Lead and Cardboard: Fall of the Reich AAR

Ran my late WW2 skirmish game for some friends a couple of weeks ago. A force of Soviets are attempting to cross a canal bridge in some unnamed city in eastern Germany and push on towards the lair of the fascist beast, while its doomed defenders sell their lives dearly. Overall my impression of the session is mixed. Though if judged strictly as a playtest it was a success. I definitely got some good feedback and I have a few ideas on how to improve the scenario.

The rules I used are called FUBAR, a set of free, one-page rules for fighting small-scale battles available here. While I have played and enjoy Force on Force by Osprey, the activation system for that game can be complex and not necessarily suited for big multiplayer convention-style games. FUBAR's activation system is much simpler while still being more interactive than typical I go/you go systems. Basically you roll to activate a unit, the ease of which is dependent upon your troops' training level. If you succeed you perform an action with that unit and then you can try to activate another, continuing until you fail an activation roll, at which time initiative passes to your opponent. This continues back and forth until all units have activated, at which point the turn ends. It uses six-sided dice, 1's always failing and 6's always succeeding. The way casualties are taken is interesting, with each unit having a suppression number, that being the total number of figures in that unit that can absorb hits as suppression, with anything over that being kills.

The authors state that the rules should be modified as needed ("These are one page rules after all!"), and while I did make a few changes they're pretty good as written. The biggest thing I changed was the effectiveness of a sub-machine gun by considerable reducing its range. Another change my friend Kelly suggested involves tanks. Since it seems difficult to kill an AFV, he said to add a "stun" penalty to activation if a tank has been hit, which sounds like a good addition to me and I'll use this next time I run the game.

Beyond the rules, the scenario had a couple of problems. I wanted to create a situation where the sides weren't binary, so for the Germans they were split between troops that were defending and an additional group that was just retreating through the battle area. While I still love this idea, in practice it didn't go quite like I wanted. The retreating force was able to easily get off the board and really wouldn't have had to have fought at all if I hadn't thrown some Russians onto the table to cut them off. Which, while cheesey, did inspire me to change the scenario a bit. As I had it, the defending Germans start the game hidden in various ruins, while the retreating Germans come on the side of the table and have to retreat across the canal bridge that the other Germans are defending. The attacking Russians come on the edge of the table directly opposite the bridge and have to fight their way through both the defending and retreating Germans, which consisted of Volkssturm and Hitler Youth along with some straggling veterans. The retreating force very cheekily stayed out of sight of the Russians and got to the bridge completely unmolested. So in the future I think I'm going to have a small force of Russians who have infiltrated and captured the bridge and are holding it until the main body of infantry and tanks arrive. This will obviously prevent the retreating Germans from easily exiting the board and will give the hidden defenders something to think about since they'll have the enemy in their rear.

Additionally, there was a "problem" with the combat inside the ruins. The table set-up consisted of a number of ruins "tiles," inside each of which could have been hidden defending Germans. The problem for the Russians was they had to move their tanks though the city, wary of being ambushed by Germans with Panzerfausts. I abstracted the ruin tiles by having the players either be looking out of them, in which case they could be seen, or hiding inside. Also, once two opposing units were on a tile, I said they could either use fire combat against one another, with each side being in moderate cover, or they could close assault. The problem arose when the defending German player wanted to try and shoot his Panzerfausts at a passing T-34 while there were Russian infantry inside his tile. In my mind the Germans would have been too involved with fighting off the infantry to try and take a pot shot at the tank. The problem was I hadn't read the rules close enough (even though they're only one page!). While during the game I basically made a GM call that the German player couldn't do this, in fact, the rules clearly state a "Unit can only target enemy figures that share the same area of cover if they are within 6”. The target will get a cover save." So basically exactly as I intended and certainly the most sensible way of doing it. Great minds think alike!

The other problems with the game were definitely just an issue with me not communicating well enough with the players while explaining the scenario and rules. Such as I didn't make it clear enough that all of the German units were armed with Panzerfausts. Next time this should go much smoother. Hopefully with more experience on my part with the game and a few tweaks the next time will be better.