Let's read ... Practical Wargamer #6 (Winter 1988/1989)

It has been a while since I posted in this series, but time to pick up our readings of Practical Wargamer again!

So here it is, the 6th issue of Practical Wargamer. At this point PW had a full run of a year, so the magazine should have found its own style by now.

The cover looks promising, lots of figures, War of The Roses this time. As I have stated before, I firmly believe a wargaming magazine should show figures on the cover, and this cover has some nice flags as well!

The first article is Points to Ponder, a column and editorial folded into one. Stuart Asquith starts with an encouragement to submit articles, and then talks about drummers and musicians on the tabletop, and how they should affect morale (and subsequent actions) of a unit. But I'm somewhat puzzled by Stuart's claim that "we tend to ignore the presence of musicians on the wargames table". This is 1988, and by this time, Warhammer as a ruleset is well established in its 3rd edition. I played this edition quite frequently (actually, I never progressed beyond 3rd, but that's another story), and musicians were very much a part of the fantasy units in Warhammer, providing all sorts of bonuses and special abilities. Anyway, I agree that musicians do add color to the table as separate figures, but I guess we have better mechanics these days to have its influence depend on the survival of that specific figure table-wise.

In You Scoundrel ... I'll Liberate You, we are presented with the story of the battle of Vinegar Hill, a battle that took place in New South Wales in 1804. The author suggests a mini-campaign centered around these events. The article is typical for magazines of the 80s: a lot of historical information, with the assumption the wargamer can figure it out for himself how to turn this into a game.

The battle of North Cape (Graham Dixey) brings us to the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean, and tells us how the German battleship Scharnhorst finally was sunk. Again a lot of history, but barely any info how to make a game out of this. But then, these were still the pre-internet days. Wargamers needed articles like this to get a feeling of the historical context. 

Veterans! (Matthew Bennet) is offering us some mechanics on how to include veteran troops on the wargames table. Not by giving them some better statistics as would be a standard way to do it, but rather give each player some bonus cards that can be used during the game at any unit, which then ""turns out to be a veteran unit!". Suggestions for such cards include a forced march, ignore a morale test, form square faster than usually permitted under the rules, that sort of thing. I do like such simple mechanics that combine gamesmanship (when and how should I use the card?) with some narrative effects on the table.

 

Mayhem on the Medwin (Peter Helm) brings us back to the English Civil War, that grand period that British wargamers care deeply about but leaves the rest of us rather cold. Just kidding :-) The article describes a rather big setup with players acting as Commander in Chiefs in separate rooms, with objectives and victory points only known to them, and not to the commanders of troops at the table. It's the kind of game you rarely see these days, and such games always stir my imagination.

 

Kevin Dallimore reveals some of his "tricks of the trade" in How I paint Figures. I always admire such articles and the close-ups of figures in various stages of being painted, but to be honest, I have never excelled at painting (although I don't dislike it), and always wonder whether people actually spend all that time on painting a single face? But from such articles, I did pick up the techniques of undercoating, drybrushing, highlights and washes, which still serve me well up to this day.

 

Suomi - The Wicked War Sagas (Robin Hunt) gives us an overview of the Winter War during WW2, and also gives some decent advice on how to model a snowy battlefield as well as some kit availability.

 

Chris Peers gives us The Army of Tarmurlaine, an article focusing on the history of Mongols, but without a scenario or some good hints on how to portray such an army on your table.

In the continuing series of skilled figure painters, Graham Green shows part of his collection, mostly fantasy figures. Especially the Fellowhip of the Ring figures look very nice.

 

Campaigns with Clive (Paul Stevenson) highlights the possibilities of campaigning in 18th century India, and offers a lot of historical information to set up your own games, including a full table of all actions, battles and sieges in India at the time of Clive. All very useful as I said, but by today's standards, I would expect some more ready-to-use information to get a game on the table. 

Charles Vasey gives us some ideas on medieval campaign rules in Going to the Country, and offers a smallish card-based system to determine in what areas players might find support during the War of the Roses. Most of the article is taken up by historical descriptions about the difficulties of medieval campaigning.

Fighting in Buildings (Charles Grant) is a wargaming-centric article, explaining how fighting in built up areas can be incorporated in your rules. However, the author says "... it is not possible to produce a set of suitable rules within the scope of this article". Darn! However, there's a list of factors that we should include in our games, such as: categories of houses, firing into and out from houses, enetring houses, using ladders, barricades, etc. Although the articles leaves much to the wargamer, it is an article that stirs the imagination and gives some good ideas to start  from. 

Away All Boats (Keith Benson) gives an excellent overview of the planning issues involving amphibious landings in WW2, with quite a lot of suggestions for scenarios both for defender (e.g. preparation of the beaches), as for the transit phase, as for the final attack. A nice trick is to provide different maps to both sides.

Arthur Harman gives a small Napoleonic action in Rearguard Action at Cacabellos, set in the Peninsular War. It's a ready-to-play scenario, invovling the British defence and retreat from a small town built along a bridge over a stream.

 

Disguised Scenarios (James Oliver) describes the idea of taking an action in one historical period, and using it as the basis for a scenario in another period. An example is given for a WW2 coastal attack on France, based on an action in Cuba in 1962.

Marignano 1515 (Peter Wilson) tells us about a two-day battle between the Swiss and the French. during the Italian Wars. Mostly history, with some hints on how to turn this into a wargame. 

My "ad of the issue" is a smallish ad for cardboard models produced by "Draper Models", I couldn't find anything online about this company, except a small reference on the Lost Minis Wiki, with interestingly enough, a mention that at one point the company had an address in Belgium? And I also found a blog entry that shows a model of Hougoumont in cardboard, of which the author says it is from Draper Models.

 

Overall, this issue left me a bit cold. Yes, there are a lot of articles, but there's relatively little direct usable wargaming information. It almost seems as if for this 6th issue, the "good stuff" has already been used in the previous issues, and now we have to settle for mostly historical stuff. But maybe I am too negative here - after all, historical articles had their place in wargaming magazines.

All issues so far:

• Practical Wargamer 1 (Autumn 1987)
• Practical Wargamer 2 (Winter 1987)
• Practical Wargamer 3 (Spring 1988)
• Practical Wargamer 4 (Summer 1988)
• Practical Wargamer 5 (Autumn 1988)
• Practical Wargamer 6 (Winter 1988/1989) 

 

Check Your Six! game 20260201

 Last Sunday we played an old favourite of ours, Check Your Six! WWII aerial warfare. We played the first scenario of the Guadalcanal campaign book, putting 4 Wildcats of VMF-223 on their first patrol up against 6 Zeroes fresh out of Rabaul. Eddy and Ruben played the Japanese, JP and myself the Americans. Pilot wise the Japanese were all Skilled (these were army pilots, not the veteran Kido Butai naval pilots), while the Americans had a mix of two green pilots (played by JP), a skilled and a veteran pilot (the last representing the CO of VMF-223).

The table a few rounds into the game. The Japanese are closing in on the Americans in two groups.

I deliberately started the game with the planes a bit further apart then stipulated in the written scenario to prolong the approach phase a bit. This gave the players some time to get familiar with the maneuvring rules - it has probably been more than a decade since Eddy and myself played these rules and for JP and Ruben it was their first time to do so. During the approach phase, the Japanese advanced in two groups with Ruben taking his planes in a wide right hand sweep of the table. The American pilots, separated in two groups with about a single move distance between them, angled to intercept the other Japanese group piloted by Eddy.

Eddy and Ruben plotting their moves

Approaching the enemy is all good and well, but the real deal is of course the dogfighting once contact is made. JP's green pilots made a first sweep through Eddy's flight, but despite furious attempts from both sides, the high speed head on approach resulted in a lot of noise but no hits. At that point, my two pilots turned into the melee and positioned themselves to tail the Japanese. Unfortunately, that was when disaster struck -- my skilled pilot executed a text book Immelman to sneak up onto the tail of a Zero but miscalculated his maneuver and collided with said Zero (we ended up in the same hex at the same height, and both pilots failed their aircrew check). The result was two severely damaged planes (the Zero caught fire and would be shot down the next turn, the Wildcat pilot would need to crawl home and eject over the airfield as the plane's elevators were reduced to a few flapping shreds of aluminium), but an even worse outcome was produced when debris from the collision hit the veteran pilot's plane causing airframe damage before he had even fired a single shot.

The second flight of Zeros banking left into the fight

At that point, Ruben's flight joined the fight - three fresh Zeroes joined the two Eddy had left (the burning Zero involved in the collision was shot down by the veteran American pilot) and quickly set things to right. With the two green American pilots out of the fight (one had received engine damage and was severely slowed down, the other turned away out of the fight) and Eddy's remaining Zeros turning to catch up, it was up to Ruben's force to finish the job. The American veteran turned in to the pack of Zeros, counting on the fact that a head-on or deflection shot by the Japanese planes would probably miss. Unfortunately, Ruben's lead Zero pilot took careful aim, proceeded to hit the American plane with a full blast of cannon and machine guns and brought it down crashing in flames - scratch one American squadron CO.

At this point we called the game as a Japanese victory; The Americans lost one plane (flown by the squadron CO no less) and had two heavily damaged, while the Japanese only lost one plane. Well done to the Japanese players!

This game showed that we still like the CY6! system a lot - by turn 3 all players were no longer thinking of the rules but looking at the table and figuring out what tactical moves to plot to gain an advantage - as it should be. As an aside, the firing could be a bit more elegant (I know Phil will have his say about the roll-to-hit with modifiers, roll-for-amount-of-damage, roll-for-robustness with column shifts, roll-for-actual-damage sequence🙂 ) but as you're usually not playing with many planes on the table, it all goes quite smoothly in reality.

Will definitely be repeated!