On vacation in Italy, I spent some time browsing through the central Florence game store Stratagemma. This is a very nice, classical game store with a broad range of board gaming, role playing and also a remarkable selection of Consims on stock.
They even had a big box of boardgaming magazines, magazine games and mini games to go through, and a mini game called "Border War" from Decision Games' Commando Series about border intrusions by the South Africans into Angola around 1980 caught my eye - mostly because of the subject, which is totally unknown to me as I'm generally not well read about post-WW2 military history in general, and Africa in particular. But it also looked eminently playable, being a small format mini game designed for Solitaire play.
So here are a few notes from a first playthrough based only on a single read through of the notes (I later found that there is a small thread about the game on Consimworld, too, but with very little volume). I really liked the story that came from the game and will try to summarize a few rules and tactics points to keep in mind in case I get around to trying the campaign, too.
I played Operation Reindeer, the smallest of the four scenarios in terms of time (game turns, called "Operations"), forces involved and victory conditions. Here is the starting setup with my forces before the game, after an initial recce die roll performed at the home base of Ongandjera had revealed the mission target at Chetequera to be only a mine field:
As one of the two objectives close to the border turned out to be a real one, I limited myself to a very local operation, ignoring the targets much further East. This meant I would mostly lean on my main force starting out in Ongandjera, and was unlikely to need the para reserve ready to be airlifted in via helicopter from Grootfontein.
It turned out that the game went very quickly - recce found that Chetequera was not a real target, so I went straight to Ngiva which did turn out to be a target despite a failed recce attempt.
The mission was a clear success. At least, that's how the South Africans will sell it: the commandos went in, defeated the opposing forces, occupied the target, had the target material flown out via helicopter and returned home in less than half of the available game turns.
Internally, though, there will have to be a severe counter-intelligence investigation of the departments involved in planning and preparing the mission, and I do expect that some heads will roll (figuratively or even literally, no sure how the SADF would have handled such an event).
Just take a look at the events as they happened in sequence:
As you can see, the operation must have been leaked to the enemy, and the international community at large, well in advance. The commandos had just crossed the border and had not even engaged with the enemy yet, when the international press already reported it and forced the issue onto the agenda of a UN emergency session which had been scheduled for some other crisis elsewhere on the planet.
Now, the UN attention was not a reason for the mission to be cancelled or considered a failure (in game terms, it only reshuffles the event card pile for no immediate effect). More damaging was the fact that the commandos were welcomed in force by a full contingent of all the six OPFOR units available in this scenario (local forces only, no Cubans or Warsaw Pact advisors).
Here's how I lined up the involved forces:
The exact arrangement who fights whom seems to be one of the murky areas of the rules, the brief Consimworld thread revolves mostly around that detail.
I handled it like this: each side uses its units from left to right as arranged. Friendly units get to choose their target freely, OPFOR units always target the leftmost friendly unit which is still active (i.e. not panicked or eliminated). I.e. I did not have each OPFOR unit shoot at the unit arranged directly on top of it in the battle setup (although I originally read rules in this sense).
If this is correct, it means that friendly units always die from left to right, so the most expendable units should be placed first (for example, for more long range forays I will probably often place the slower units first so the force can move faster once these are gone), and very important units should be placed to the right (as I did in the example with my tank bataillon). On the other hand, placing low firepower units earlier increases the number of OPFOR units that will be able to fight, which is why I put the infantry last.
The other major rules uncertainty was how to handle the end of the operation, and whether all friendly units must have returned to a friendly home base within the allocated Ops limit to consider the operation a success.
My first test game happened very close to home, so this was not a concern, but for future games I decided that I will keep playing even if I fulfill the victory conditions with Operations to spare, and will try to return as many friendly units home as possible (which implies the risk that the game can go from a win to a loss if I lose too many friendly KIAs on the retreat).
On the other hand I don't see anything in the rules that punishes the player for running out of Operations with friendly units still in enemy territory, so I will consider a game with victory conditions met, but some units still at large in Angola at game end, a minor victory, as well.
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