed AWB predicts about 4 weeks of solid gaming to finish this scenario.
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