Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog, page 6

SDHistCon 2024 Second Front - Interview on Reviewing Games

I was recently lucky enough to be interviewed by Andrew Bucholtz from the team behind San Diego Hist Con about how I came to review historical games and my own philosophies and opinions on reviewing tabletop games. The interview was recorded live as part of their online SD HistCon 2024 Second Front convention and the recording has been saved to their YouTube Channel.

Successors (4th Edition) by Mark Simonitch and Richard Berg

Originally published in 1997 by Avalon Hill, Successors was built on the foundation laid by 1993’s We the People, the first Card Drive Wargame (CDG), but its most immediate inspiration was Mark Simonitch’s Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage released in 1996. There’s something about this era of CDG design that really stands out when looking back - the somewhat Go inspired element of political control and the emphasis on point to point movement always stand out to me. I’ve never played Hannibal, although I’ve heard it’s amazing, but I am very familiar with We the People and I could see both its influence and how Successors moved beyond that simple foundation to make a far more robust game. Successors also brought something new and exciting to the table: more players. So far as I’m aware this was the first multiplayer CDG and it laid the groundwork for Here I Stand, one of my all-time favorite games. Given this history, as well as the fact that it was co-designed by Richard Berg, a designer I am fascinated by, I was very excited to finally play Successors. The deluxe 4th edition from Phalanx Games had sat on my shelf for at least 18 months sadly neglected until earlier this year when I finally managed to get it down, punch it (find out I was missing a piece), and play several games of this majestic and sharp masterpiece of wargame design.

Successors is about the Diadochi, the period after Alexander the Great died when his generals would eventually murder his heirs and carve up his empire for themselves. Players are each given two random generals to play, each with their own little card for tracking armies and other pieces. In the 4th edition each general comes with his own special power, something I believe was added to the 3rd edition as a sort of expansion, but in my experience, we forgot about these as we were learning the rest of the game. Beyond their powers generals have two statistics: Initiative which determines how far they move, including how reliably they can intercept and avoid combat, as well as a Battle Rating that affects their die rolls in combat. Generals each come with a starting territory, some units, and sometimes a bonus or penalty to either legitimacy or prestige. Players also have four minor generals who all have identical stats but in a nice touch do all have different names. Generals are the main way that players interact with the game map and as a result Successors feels like a struggle between individual people and their followers. You refer to the generals by their name and they develop reputations over the course of a game.

I'll confess that I’m not particularly familiar with the history of the Diadochi, but Successors does a good job at making you feel like you are either trying to secure Alexander’s inheritance or carve it up without requiring you to be an expert on the history. The fact that each player has two generals does a lot to make the game interesting, but it does make it harder to feel like a single historical actor – you are split between two (or later in the game possibly three) individuals but you don’t have any clearly identifiable faction linking them. I don’t think this is a flaw in the game, but I do think Successors manages to simultaneously evoke the narrative of its historical period without really making me feel like I’m reliving it. Unlike say, Here I Stand, I don’t feel like I’m playing history. Instead, I feel more like I’m making a prestige historical drama – the overall thread of history is happening but what I’m doing doesn’t feel very rooted in historical events. It’s a game first, and history second.

Play passes around the table with each player choosing a card from their hand and playing it either for its event or Ops (classic CDG stuff), but in one of Successors’ more interesting layers they roll a die and based on the result and their generals’ Initiative values each general will get a number of movement points to use. Movement points can be used to move across the map, of course, but also to remove (but not place!) control on the map and to conduct sieges (but again, without taking control should they succeed). Ops can be spent to place control on empty spaces, to recruit units, or to move a general - effectively giving that general two moves in one turn, allowing for remarkably fast transit across the game’s board. Combat units are kept on a general’s card and cannot move without a general (major or minor), so armies stomp across the map in big stacks threatening everything around them but leaving much of the board empty. We’ll talk about combat later, but this centralizing nature of the army movement really emphasizes the maneuver aspect of the game.

You will quickly find yourself following the movement of your enemies’ generals closely and debating whether you want to be in their way, or whether you want to try and sneak your way behind them and hopefully capitalize on the empty territory left once they pass. This also prevents Successors from ever being too much to take in – there are lots of very hard choices to make but the game state is easy to read. There are only so many active pieces on the board at any given time and you won’t get caught out because you failed to notice a stack of enemy units somewhere. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the game would be slightly more interesting if you couldn’t see the size of enemy generals’ armies, but given how punishing combat can be that might radically transform the game.

At its core Successors is a game of control. There are two core paths to victory. One is to gain victory points by controlling regions on the board, the other is to establish yourself as the most legitimate successor to Alexander by controlling his heir, marrying his sister(s), forging an alliance with his mother, or by burying the king himself. Nothing directly is gained by fighting the other players, so while you will engage in battles Successors is at least as much about being a passive aggressive dickhead as it is about fighting. Control on the board is marked by placing down counters of your own color and you can take control of other players’ spaces and – occasionally – even isolate their control markers and remove a vast swath of their territory at once. Early in the game when the board is still mostly empty players will take their time filling in spaces and largely ignoring each other, but once the board is mostly full then it is time to start stealing from each other. The easiest way to take political control is with your armies during each turn’s Surrender phase, so you can find yourself in a situation where you and an opponent are in a slow dance of generals taking political control of an area only to lose it to the person you took it from in the first place as they follow you around the map – avoiding fighting but provoking you, nonetheless. When you finally grow tired of this cycle, or when your opponent has something you want, or gets in your way, then it is time to fight.

Usually Successors looks like this - control markers covering most of the board with a scattering of generals simultaneously trying to protect their own territory and encroach on other players.

Combat in Successors is blessedly simple and hellishly punishing. Players sum up the strength of their combat units and roll two d6. They then adjust the dice based on their general’s Battle Rating, a Battle Rating of 4 would set any die that rolled 1-3 to a 4. They then consult the combat results table and check the convergence of their die roll and their army strength to generate a combat result number. Whoever has the higher number wins. The winner loses a unit (usually) while the loser loses all their mercenaries, rolls attrition for their remaining units, and then disperses their general. Dispersal is both forgiving and brutal. The general doesn’t usually die (only a die roll of a 9 triggers a chance of that) but they are unavailable for the rest of the turn. Given how critical generals are to your game plan this could absolutely neuter you, and if you are unfortunate enough to lose two fights in one turn you are basically out of the rest of the turn. You can still play cards and move minor generals, but more likely than not the other players will be carving up your territory while you can do very little to stop them. At the same time, if you lose a combat very late in the turn your general might be back before you miss him, suffering minimal consequences for your defeat.

I kind of love this combat system but it is incredibly stressful. Starting a battle late in a turn is lower risk, because if you lose your general will be back sooner, but the same is true for your opponent so it may be too late to capitalize on victory should you win. Fighting earlier in the turn has the potential to yield huge results but could completely ruin you. The decision space around combat and the ease with which it is resolved combine to make an excellent system. At the same time, losing both of your generals is punishing should it happen to you. Even worse, should one or both die in those fights you will have to spend high value cards to get new generals, if you have them and if any generals are left in the game. On paper I don’t hate this, but in a big multiplayer game I think it generates some undesirable friction. Having your plans completely crumble because you risked too much is a perfectly satisfying experience in a wargame, but it is dampened significantly if there are still hours of game left.

The two generals in the lower left are in the dispersed box - punishment for their defeat. Meanwhile everyone clusters in the center to try and stop Perdikaas from bringing the burial cart to Macedon on the far right of the map.

Successors is the kind of game where it is very possible to come back from a disastrous position but that becomes harder and harder as the game progresses, so having disaster befall both of your generals on turn four or five could essentially eliminate you from competition while the game still has more than hour of gameplay to resolve. This is what I find frustrating, and to some degree I wonder if it wouldn’t be better with total player elimination so that someone in this situation could simply stop playing. At the end of the day, though, I don’t think this is a design flaw. Rather it is just the kind of game Successors is. It has sharp edges and when playing it sometimes you will get cut – individual players’ tolerance for that will vary and it is something to be aware of when you sit down to try it for the first time.

Those sharp edges emerge over the course of the game – or maybe it is more accurate to say that they become more pronounced. In the early game there’s lots of space to compete over and players jockey for position in a relatively amicable way. Whoever has the most victory points each round is dubbed the Usurper and is fair game to attack without losing your status as Champion, which grants three Legitimacy and is almost essential if you want to win via Legitimacy. This means that early on players will want to get some victory points but not too many. Getting too far ahead is a recipe for being brought down a peg or two by everyone else. However, by the late game several players will have given up being Champions and the board state will be a bit more of a free for all. At this stage the knives come out and things can get a little more vicious as players take it in turns to try and seize an opportunity to lunge for the auto-win threshold, only to possibly be cut down in the process.

Successors isn’t really a game that disincentivizes players from picking on the weaker players. Early on you need to deal with whoever is in the lead, but in the late game players in second and third might start racing to cross the victory points threshold for victory and it can be easier to pick up points by crushing the weak than by challenging the leader. This isn’t necessarily a lot of fun if you’re that weaker player. This is certainly more of a problem when everyone is learning the game and I expect veterans who play Successors a lot do not have this problem to the same degree. At the same time, this is a 4-5 player game that takes 4+ hours to play, so most people won’t be playing it dozens of times, which means they may never quite achieve that balance.

Balanced is perhaps a misleading notion, though, as Successors is a game that demands the players provide necessary balance by scheming together rather than by enforcing it with rules. Some generals start with better positions than others, and thus their players are an early threat that must be dealt with collectively. I liked this well enough, but again as the game developed the risk of your mistakes compounding and resulting in you largely being unable to win increases. I don’t mind being washed out of a game, but as I mentioned earlier this is a game where your chances of victory could dry up hours before the game ends, and that’s a much harder pill to swallow. This is still not a design flaw, Successors is precisely as it means to be, it is just a style of game that I don’t generally click with. Potentially relevant – I am also terrible at Successors and very likely to be the weakest player in the late game, so this happens to me a lot.

The other reason I don’t like Successors end game as much is that it no longer has the most exciting element: burying Alexander. On turns two and three of the game’s five turns Alexander’s funeral cart is in play. It starts in Babylon and can be buried in any of the map’s major cities, but if a player buries him in Pella back in Macedon, they receive ten Legitimacy and possibly win the game outright (you need eighteen for an automatic victory). However, getting the cart from Babylon to Macedon is no small feat. In my first game I gave up and buried Alexander early and I regret it to this day. While it is no doubt sometimes the correct decision, all my best memories of Successors have arisen from the chaos around trying to move that cart. It also dramatically ramps up the passive aggression, as players put their generals in the way of the cart and whoever has the cart doesn’t want to attack them because if they lose Champion status then that auto victory is suddenly three points further away, but going around will be incredibly slow and the cart disappears at the end of turn three. This dynamic is amazing and unlike anything else I’ve experienced in wargaming. It’s fabulous and the moment it is gone from the game I feel its absence acutely. The first three turns of Successors are so good that nothing follows can really live up to that hype.

At its core Successors isn’t very complicated (for a wargame). It has its fair share of chrome to track, but it can be taught in under an hour and play moves smoothly. For all that, it is a game of incredible depth. The rules for naval movement and interception take a little while to internalize but create some really interesting decision space around how to move your generals. The independent locations and especially the independent generals inject fun chaos and friction into the game, especially with the various cards that can spread unrest across the map. There are lots of little elements to keep in mind and definitely some strategic depth that I haven’t fully explored after three games (for example, I’ve never upgraded a fleet). I am terrible at Successors, but I can see how one could play it again and again and continue to find new strategies. No two games will be the same and there is absolutely skill involved in being a good Successors player. It’s a truly impressive design and I have nothing but respect for it.

I have slightly less respect for the 4th edition printing. I haven’t played the earlier editions, so this isn’t in comparison to those, but rather just issues I found that I don’t think should exist in a 4th edition of any game. The rulebook is dreadful, the layout is irritating, and the wording is often not as clear as it should be. Same with the cards – several of them have vague or confusing wording that should not exist in a game that has been through this number of iterations – CDGs especially live and die by the clarity of their cards and Successors 4th Edition has some of the poorest I’ve ever encountered. The game is also overproduced. It comes with a pile of miniatures, but the minis are hard to read at a glance – too many similar poses – so unless you are prepared to paint them you should play with the cardboard standees. These miniatures make the box enormous, a pain to transport to conventions which are the only place I will be playing a 4+ player wargame. It just feels like a game that was produced for an impressive table (and Kickstarter) presence first and practical playability second. It certainly is aesthetically pleasing, and the tarot sized cards did grow on me over time, but I can’t help but be underwhelmed by the production.

Overall, Successors is a stunning design. It takes the CDG foundations of earlier games and builds them into one of the most dynamic and exciting multiplayer wargames I’ve ever played. At the same time, I don’t love it. It is a harsher game than I like and, critically, I don’t particularly enjoy Successors when I’m losing, and boy am I losing a lot at this game. I can still enjoy Here I Stand when things are going disastrously for me because the historical narrative is still fun and there’s usually some (ineffective) thing I can be doing. In Successors my defeats feel like the result of my own idiocy but even worse, if things go very badly for me, I can find myself playing far less of the game than everyone else at the table. These are not flaws in the game – I fully believe these are deliberate features – but they are aspects that frustrate me. Don’t get me wrong, I would play Successors again and I recommend that every wargamer try it at some stage. However, I don’t think I need to own a copy. This isn’t a game I’m going to be pulling out and trying to recruit players for. Instead, this is the kind of game I’d love to play with some friends every couple of years at a convention, but probably only if we can’t get enough players for Here I Stand.

SPQR: Deluxe Edition by Mark Herman and Richard Berg

I am a massive fan of Richard Berg’s Men of Iron system, but I bounced off Great Battles of the American Civil War (GBACW) pretty hard. This meant that I approached SPQR, the second volume in the Great Battles of History series, with both excitement and trepidation. Men of Iron and GBACW were originated by Berg, while in contrast Great Battles of History started as a Mark Herman design before it became a collaboration in subsequent volumes. I want to recognize that up front, because in this review I will probably be talking a lot about Richard Berg because it is his hex and counter designs that I am more familiar with – I know Herman’s card driven games better than his traditional hex and counter designs.

There is no denying the legacy of GBoH, I can see its legacy in many of the games I have played, including Men of Iron and Ben Hull’s Musket and Pike, and tracing that lineage as I was playing it was really interesting. This is a system with an impressive legacy to go with its significant heft in terms of scope and rules weight, I can see why it has more than a dozen volumes and a significant fanbase. In my case, I had an interesting time playing SPQR and I’m glad I’ve tried it, both for its influence on later designs and for aspects where I think it is still superior to those games, but at the end of the day I don’t think SPQR is a game for me. In this post I hope to explain what clicked with me and why ultimately I decided to pack it back into the box and pass it on to someone else.

I want to note at this point that this is not meant to be any kind of definitive review. Instead, this sits somewhere between initial impressions and a full review - partly because while I haven’t played anywhere near all the scenarios in SPQR I also don’t really want to play any more.

SPQR is a complicated game, there’s no denying it. It's nearly forty pages of rules are light in images but contain a decent number of extended examples to help you understand key rules. I was reading the 4th edition rules and I could see the impact that successive iterations had on making them easier to follow and to clarify key concepts. That said, it was still a lot to take on board. Many of the concepts in SPQR aren’t that complicated once you understand them, but gaining that understanding is a challenge. It doesn’t help that some sections feel a bit overwritten – making a concept seem more complex than it is. I was able to play a game after only one read through of the rules, though, so that is something of an achievement for a game this heavy. I can’t say that I got every rule correct but I believe my errors existed more in neglected tactical options that were available to me rather than failing to play the core system correctly, and I’m okay with that.

It also has an abundance of excellent design notes. I love seeing designers explain their thought processes throughout the rules document - even if I don’t agree with everything they write it shows the level of thought that has gone into the game.

In SPQR units are activated by generals and generals are activated in initiative order, starting with lowest initiative value and working your way up. Interestingly, generals are not linked to specific units but rather can activate almost any unit on the map. There are restrictions, for example Roman generals are often limited to activating units from just one legion (helpfully color coded) at a time and units can only be activated to move and fight so many times in a turn, but there is still a lot of flexibility on display. When activating a general you can choose activate a number of individual units or to issue a Line Command (if your general is able) which activates a lot of units but is restricted by their formation (in a line…duh). In the case of the former, a general activates a number of units equal to their initiative, which creates an interesting balance where low initiative generals go first but can’t consistently activate as many units. Low initiative also hinders a general’s chance to pass a Momentum check, which lets them activate multiple times in a row. So, low initiative is fast but in all other ways worse. Line commands let you activate huge swaths of your army all at once, but is restricted by the formation rules. This is fine early in a game when everyone is (hopefully) laid out in battle line but as the lines meet and clash they become increasingly disordered and it becomes harder to maximize on your line commands.

Maybe just don’t play like me and don’t let your lines become this much of a disaster.

I found this system to be both excellent and not too difficult to understand. There are some nuances around line commands that took me a bit to grasp, but the meaning is clear in play even if the wording of the rules can be a little confounding. This offers more depth than Men of Iron’s system of activating Battles and then attempting Continuation rolls and is easier to grasp strategically, although not quite as nuanced, as Musket and Pike’s system where leaders activate in an order based on the orders they are under. I think it hits a great balance between the two (acknowledging that both Men of Iron and Musket and Pike are in part derived from GBoH’s activation system) and made for interesting choices. If I were to find a downside with it I would note that the activations can be a bit predictable as generals will generally activate in a certain order every turn, but that is also partly down to scenario design. If both players have generals with the same initiative value, then they roll off to see who goes first, so a scenario with more instances of generals with the same initiative will produce a more unpredictable turn structure.

There are some further complexities in the rules around activating generals, such as superior generals who are so good they get another activation phase at the start of the turn and the potential for generals to Trump, which lets them insert themselves earlier into the activation order. There are also systems for potential interrupting an opponent’s Trump or their Momentum, both of which come with a risk but can potentially change up the activation order of a turn. All of these offer strategic depth but they also aren’t mandatory to play the game. They are a nice example of extra rules weight that expands the game space but that doesn’t act as a barrier to play because you can play an entire game without ever Trumping an activation, for example. I didn’t dig very deep into these systems because I was too busy learning everything else but I could already see how much deeper they can make the game space when players are ready to tackle them.

Movement is simple if there is no terrain but becomes more complicated when that terrain exists. I was pleased to see that there is quite a lot of terrain in SPQR’s scenarios, even if some are still fought on the traditional featureless plain common to many ancient and medieval wargames. The way terrain can inflict cohesion hits to units marching through it feels like a simpler and more holistic approach to the design than how Musket and Pike uses terrain to inflict formation hits, which are completely separate to unit strength. I understand why those differences exist, but for me I found how SPQR handles it to be far easier to intuit and understand in play. The immediate consequences of difficult terrain were more readily apparent and delivered in a vocabulary I found easier to understand.

Once the lines meet it is of course time to resolve some combats. I didn’t find SPQR’s combat to be uninteresting, but I did find it to be a bit tedious after a while. Combat is essentially a series of consulting several tables: the first compares the unit types to determine a column on the CRT and then there are combat ratios to shift columns as well as a chart (and other rules) for determining if one side has Superiority, which could double or triple the hits one side takes. Then roll a d10, find that row on the CRT, and assign cohesion hits. Inevitably both sides will take cohesion hits out of a combat, which means it is more about coming out ahead in the mounting strain of warfare than delivering one decisive blow. You may even be going into the combat at a disadvantage because when a unit moves adjacent to another unit before resolving the combat everyone must roll to see what cohesion damage the lines take from colliding with each other. This is easy to resolve, you roll a d10 and take hits for every point above your Troop Quality (TQ) you may have rolled. This is a simple and engaging system but if you used a Line Command to move an entire line of units adjacent to another line it can take a long time to resolve all of these checks.

Resolving all of these elephant combats took quite a while.

And that is probably my core problem with the combat in SPQR: I find it slightly too tedious to resolve. Lots of chart checking and dice rolling, combined with swapping cohesion counters in and out for each unit, to slowly increase the strain on individual units until someone Routs. It is an interesting simulation of ancient warfare and I like how it goes hard on representing the degrading quality of troops under combat, but it doesn’t get my blood pumping. This apathy is further enhanced by the scale of many of the battles in SPQR – these things are huge. The massive size means that I could be resolving a lot of combats each turn and it was during that process that I found my enthusiasm waning. Part of my problem is that the CRT itself is not very exciting. The results are just cohesion hits. The only difference between results is how many hits the attacker receives vs. the defenders. Many individual columns only have a range of three different results, which could potentially make the CRT easier to learn off with experience, but for me just made it a lot harder to care about what result I got. Inflicting one more hit than I received is just not the most exciting result and doing that half a dozen times in a row is wearying.

When a unit receives cohesion hits equal to their Troop Quality they Rout (with some caveats around when both sides in a combat reach this threshold at the same time). I’m a big fan of how Routing works in SPQR. The routed unit first retreats two hexes and the victor in combat must advance into the vacated hex. Then at the end of every turn, unless they are rallied, the Routed unit will move its full movement towards its friendly map edge. Rallying is an action generals can take and requires a dice roll, success allows the unit to turn around but flips them to their depleted side while failure causes the unit to Rout immediately. One of the things I like least about Men of Iron is how abstract the Retired result is in combat; I really like the chaos of a battle with units fleeing through friendly lines as their morale collapses. This system in SPQR is easy to understand and resolve but still generates interesting game states.

Unfortunately, there is more tedium to be found in SPQR than just repetitive combat results. There are status counters. So many status counters. Of course, the aforementioned cohesion damage is tracked via counters for each unit – never my favorite system – but there are also counters for units that Routed, counters for ones that Rallied this turn, counters for units that moved, counters for units that are low on ammunition, counters for units that are out of ammunition, etc. You get the idea. Not all of these are strictly necessary, I for one didn’t use counters to track who moved this turn, but they collectively represent a lot of different elements of the game that you need to track either mentally or with cardboard. This is far from the most cluttered game I have played, but there were definitely times were I felt like I spent more time swapping cohesion counters than I did actually playing the game and that balance didn’t sit quite right with me.

However, probably the single greatest blow to my ability to enjoy SPQR is that I just don’t care about ancient Roman warfare. Don’t get me wrong, I like the history of the ancient world. I studied ancient philosophy at university, I like reading Homer, Plato, and Aeschylus more than I probably should, but I have never managed to muster enthusiasm for Roman tactical combat. I don’t care how legions were deployed, how they moved, or what weapons they used. This meant that I was playing SPQR exclusively for the Great Battles of History system and not really for its subject matter. While I found a lot to like in GBoH, I did not find enough to surmount my preexisting apathy towards the tactical combat it represents. People who enjoy this stuff more than I do will inevitably find a lot more to like in SPQR than I did, but for me this would probably have to have been an all-time favorite system for me to have played through all the battles in the box (to be fair, there are a lot of battles in this box). Wargames are more than just games, they are representations of historical argument and recreation, and if I don’t care about that history it is hard to get fully invested in the game.

Before we get to the conclusion, here are a few miscellaneous thoughts on SPQR I couldn’t quite fit anywhere else:

Elephant rampages are fun and provide a satisfying sense of chaos in a game where formations can be quite rigid.

I like how victory is achieved by one side’s position collapsing so far that they flee the field. While overall I prefer how Men of Iron handles this idea, I loved seeing an earlier version of it here.

While overall GBoH, and SPQR specifically, are very complex games I found that the various mechanisms lock together very well and the result is a game that is far more intuitive and easier to play than its weight of rules would lead you to believe. That alone is an incredible achievement.

I am aware of the existence of Simple Great Battles of History but I have not tried it. I would be interested in playing it at some stage to see if I like it more, particularly as it is apparently more of a Berg design and I do tend to like his hex and counter work, but that will have to be a future project.

There’s a lot to like in this system but I don’t think it sits in quite the right place for me. The activation system is very cool and the movement nice and clean, but the combat is too much and overall the game is just that bit heavier and slower than I want out of my hex and counter experience. When combined with my apathy for the subject matter, I just can’t really see myself enjoying SPQR in the long term. That said, I may dip my toe back into GBoH at some point in the future with a different volume that is on a subject that I find more interesting. I’ve got my eye on Chariots of Fire in part just to see what they do with chariots. There is certainly a lot of elements to love in GBoH, and I can see why the system has so many fans, but I don’t know if in the end it will be for me.

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath

I was slightly worried when I first opened Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground (Monsters from here) that what I had gotten all excited for was essentially an encyclopedia. Not that the existence of an encyclopedia of tabletop RPGs would be a bad thing, but they tend to be incredibly dry reading and I wasn’t excited to tackle one from cover to cover. Thankfully, while the format resembles an encyclopedia the contents are distinctly their own thing. The feeling that Monsters most closely evokes is that of having been invited into the basement of a genial but intense RPG aficionado to be walked through his collection one item at a time. The book oozes a sense of familiarity and enthusiasm that make coverage of even the driest, or most bizarre, RPG supplements a fascinating trip down a branch of the hobby’s history.

The pictures are all of the actual copies in Horvath’s collection, something that it is easy to overlook but every so often there is a real gem that shows how these were played with and not just left on shelves in pristine condition. Sadly the mystery of who Kalvan the Sinister was remains unsolved.

Monsters doesn’t just focus on main series books or the advent of a new system or edition of a beloved classic. The coverage devotes just as much time to individual adventures as it does to entire systems and is determined to capture a more holistic view of how the hobby has developed than just leaping between names most of the readers will have already heard of. In particular, I really enjoyed the attention in the early sections devoted to the development of the published RPG adventure as a concept, with the emphasis on how TSR initially neglected this by now standard part of the hobby and how other companies filled that void. Generally, this wide focus allows Horvath to pay attention to many of the smaller names that nevertheless made the RPG hobby what it is today rather than dwelling overlong on Gygax, Arneson, et al, who are arguably better covered in other monographs.

The book’s contents are grouped by decade and within those sections further grouped by year of publication. RPGs from the 1970s through the 2010s, with a few cheeky 2020 games, are covered within its covers. The distribution is far from even across those decades, with the 1980s being by far the largest section and the 2000s the shortest. Each decade has something of a theme drawn out of the many items covered within. The 1970s are the wild west when experimentation and attempts to “fix” original D&D are the order of the day. The 1980s are an extension of this early experimentation, with entirely new systems of RPGs being developed and a shift in how games are played taking place – slowly codifying into an RPG scene one might recognize even if, theoretically, they weren’t even born when it happened. The 1990s emphasizes the edgy punk/goth aesthetics and a new focus on storytelling and experimentation that produced some wondrous (and potentially unplayable) games. The 2000s is given the shortest time and both represents something of a fallow period in RPGs and the beginning of something new, which sets the stage for the wild experimentation and innovation of the 2010s.

The decades are lovingly color coded so you can see the distribution just by looking at the fore edge.

Not every RPG is included in the book – how could it be – and readers may note some few absences. For example, the 2000s section lumps the many OGL games that spawned off of D&D 3.0’s open license into one group and does not really dig deep into any one of them (sorry Dragonmech fans). It provides a similar treatment to the early retroclones, grouping many of them into a single heading and considering them more for what they share than for their individual aspects. This structure makes sense and avoids Horvath overly repeating himself, but I’m sure devotees of 2000s RPGs might be disappointed that their favorite obscure title is absent.

I admit I was a little surprised to not see any sections for the Burning Wheel system, although Torchbearer receives passing mention in discussions of other games, nor are there any examples of Modiphius 2d20 systems. The scope of Monsters is also limited to books that were published in English. When non-English systems are mentioned, it is either because they were translated into English later or because an English-language system was developed based on an earlier non-English ancestor (for example, Mutant Year-Zero). In both cases the books are placed in the timeframe linked to their English language publication, not their design origin.

It is worth reiterating that far from being a comprehensive listing of every RPG from the last five decades – the reading of which would be incredibly tedious – this is the author’s tour through his own collection and as such it is inherently his personal view of the RPG scene during that time and how it has developed. In that manner it is almost an oral history of the last five decades of tabletop roleplaying rather than a comprehensive academic survey.

Unfortunately, there are some some small errors in the writing, although these ultimately come down to an editorial error rather than an authorial one. I found a dozen or so instances of run on sentences, words that were probably meant to be deleted but were overlooked, and missing punctuation. Fortunately, the meaning of the text is never lost by these errors and the writing in general is smooth and easy to follow, with the overall effect (errors included) once again evoking the sense of someone spilling out their deep personal knowledge of the topic to you in person rather than in the form of a formal academic text. Similarly, while there is a lot here that historians of tabletop RPGs will benefit from, it is also not a purely academic book. There is a list of sources the author consulted, and a bibliography of games mentioned, but no foot/endnotes for individual entries. It is more a source unto itself, a primary account from someone who has lived through the development of RPGs, than it is an attempt at an objective account of that time.  

I don’t want t sound overly critical – all of these elements are but minor nitpicks that I mention mostly to make clear what the scope of the book is and what it is not. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground and I expect I will be consulting it for many years to come. It significantly expanded my wish list of games I want to own and play (so be warned all who enter) but I can’t think of the last time I had this much fun reading an encyclopedic overview of a subject. I would gladly spend another book’s amount of time listening to Horvath’s opinions on yet more RPGs – but first could he point me to the stairs because I think I’ve been underground long enough and I’m not sure when I last saw the sun.

Forbidden Lands by Free League Publishing – a GM’s review

Forbidden Lands is a fantasy roleplaying game with an emphasis on exploration and survival that uses the Year Zero system from Free League Publishing. After a bit of a hiatus from tabletop RPGs last year I finally managed to scrape together a group of friends with availability for an in-person RPG. We’ve in theory been weekly but as is the way of these things it’s usually more like bi-weekly. The players are a mix of seasoned veterans and total newbies to tabletop roleplaying, and collectively we have all been having a great time. The Year Zero system is easy to understand but offers plenty of depth and the world of Forbidden Lands strikes a balance between offering a deep background to explore while also leaving space for improvisation and creativity. All of this comes in an excellent package that could be a great entry point into the hobby or, alternatively, a great new system for people who have only played D&D before. I think I’m in love, basically.

Don’t Plan, Let the Fates Decide

At its core Forbidden Lands is a hex crawl. The game comes with a map of the titular lands with a hex grid laid over top. Players will traverse this map one hex at a time, making rolls as they try to enter a new hex and potentially encountering some new horror, mystery, or just a very rude orc. This is powered by a collection of tables that determine what happens should the players fail on their exploration rolls as well as what encounters may lie within any given hex based on its terrain type. The players travel with the goal of reaching an adventure site which could be a ruined tower, a dungeon, or a (seemingly) ordinary village. The core book includes several sample adventure sites but there are also tables for quickly generating your own. All of these tables make planning a session of Forbidden Lands incredibly easy – the day of our game session I would usually roll up a few potential dungeons (possibly including some Rumors to help give the players the idea that there is something to explore in the first place) and then let the players try to navigate their way there. Play is emergent and rewards a certain willingness to go with the flow.

The party’s progress after the first half a dozen sessions or so - they are truly terrible at making it out hexes and represent this by literally drawing circles in hexes they get lost in. Little triangles represent where they rested at night. This adds so much to the experience, highly recommended - and there’s an identical map on the back so you can even keep a blank one for reference!

I’m not always the most confident GM. I’ve run countless one-shot adventures and if you hand me a scenario and sit me down at a table with no prep I can deliver a good time to that group – of that I am confident. I can even write one-shot adventures of my own. However, planning my own campaigns and delivering on more satisfying long form experiences with characters intended to last more than 3 hours has never been my strong suit. I’ve GMed a few campaigns, but I’m always nervous and worried about designing combat encounters and whether people will enjoy a given session enough to keep coming week after week. I say this because Forbidden Lands has easily been the best GMing experience I have ever had, and I really appreciate how it held my hand as I learned the game and brought my players through the experience of traveling across this world.

A key reason for this is the abundance of tables and the way that Forbidden Lands makes it easy to generate encounters on the fly with little to no prep. In the past, like many GMs, I have often found myself caught up trying to plan an arc to the campaign and then pushing my players towards that. This is never a satisfactory way to run a game, but in other systems it can be hard to improvise a satisfying experience and so the pressure is there to always have something planned in advance. Rather than putting the burden of improvisation on the GM, Forbidden Lands includes a plethora of tools that make it easy to throw something together if your players surprise you. On top of that, the nature of a hex crawl means you can see where your players are going in advance – they’re literally walking there one hex at a time. That means that while they travel, I can put together a quick dungeon for them to explore when they arrive.

I want to emphasize how easy it is to use these systems and how clearly they are laid out. I know modern versions of D&D include guides for creating combat encounters that should be an adequate challenge for players of a given level, but that usually involves flicking through a monster manual, doing math to calculate challenge ratings, and then possibly familiarizing yourself with various monster rules. It’s not impossible, but it is stressful to do while the players are looking at you waiting to do something. In contrast, rolling up a dungeon in Forbidden Lands can take all of two minutes and doesn’t require any math at all.

No Requirement for Knowledge

One challenge when playing tabletop RPGs is how to act like someone who belongs in this world, who grew up in it, and who is intimately familiar with its culture and history. You can read lore books and write an elaborate background, but most people don’t want to do weeks of research to play a game, and it’s especially hard to sell that experience to new players. Forbidden Lands neatly bypasses this by having players exist in a world that has only just reopened to travel. The Blood Mist is gone and for the first time in generations it is safe to leave your homes and travel the wider world. That means that players only need a basic level of knowledge about where they grew up – something they themselves can easily invent, as the setting invites filling in the gaps – and then players can collectively discover what is going on in the world. This really helps to marry the setting to the hex crawl gameplay and helps to get things going so that everyone can be at the table playing the game with minimal prep time.  

That is not to say that there is no lore here to explore. The player’s guide (which is in my estimation the better written of the core books) is very light on background specifics but offers an excellent flavor for the setting - providing enough to get your imagination going without overwhelming anyone. There is a more complete timeline of the world’s history and details on its religion in the Gamemaster’s guide. If I’m honest, the GM’s guide was a bit of a tedious read in places – the tables and play supports are amazing but, in the end, I didn’t bother reading all the background of what happened centuries ago. These sections could feel more like doing homework rather than getting me excited for the game world. That’s not to say the world isn’t interesting, though! The story of the Blood Mist is a great hook, and the game includes interesting takes on classic RPG monsters and races – I was particularly fond of this version of goblins. Rather, I prefer to take what I find interesting and leave the rest aside for the moment, but thankfully the game does not require me to master its lore before running a game. There are campaign supplements for people who want to dig deeper into the lore of the world and engage with its background, but we had plenty of fun just wandering around the world and making our own narrative out of the bones the core books provided.

Year Zero System

In the Year Zero System player characters have core stats and skills and they make checks using pools of d6s based on their values in the skill and the matching stat. All they need to do is roll a six to succeed,. If they want, they can “push” a roll by rerolling all dice that didn’t come up one or six, usually in hopes of getting a six in the first place but possibly searching for more successes (multiple sixes can yield critical successes or do more damage in combat). However, for every 1 showing after a Pushed roll their character will receive damage, but they will also receive willpower that can be used to power class and background specific abilities. There are a few more wrinkles than that, like how you can add equipment to your dice and how skill dice generally won’t hurt you, but that’s the core.

I really like this system. It’s easy to explain and avoids the faff of adding up die roll modifiers to try and reach some target number. The ability to push to reroll is brilliant especially when combined with the fact that normal rolls contain very little risk but pushing can be disastrous. In our first session one player pushed a test and promptly rolled all 1s and his character passed out. It was hilarious and exactly the kind of emergent chaos that RPGs ought to deliver. My players now routinely chant “Push it! Push it!” whenever someone is thinking about making a risky play.

The combat also manages to avoid being too complex, although RPG combat remains for me something of a bugbear. As a player I love being part of a big RPG combat where we scrape by the skin of our teeth thanks to clever tactics and key rolls. However, as a GM I find designing these kinds of encounters incredibly intimidating and so I tend to prefer running games that focus more on mysteries, investigation, or exploration – areas I can build tension without needing to worry about the intricacies of a combat system. Forbidden Lands’ combat is interesting, and as a player I could see myself digging deep into it, but the guidelines for encounter design are relatively thin. Now, this is because this is a game where combat can be brutal, character death is always a risk, and it wants the players to think about running or solving encounters non-violently before they go all wandering murderer on everyone. I never found that combat completely ground the game to a halt, which is good, but it is also a very obvious switching of gears from the rest of gameplay – the same systems are in play, but the degree of complexity clicks up a notch or two – and for me and my players we generally preferred the game when the combat was peripheral. Thankfully there is plenty in Forbidden Lands to support that, but I would say that if you came to this review looking for opinions on the advanced combat rules you will be sorely disappointed - I haven’t even read them.

The Whole Package

The value on display in Forbidden Lands core set is staggering. Two loverly hardback core books, a supplemental booklet that I’ve gotten a lot of use out of, a gorgeous map, and some stickers to place on said map. It was the latter two elements that made me want to play Forbidden Lands in person around a table. In my campaign the party draws their progress on the map as they explore, adding stickers sometimes for specific dungeons. This gives such a satisfying materiality to the experience that wouldn’t be the same if we were playing online. The core books are a fabulous production and a joy to flip through with excellent art that really sets the vibe for the setting. You can really see the love on display in the box.

The contents of Forbidden Lands’ core box

The years 2017-2022 were something of a drought for me in terms of RPGs. I got married, started a new job, had a child, and the world ended – only one of these was strictly bad but they all consumed a lot of my time and mental energy. I managed to squeeze some gaming in, including a short lived fifth edition D&D campaign, but for the most part I wasn’t up to any adventuring. When I finally managed to assemble an interested party around a table to play some games, I pulled Forbidden Lands down from my shelf to be my first game. I’m so glad I did, this is a phenomenal system and experience, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Korea: The Mobile War by Jim Dunnigan

First on my docket for operational games on the Korean War is the original, Jim Dunnigan’s design from 1971. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly beloved title these days, based on BGG ratings and anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered on social media, but as the first game on the topic (as far as I’m aware) and one that was published within twenty years of the war’s end, I couldn’t help but want to try it. I can’t say that my experience was comprehensive, I played the opening scenario and just dabbled with the system, but I have some initial thoughts just from pushing counters around for a few hours.

I’ll just note here as well that I’m not very familiar with wargames from this era – they’re long before my time – so it is possible that some of my observations are just aspects of design that were incredibly normal at the time and not at all unique to this game. That said, I’ve tried to focus on what I think are probably distinct to Korea, and elements of the design that relate to the history of the Korean war.

While my familiarity with this era of wargame design is limited, even to me it feels like Korea is building on the foundation of existing designs. Simple single d6 CRTs with combat ratios and no DRMs is not something you see very often these days, for example. My (uninformed) guess would be that Dunnigan took the same kind of core wargame you might have seen in Avalon Hill’s D-Day, for example, and modified it for Korea. Not that this is a criticism, it’s a perfectly sensible thing to do, but playing Korea evoked a similar feeling to what I get when I play a game in an existing series. I could feel the legacy of other designs in its mechanisms, but of course it was not part of any series (I’m not even sure if series were a thing yet when it was published).

In terms of gameplay, the counters have a strength and movement factor but not much else. There are NATO symbols for the different units, but really all the rules are covered by different strength and movement factors. Stacking is just two units per hex, but there are rules for merging and splitting units that can effectively allow for larger stacks in terms of strength value if not physical counters. The terrain rules are simple, and combat is quick to resolve (and deadly). There are rules for supply and naval movement, including amphibious landings, as well as a bit of chrome for one airborne division that the UN can drop anywhere they want on the map. There is a nice asymmetry in the game, for example there are differences in how supply works between the Communists and the UN, the Chinese are more limited in how they divide up their units, and the UN can inflict double casualties on Communist attacks.

The initial set up for the first scenario which covers the North Korean invasion in 1950.

One thing I really liked was the decision to have three different CRTs. When combat is initiated, the defender gets to choose what kind of combat this will be. Pursuit combat is harder on the attacker, but the defender must retreat. Meeting engagements are more violent and higher risk, while the final CRT is only available when defending a strong position (usually via entrenchment, but sometimes with special rules) and offers the best option for the defender but is of course more situational for when you can use it. While I have mixed feelings about the CRTs as a whole, the single d6 with no DRMs honestly doesn’t offer a lot of variety and it made combat feel very swingy, this choice really intrigued me. I like when games do interesting things with their CRTs, it can be a great way to introduce strategic complexity while keeping rules overhead low. While I don’t think Korea necessarily delivers on this, the idea that players will want to pick different CRTs situationally has the potential to add a lot of strategic depth to the combat but doesn’t require pages of combat rules. I’d love to see some examples of more modern takes on this kind of combat.

Things are not going well for the South Koreans after the first few turns.

Overall, the game didn’t feel very much like Korea. There are supply rules which are simple but offer some potentially interesting decision space. Supply is asymmetric, the Communists have to expend supply to attack but the UN doesn’t. However, UN supply units are slower especially when moving off road. Establishing a supply link is pretty simple, but it can be severed by an enemy zone of control, so cutting supply is also relatively easy. Units without supply fight at reduced strength, so this encourages the Chinese strategy of encircling an enemy position - although arguably for the wrong historical reason. I’m not sure the rest of the game does enough to support them, although that may be the first scenario speaking because it has pretty lenient exceptions that make achieving supply easier. It felt like there was a lot of interesting potential in the supply rules, but I didn’t necessarily seem to be using them all that much.

The limited air power rules just let the UN supply a fixed number of units via air drop, there are no rules for bombing. On the one hand it’s disappointing to not have that aspect of the war in the game, but on the other hand in a game that is this simple maybe it makes more sense to handle it this way. Yes the UN had superior bombing capability, but also the Koreans and Chinese were largely able to completely negate that strength due to their tactics. The game could choose to include layers of rules for UN bombing and for Communist night attacks, but it achieves almost the same final result by just not having bombing in it in the first place.

The only reason I noticed the lack of air power is that the Communists in my game ended up moving primarily along the roads, which they didn’t do historically precisely because that would have exposed them to bombing by UN airpower. The UN and Communists fought very similarly in my limited time playing Korea. Maybe if I got better at the game, I would move off road some more, but in the opening scenario where I’m trying to race to Pusan from the north it always felt like the right choice to move along roads and ignore the rough terrain. This made the game feel more like World War II and less like Korea.

UN reinforcements finally arrive, but they have to push out from Pusan to try and set up the perimeter rather than having fallen back to it successfully. With the CRT being as swingy as it is, breaking back out will be a real challenge.

The aspect that felt the most Korean was the aesthetic. While very simple and undeniably old school I really liked the look of this game. The map in particular really endeared me to the game. The counters are classic NATO symbols that I usually don’t like, but at least in Korea they feel appropriate - NATO at least existed at the time of the war. I do like the subtle color distinctions between the two Korean armies and the UN/Chinese – just about the only distinction between the multiple factions in play. Arguably more could have been done to distinguish the Chinese from the North Koreans in play, but this was also designed in the middle of the Cold War so maybe that would be asking too much.

Korea: The Mobile War unsurprisingly doesn’t have any political layer or mechanisms to try and replicate divisions within command for either side. It only covers the first year of the war and in play feels like the hyper mobile war with how fast it moves along, but there are mechanisms for entrenching your soldiers and so in theory it could eventually produce something like the static combat lines of the later war.

Overall, I had an interesting time playing Korea, but I wouldn’t necessarily say I had a great time. A lot of my enjoyment derived from the fact that I’ve played very few games from this era, so there was a greater novelty to the old school design for me that people who grew up with these games would not experience. I expect this game will very rarely grace my table, but it remains an item of historic interest and for that reason if no other I expect I will set it up again in the future to try more scenarios and maybe even explore some weird strategies to see what happens.

Wargaming Korea: 1950-1953

Partly inspired by some potential changes in my own life and partly because this year marks the tenth anniversary since my grandfather passed away, I’ve found myself with a newfound interest in the Korean War. I’m resisting the urge to turn this into a research/game project of a similar scale to We Intend to Move on Your Works, but I intend to at least dip my toe in and I would like to have a little structure as I dive deeper. With that goal in mind, I recently read The Coldest Winter and I’ve a short reading list to tackle over the rest of this year. In terms of games, I’m focusing only on operational games that look at the whole Korean peninsula – nothing tactical for the moment. I don’t want this to balloon into a huge life consuming project, so I’m only planning to play at most a handful of games.

Before I get to the games, though, I wanted to outline a few notions I have about the Korean War and its key elements that I would be interested to see game designers tackle in one way or another. This is very much my impressions before I’ve played the games and while I’ve only done a very little bit of initial research, so these are my starting position not a final thesis on the Korean War as a subject. I may end up renouncing some or all of these at the end of this process, but I wanted to lay out where I’m starting from to provide some more structure to what will follow.

Underestimating of the Opposition

The Korean War was almost defined by an underestimating of one’s opponents. In the late 1940s McArthur, and to an extent the American government, thought Korea was on the periphery of global politics. They did not believe that it would be the site of the next big conflagration and in fact their plans to reduce their presence on the peninsula may have helped trigger the North Korean invasion. McArthur and his command didn’t think the North Koreans would attack and if they did they thought that they could be trivially driven back by a fraction of US troops.

On the other end, Kim Il Sung didn’t believe the Americans would bother to intervene in Korea when he crossed the 38th parallel. He was confident in his ability to defeat the South Koreans (largely correctly) and thought he could have the entire peninsula in a matter of weeks (less correctly). He didn’t expect the level of strategic investment that the Americans were prepared to commit. Kim Il Sung also refused to heed warnings about the potential for an amphibious landing at Incheon.

Then, once they had intervened in force, McCarthur and his Tokyo Command were convinced that the Chinese would not possibly intervene on behalf of the North Koreans. Again, even if they did McCarthur was convinced that they could be easily defeated – boasting that the US Airforce would turn the Yalu into a bloodbath should the Chinese try and cross. His command routinely denied evidence that China was in North Korea in force before they launched their offensive in late 1950. Once again, the side that was winning the war underestimated the risks they faced.

Finally, when Chinese forces crossed the 38th parallel heading south (the third crossing of the parallel in less than a year), Mao believed the UN forces were nearly defeated and did not give proper credence to reports from his generals in the field about the limits of Chinese supply lines and the exhaustion and starvation conditions his troops were under in South Korea. Once again, the side in the winning position underestimated the risk of their position and stretched themselves to the breaking point.

The endless quest to control the entire peninsula, and a lack of belief in the strength of their enemies, routinely caused both sides to overextend themselves and for this situation to be exploited by their enemies. Generally, this ignorance and over optimism came from the top of the command and was in defiance of the facts and expertise of the people on the ground.

I am curious to see how games can encourage players to engage in overly risky behavior and prevent their knowledge of the historical outcomes to create conservative play. To be a good counterfactual, games should probably allow you to play a little more conservatively to see what might have happened, but to really convey the history and help players understand why the war was the way it was I would like to see some encouragement for (and punishment of) reckless aggression.

Racism

We also cannot underestimate the role that racism played in the tendency for UN Commanders to underestimate the strength of their adversaries. Douglas McArthur practically made a career of underestimating the fighting strength of Asian peoples and, even as they routinely made a fool of him, he continued to claim that he was an expert on “oriental psychology”. In his support staff he had General Ned Allmond, who frequently used disparaging language towards Asian people, calling them “laundrymen”, and was aggressively and vociferously against President Truman’s efforts to end segregation in the US Military. General Charles Willoughby, McArthur’s head of intelligence, was a German born fascist – he maintained very close personal ties Franco, so much so that the dictator sent him gifts of wine and other Spanish goods, and after the war he would emerge as a member of the political far-right.

Willoughby was in charge of supplying McArthur with intelligence, or more accurately with distorting all intelligence reports to fit the conclusions McArthur had already made. Collectively, these men and the culture they created in the high command of the Pacific theater was one of intense racism and disrespect for the fighting capabilities of the Korean and Chinese soldiers the men under their command would be up against. This repeatedly led to strategic and operational mistakes and a refusal to engage with the war based on the facts, preferring instead their own misguided and backwards notions of what ought to be happening on the Korean peninsula.

Correctly capturing the psychology of historical actors is a huge ask for any game, but I will be very impressed if a Korean War game manages to convey some of the ways that racism overwhelmed good judgment and led to catastrophic miscalculations on the part of UN high command.

Supply Lines of the Korean War

Throughout the war, both sides suffered from the problem of how to keep their troops supplied the further down (or up) the peninsula they went. Korea in 1950 didn’t have a particularly robust road or train network and certainly once the war got going what it did have was battered by use and combat. The North Koreans and Chinese forces had no air power and so their supply lines were susceptible to bombardment by air, which meant that what trucks they had usually drove by night (a risky business) and large amounts of supplies were carried overland on the backs of porters. These were huge logistical problems for them and created the kind of supply networks that would become strained very quickly.

The UN Forces had better supply options – they had air drops and could move their supplies by road and rail with relative impunity – but even then, the further they traveled up the more problems they faced getting supplies to units in need. They also struggled, at least during the first year or so of the war, to move their supplies from the existing road and rail network and to fight in the more rural areas of the peninsula.

A game should ideally reflect the greater supply capacity of the UN Forces but also represent how they were not without their own struggles, and they had to routinely come up with solutions for delivering key supplies to embattled units in difficult circumstances. Korean and especially Chinese forces had far more limited supply, but they also drew some benefits from the fact that they often carried their supplies by human labor overland and were thus not as dependent on the limited road and rail networks. The geography of the Korean peninsula, both its length and how it widens out as it approaches the mainland, naturally made the shipping of ammunition, food, and even winter clothing (for the brutal Korean winter) a key aspect of the war.

Destruction of Korea

The Korean war was highly destructive and wreaked massive devastation on the landscape of the peninsula. The city of Seoul changed hands three times in approximately six months, and in the process was virtually levelled. It was obviously a time of great suffering for the Korean people. I think it is far too easy for wargames to lose sight of the tragedy of war by obsessing over details of battlefield maneuver and strategic positioning of soldiers. I want games to remind players that people were suffering and more than just soldiers died in these wars.

The devastation also had significant impacts on the waging of the war, because it meant that there was often little to no food in the Korean countryside. The posed a problem especially for the Chinese forces as they moved further south into Korea and further from their supply bases. UN Troops could fly in food and other supplies from Japan, but the Chinese military had far less logistical support and so would have benefited greatly from being able to forage off the land, something that the total devastation of the war prevented. It also meant that there were refugees and people fleeing from battles – a fact that the North Koreans and Chinese sometimes used as a means of infiltrating UN positions and gathering intelligence before they attacked.

Night Attacks and Ambush Tactics

This one may be a challenge for the operational scale games I’m interested in playing, but I would love to see if they could capture the different tactics used by the two sides. For most of the first year of the war, the UN forces traveled by road and used the main arteries of travel on the peninsula to drive their attacks. Meanwhile, the Chinese forces often preferred to move past a UN position to set up an ambush, and then when they attacked drive them back into the trap, they had already set for them – often along the same roads the UN had used to get to that position in the first place. Until the UN forces learned to stand and fight, setting up stronger defensive positions that they could hold out against sustained assaults, this proved devastating.

This tactic combined well with the chaos created by the fact that the North Koreans and Chinese almost always attacked at night. The soldiers would virtually disappear during the day, limiting the practical usefulness of UN air superiority and making counteroffensives very challenging. The preference for night attacks meant that UN soldiers might have no idea how many Chinese soldiers were in the nearby area or where they were, greatly limiting their capacity to fight back. It also meant that UN forces were usually exhausted, having to move all day and then fight all night. It kept the initiative out of the UN’s hands for most of the first year of the war.

Who do you play as?

A key question for any wargame is who the players represent. Are you a specific historical individual or more of a zeitgeist or virtual deity manipulating the levers of history? This matters especially in something like the Korean War where there was such a massive disconnect between the levels of command.

For the UN side you have at least three potential historical avatars with three very different experiences of the war. As McArthur you can be the overly ambitious and obscenely reckless commander in chief – although his firing near the end of the first year makes this a challenging position to represent. Even more difficult is that of Harry Truman, the president a continent away who cannot control McArthur or his command and is faced with significant political pressure which makes controlling his reckless commander even harder.

Take for example the march to Yalu – no gamer with the knowledge of the history is going to see Yalu as a good idea. It was obviously going to be a disaster. So, most UN players would presumably take the more logical choice of trying to set up a perimeter from Pyongyang to Wusan. However, that was not the orders given to the men in the field. If the player is McArthur, how do you encourage them to make such irrational choices and can you convey McArthur’s refusal to recognize the reality of what was happening on the peninsula?

I think the most interesting role for an operational game of the Korean War is to be the commander in the field: historically General Walker and then later General Ridgway. These generals are in charge of the war on the ground but faced with constant pressure from both McArthur and Washington, which may force them into making strategically unsound decisions because the choice is out of their hands. This does have the slight problem that it is hard to capture McArthur’s baffling decision to split the command in Korea by placing Ned Allmond in command of the Incheon landing and freeing him from having to answer to Walker during the push to the Yalu. However, if a game can convey this frustration and idiocy to the player I will be thoroughly impressed.

On the other side are you Kim Il Sung, Stalin, Mao, or Peng Dehuai? Kim Il Sung and the North Koreans were the driving force behind the opening of the war, but once the Chinese intervened, they were largely sidelined. Stalin lurked in the background, giving his permission for Kim to invade but offering little in the way of actual support. Once the Chinese did intervene, General Peng was in charge of the actual military operations but faced increasing political pressure from Mao which led to a reckless overextension of the Chinese position. The easiest solution is probably to simply have a Communist player and let the role bleed fluidly between the various players within that faction, but that does mean committing to a bit of a Red Scare view of the communist powers. One communist leader was not interchangeable with another, they all had separate goals for and perspectives on the war. I would like it if games took a specific stance – maybe even one that changes during the game or between scenarios – about which communists exactly the player represents.

Both sides frequently faced the problem of a disconnect between political goals, the goals of the overall commanders, and the goals of the commanders in the field. This tension between elements within each side is difficult to replicate within a two-player game but is crucial to understanding why the Korean War happened as it did. Players should ideally feel both their bosses and the wider political pressures breathing down their neck as they try to do their best on the game board. This is not just a war of operational and supply challenges (what war is?) but rather one with a significant and impactful political component.    

Incheon landing

The amphibious landing at Incheon was the operational high point of the war, probably its most famous single moment and the event that made McArthur’s foolish push to the Yalu possible. No one wanted to contradict the Great General after so masterful a stroke as Incheon and it thus paved the way for his downfall. This presents a challenge for game designers, though, because if there is one thing players know about the Korean War it is the famous amphibious landing at Incheon. The thing is, that landing was incredibly risky and was only the stunning success that it was because the harbor at Incheon had not been mined and Kim Il Sung did basically nothing (despite warnings from the Chinese) to oppose any possible landing there. The Incheon landing was hardly the secret that Operation Overlord had been in 1944, so it stands to reason that any player recreating the Korean War could adequately prepare for and prevent a successful landing like Incheon. But would a Korean War game where Incheon doesn’t happen be satisfying? I think any game that can capture the decision space that made an amphibious landing so effective and that offers up the option for alternative landings (many alternate sites were suggested and rejected by McArthur) could effectively be evoking the idea of Incheon without guaranteeing that it always happens. This is a tricky balance and I’m keen to see how various designers have decided to tackle it.

From Mobile war to less mobile war

I know going into this project that many games on the Korean War are only really interested in the Mobile War phase – roughly the first year from June 1950 until mid-1951, a period that also roughly aligns with the part of the war that Douglas McArthur was in command for. This was the phase with the most dramatic troop movements and set piece battles before the war settled into a more grinding form of almost trench warfare from late 1951 until the truce in 1953. I don’t believe any of the games I intend to play continue past mid-1951 but I am curious to see if they offer the possibility of the war changing from mobile war to the more grueling combat of the war’s second and third years. After all, it was not predetermined that the war would change shape in the middle of 1951. It could have been done sooner, and along a different parallel. I would also really like to play a game that covers the years 1952 and 1953, possibly including the peace process as part of it, but I am not aware of any such game. This period of the war, while it has not captured the same attention was nevertheless incredibly bloody and important for the history of the region and the peace that followed. I have the low expectations that any game will address this latter phase of the war, but I am curious to see if any of them handle the transition from mobile to more static warfare.

What Next?

Those are my initial hopes and expectations, now what remains is to see is how they compare to the games and books I have ahead of me. For the first game on the docket, I decided to start at the very beginning with Jim Dunnigan’s 1971 game Korea: The Mobile War 1950-1. This game doesn’t have the same glowing reputation as some of the later titles I have planned, but it is a very early SPI game and was released less than 20 years after the war ended so I have hopes that it will have something interesting to say even if the gameplay doesn’t hold up.

If you think this project sounds interesting, you could really help me out by making a donation to my Ko-Fi. Sadly, researching, playing, and writing about historical wargames is not that lucrative a business and some of these games can be pretty expensive so any assistance is greatly appreciated. If enough people support the project, it is far more likely that I will expand it to include even more games as well, so if you want that please consider donating via the link below. Thanks!

My Grandpa's War

Today marks the tenth anniversary since my grandpa, Richard Erwin, died. He was 91, he had recently had major surgery and ended up going to hospice where he died peacefully. I was 3,000 miles away doing my PhD in Dublin, Ireland. Few people had as large an impact on me as he did. He taught me how to ride a bicycle but more than that he was just there for most of my childhood being himself. I have, unsurprisingly, been reflecting on him and his impact as this anniversary approached. When I was last in Virginia I found copies in my brother’s house of some memoirs he wrote in his final years, and I thought this would be a good time to share one: in this case, his memory of his time at war.

The text below is copied from my grandpa’s memoirs. I have only cleaned up any obvious typos and removed names of my family members. Any edited text is shown in brackets. For context not covered here, my grandpa enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1942 under condition he be allowed to finish his university degree before going to boot camp. This account picks up in 1944 after he finished his studies.

“The War Years

Upon arrival at Parris Island, I was put in a platoon of other men from many states. There were 75 of us assigned to a corporal drill instructor and his assistant instructor. This was the group I lived and trained with for the next eleven weeks.

The first items we were issued were a padlock and a bucket. The lock was for our foot locker and the bucket was used for many things – washing clothes, and trash collection among many other uses.

Many tasks had to be accomplished in the eleven weeks at Parris Island. Every minute of every day was scheduled. The first day was a trip to the quartermaster to receive uniforms and other gear. The most important items we received shoes – two pairs for every day wear and one pair of dress shoes. The everyday shoes were stiff and could cause many blisters. Our drill instructor (DI) was an old experienced marine. As soon as we got back to our Quonset home he had us fill the bucket with water and put one pair of the work boots in it to soak overnight. The next morning we put on these wet boots to mold them to our feet and thus they did not cause blisters. The clothing had to be put in our wall locker in a precise fashion. If you did not do so, you kept doing it until you got it right!

We were marched to the regimental sick bay where we were given our first round of shots and a vaccination. Several men fainted when they saw the needles. They were picked up, put on a cot, and given their shots.

A lot of time was spent on close order drill on a huge asphalt paved drill ground. At times there were as many as 1,000 men in various stages of training on the field at one time. After becoming adept at close order drill (about three weeks) we marched to the armory where we were issued rifles and all the web gear that went with it (cartridge belt, back pack, etc.). We spent the next three weeks learning the manual of arms with the rifle and its care.

After six weeks at the main base, we and all our gear were marched three miles to the rifle range for a three week stay. We were taught the proper ways to handle the rifle and began firing it. After all this training we fired for record. I shot 318 points out of 340 and was awarded a sharp shooter badge. After firing the rifle we fired the .45 caliber automatic pistol, tommy gun, grease gun (a form of tommy gun), the browning automatic rifle and the carbine. After completing our three weeks at the rifle range we marched back to the main base to complete our basic training. For the final two weeks we received our last round of shots, learned hand to hand combat and more about hygiene in a combat zone. We were then put through the classification center to determine what our next assignment would be.

They really did not know what to do with me. I was a college graduate whose eyes would not pass the test to qualify for officer candidate school. I wanted to go to artillery but there were no openings at that time. They finally found out that I could read and interpret aerial photographs. Based on this discovery I was assigned to the photogrammetry school (making maps from aerial photos). I went to New River Base in North Carolina. The school was interesting because we had to learn many things – plane surveying (which I had in college), drafting, advanced aerial photo reading and interpretation, and special math that went with this work.

This all came to a halt on a rainy, humid August day when my name was called to go to the headquarters building. I was not told why I was going, except to put on clean khakis and get up there NOW! After walking in the pouring rain, I looked like a drowned rat among a large room of other men who looked as bad as I did. My name was called to go up a flight of stairs and enter a certain door. No one ever came down the stairs so I had no idea what was waiting for me when I went through the door. Stepping into the room I faced a full colonel, two captains, and two senior sergeants. The first question the colonel asked me was if I wanted to go to OCS (officers candidate school). I asked what was my other choice and I was told that I would be shipped out in the next infantry replacement draft. I said I would go to OCS.

I was shipped out to Quantico, Virginia with about 350 other men. The drop out rate was very high in OCS. About 110 of us completed it. We were commissioned and moved to ROS (reserve officers school) for the next three months. After completing ROS, we were reclassified to determine where we would be assigned. Out of the 120 who finished ROS, twelve of us were assigned to tank and amphibious tractor schools. I went to the tractor school which was at Camp Pendleton in California. All the rest of the class went to infantry school where they completed training and were sent to Iwo Jim and Okinawa where they took a very high casualty rate. After completing my training in cargo and armed amphibious tractors, I shipped out to Hawaii waiting further transfer to the combat zone.

After a brief stay in Hawaii, I boarded an aircraft carrier for further transfer to Okinawa to join my unit in preparation for the invasion of Japan. Before we got to Okinawa the war was over. The ship diverted to Guam where all of us marines were put ashore. My unit returned from Okinawa shortly after I arrived on Guam. The marines immediately began to downsize to its peace time size which was to be two divisions and one brigade all of which stayed on Guam. All the men who had enough points were shipped home. Some Marines were formed into occupying units and shipped to China. Fortunately I was assigned to the brigade. My unit stayed on Guam until February, 1946.

One the way home from Guam, our aircraft carrier ran through the edge of a typhoon. The waves were huge (60-70 feet high) and the wind blew at a very high velocity. We were told to stay below decks because if we went topside we could be washed overboard from which we could not be rescued. An aircraft carrier was a large ship but it was tossed about like a small rowboat. When it ran into a large wave it was as if it had run into a stone wall. We were served cold sandwiches and water for food because it was too rough for hot food or drink to be prepared. The storm lasted about four days. I spent most of my time in my bunk since, when walking, one could be thrown around and injured. After the storm it was discovered that many of the above deck antennae and aerials had been blown away. Several small vessels, destroyers, tugs, mine sweepers, etc. had been sunk with a complete loss of life. We landed at San Diego and were transported to Camp Pendleton where I remained on active duty until June when I was finally released from active duty.

From my length of military service I had about six years of schooling coming to me under the GI Bill. I applied and was accepted at graduate school at the University of California at Davis. I spent one strenuous year of study and research and received my masters degree. At Davis I met [his wife]. After graduation I accepted a position with the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation. I worked in Bakersfield on the Central Valley irrigation project. [My grandma] wanted to complete one more year of college before we got married.

After we were married on October 16, 1948 we moved to Yerington, Nevada where I had accepted a job with the USDA. After a few months in Nevada I transferred back to the Department of the Interior. After [my oldest uncle] was born, we lived in our first home in Delano. This was a perfect place to live and I enjoyed my work. On a bright, clear day in November [my grandma] came to my office with orders from the marines recalling me to active duty.

The recall was a great shock to us. I had thirty days before reporting. We experienced a somber and subdued Christmas. On December 31 [1950] I went to Los Angeles for a physical exam to determine if I could go on active duty. You had to be dead to fail the physical! Since the next day was a holiday nothing was happening on base. On January 2, 1951 I was finally told what I was to do. [My grandma] drove home by herself to move out of our house so we could rent it. She drove back with [my uncle] and we found a rental in Vista, outside of San Diego.

Since I was a qualified amphibious tractor officer, I was assigned to train other marines about the tractors. They wanted to keep me at the base but there was no position open for me so I was moved to a place where replacements were assembled for shipment to Korea. I was given a company of men from all units except infantry. After about three weeks we were taken by bus to San Diego to board a ship for Korea.

After 18 miserable days on a miserable ship we arrived in Kobe, Japan. At Kobe we left all of our dress uniforms and other nonessential gear and then sailed to Pusan, Korea. My unit was broken up and the men and officers were sent to various other units.

I was sent with about 30 enlisted men to the 1st amphibian tractor battalion at Masan, Korea. After three weeks, I was given 40 enlisted men and one corpsman to go on detached duty with the first division which was fighting up north. It took us about five days by truck to reach the outfit we were to relieve. We were on detached duty for the next seven months.

A collection of photos my grandpa took while he was in Masan. My cousin uploaded them to Wikimedia. I’m not aware of him having taken any other photos during the war years, but some may turn up in some uncle’s basement some day.

The unit we relieved was the first provisional athey trailer platoon. It consisted of 25 D-8 caterpillar tractors and 25 athey trailers. The job was to be a “trucking” unit that could reach places trucks could not go. We usually hauled 500 tons of ammunition. At other times we would haul food, water, engineering supplies, or the wounded.

Our living conditions varied but were all bad. The best was when we were able to sleep in tents. At other times we just slept in the open or under the trailers. We were attached to an ordinance battalion for meals and, if needed, medical help in times of serious illness or injury. There were no provisions for bathing so whenever possible we would take a bath in a river. On one occasion we stopped by a high bank where a giant water wheel was located. The water came over the bank and over the water wheel to make it turn. We decided to stop the water wheel so the water came through it like a shower. The men said that since I was the officer I could bathe first. I stripped and stepped into the wheel. The water was so cold it almost made my heart stop. One of the men climbed up to see the source of the water. The stream came from under a large snow bank. That was the end of bathing that day!

We moved all around the area of the 38th parallel. There were some exciting moments but I was proud that I had only one injured man and no one was killed. There weren’t many funny or humorous moments but there were two that I think are worth telling. On one occasion we had reached our destination about two in the morning and were settling in to sleep. Part of the men were on guard duty and the rest asleep. I had just crawled under a trailer to sleep when a man came running to me yelling “they are coming”. We set up all four automatic weapons and settled in for a fight. We had heard that the communists often attacked at night carrying lamps and candles. We could see this large bunch of lights coming toward us. I told the men not to fire until I gave the order. It seemed weird that it was totally quiet. We waited and suddenly found ourselves surrounded by fireflies. You could hear gallons of adrenalin draining away.

When we received orders to turn in our equipment and return to our home unit in Southern Korea we had to take our tractors and trailers to an army salvation depot. We had one tractor that was inoperable we had been salvaging parts to keep the other tractors going. I asked for a tank trailer to haul the inoperable tractor. I was told that it was up to me to get it to the salvage depot any way I could. You could tow it or push it for 30 miles. I discussed the situation with my sergeant. His comment was that we only had to get it to the depot and it was the army’s problem once it got there. We had a bulldozer dig a ramp in front of the disabled vehicle. A tractor carefully pushed it over a steel decked trailer. We had a welder from the engineering battalion crawl under the tractor and weld its tracks to the steel deck. When we got to the salvage depot we quickly had the army account for 25 tractors and trailers. Once we had a receipt from them we quickly got on our truck and went back to the marine division. We often wondered what the army did when they found that tractor would not run and it was welded to the trailer.

Once we had turned in our tractors and trailers, we gathered up our personal gear and scrounged rides on airplanes back to Southern Korea to our home unit. This concluded my seven month adventure in Northern Korea.

In December 1951 I was given orders to return to the USA. We gathered in Japan to board a luxurious troop ship for the trip home. Great food!! I was a captain at the time and was told that when we reached Treasure Island I would have about 2,000 regular marines assigned to me and had to see that they were processed and sent to their next duty station. I can’t really describe the SNAFU that ensued from that operation. After one week of many glitches and frustrations all the men were processed. The next day I got my orders back to inactive duty. I immediately reserved a seat on the train home. It was a wonderful reception for all, especially to see [my oldest uncle] and how he had grown and [my second oldest uncle] who was born while I was in Korea.

About six months later I was able to resign my commission and sever my relations with the marine corps. It was a great experience but not one I would want for my own sons. It taught me self reliance and how to work alone in various situations.

Of the whole experience the one most memorable to me was coming back to San Francisco and sailing under the Golden Gate at sunrise. I was home, unwounded, and ready to get on with my life.”

My Grandpa told us some other stories about his time in Korea during the war years. He generally avoided talking about any really gruesome stories, although he did hint at having seen some real violence in addition to what he was telling us about. The only other story I remember was his description of accidentally spending a night behind enemy lines due to the unit getting slightly lost - thankfully all they suffered was a sleepless night. He also had stories about life back at camp waiting to ship home - and the incredible boredom of it. He did describe some minor hijinks that make it no surprise that M.A.S.H. was his favorite show. I don’t want to try and tell those stories from memory, though, and instead will limit this post to focusing on my grandpa’s own reminiscences.

Remembering my grandpa and reading on his war time experience has triggered a greater interest in the Korean War as a subject. I have decided to begin a small project to learn more about the Korean War and to play some games about it. You can read more about that elsewhere on this website.

The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam

Due to a confluence of factors best discussed elsewhere, I’ve recently experienced a surge of interest in the history of the Korean War. While digging around looking for books on the topic, I heard a recommendation for David Halberstam’s book on the podcast Wargames to Go. Luckily my local library had it, so I picked it up, not fully realizing that it is nearly 700 pages long. This is a pretty dense book with a lot of terminology and specific military information but Halberstam’s background in journalism shows as he breaks down complex information well and keeps the story engaging without being too overwhelming. Overall, The Coldest Winter is a very good book, but I also think it is a book with some very clear limitations.

I love it when history books don’t limit themselves to just their stated topic but instead actively engage in providing key context that readers really need to know. My default example for this is Peter Wilson’s book on the Thirty Years War which has something like 150 pages of context before the war even begins. The Coldest Winter opens in medias res with a chapter on the Chinese intervention and attack on Unsan in late 1950 before going back to explain how things reached that point. Interspersed among chapters covering the main narrative are other chapters that give key background on the Chinese Civil War, American politics in the late 1940s, and the lives of many of the key figures that defined the Korean War. This helps provide readers with a wider understanding of the context in America and East Asia as well as ensuring that the book doesn’t provide easy answers to hard questions. You are made eminently aware of the many factors that converged on each key moment in the war.

I also appreciated how Halberstam isn’t afraid to zoom in close and get personal in his narrative. Often the descriptions of key battles don’t focus so much on large troop movements or the big picture strategy, but instead pick one platoon or commander and focus in detail on how they experienced the battle. To a degree this makes it harder to understand the flow of these battles – I would have a hard time describing the various troop movements of key military engagements were I quizzed on them now – but it also humanizes them and reminds you of the cost of war. It also allows Halberstam to really lean in on a key emphasis in his book which is the fundamental breakdowns in the United States military and the way that its dysfunction often led to tragedy and disaster. By focusing on key individuals at various points in the command structure he can really show the ways in which it wasn’t working and the pressures that a dysfunctional upper command caused on lower echelons.

While I really enjoyed The Coldest Winter and I am very impressed with it as a work of history, I have two minor criticisms, both of which have to do with the book’s scope. The first is that while this is labelled a history of the Korean War, it is really only a history of the first year or so of the war. It is concerned almost entirely with the portion of the war defined by large scale troop movements and the conflict between McArthur and basically everyone outside of his Tokyo staff. Of its nearly 700 pages, only about 50 are devoted to the years 1952 and 1953. You will learn very little about the peace process that ultimately brought about the truce that ended the war and defined the new border between north and south. This is hardly a problem unique to The Coldest Winter, many people find the war’s opening year for more interesting than it’s final two, but it is a bit of a failing for a book which is supposed to be on the war to only really cover 1/3rd of it in any detail.

The second nitpick I have is tied to the book’s subtitle “America and the Korean War”. I admit that this is kind of complaining about a book for what it is not, but I would underline the “America” in that subtitle. This is a book about the American experience of the Korean War, its impact on American politics, and how America related to it. While some UN Forces are mentioned, particularly the French Foreign Legion, very little information is given about the UN participants in the war and basically no information is provided on their experience of the war. Similarly, the Republic of Korea forces are rarely touched upon, and we learn very little about how they operated or what role the South Korean government played in the war. A bit more information is provided on North Korea and Mao’s China, but even still this is a book with a clear American perspective and so the protagonists in every conflict are the Americans. This is through and through an American perspective of the Korean War and while I think that is understandable, I wish it provided more information on how other people experienced the war.

Overall, I enjoyed The Coldest Winter. I don’t know if I would rush out to recommend it to people. It asks a lot of you in terms of time investment for what is in effect a history of how America experienced the opening year of the Korean War, but within that context I found it very satisfying.

We Intend to Move on Your Works ep. 9: GCACW

For episode nine of We Intend to Move on Your Works Pierre and I dive deep into Great Campaigns of the American Civil War with Stonewall Jackson’s Way II. We have a lot of thoughts in this one, I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we did recording them!