Korean War Battles and Balkan Gambit coming in S&T
March 15, 2015 6 Comments
The lastish of Strategy & Tactics magazine notified us all that two games of mine, Korean War Battles and Balkan Gambit, would appear in issues #296 and #298 respectively (fall-winter 2015, roughly). Artwork above is for Korean War Battles, which is a three-fer of operational scale games from battles in 1950: the Pusan Perimeter (August – September), the second battle for Seoul (September) and Changjin Reservoir (December). System used is a modification (don’t yet know how modified beyond what I did) of the familiar “Fire and Movement” system DG uses in its modern-era folio games.
Meanwhile, I redesigned Balkan Gambit from its diceless-combat, chit-pull system as used in Autumn Mist and Summer Lightning to use a modification of the action-point-allowance, step-reduction, shootin’-dice system first used by Ben Knight in his Victory in Normandy game, and which XTR and DG have used several times since in other games. Also, the 1950 hypothetical Soviet invasion scenario was dropped. Crossing my fingers… but I can see the map is slightly different, and website copy says game has 176 counters, but I sent in one with 240…. (Edit: I spoke with the developer-wrangler as CSW Expo in June 2015 and he said that was a typo, in fact it has a full 280 counters! (?))
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Thanks! feel free to do this with any entry you find interesting…
Interested to see your Korean battles, hopefully S&T does a good job on them. A friend an I have been discussing designing a double blind mega game (uk northern megagamers) on Chosin at battalion resolution.
Thank you Simon!
I have my suspicions that DG has made some changes to the Korean War Battles games, just from looking at the map and counter art samples on their website. But because I designed the games using the “Fire and Movement” system which they have beaten to death in their modern-era Folio games, there won’t be the wholesale changes in the basic system that they have done with my other designs… still room to throw in lots of other game-breaking junk though.
A double-blind game on Chosin would be quite good, any wargame played double-blind is better than the alternative… it just takes more time and resources but gives you insight. A megagame would be great too! Who gets to be the lucky RMC commander?
RMC commander, not sure, we’d probably pick a more experienced wargamer. Mega games are starting to come into fashion in the UK (you noted the indie article in a post), so even getting 30-40 players for a wargame is now possible, though many tend to be general public.
Getting US side data is quite easy, but are you aware of any sources or books (that are easily available and in english) that cover the chinese side well?
I thought there would be competition for the role of RMC commander so he could be all studly and British – I imagine LCOL Drysdale was quite a guy.
Though there is glamour in playing a leatherneck too.
The Chinese are shown in this game at division level, so I didn’t have to do a lot of research – I used this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chosin_Reservoir_order_of_battle#People.27s_Republic_of_China_forces) and other material from Joe Miranda’s Chosin game (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38825/chosin-x-corps-escapes-trap) and the article that accompanied the game.
Here’s an entire online “journal” devoted to the campaign, though it mostly looks like notes by a retired colonel. http://bobrowen.com/nymas/changjinjournalTOC.html