"Square Bashing review" Topic

Well having played SB a couple of times with quite large Russian Civil War forces I thought I might post a review.

What I liked; It handles big actions easily. Our games certainly had the feel of massed battles. Lots of figures and it didn't feel like a slog repeating endless calculations.

The rules are easy to pick up, indeed me and my friend were off and playing fairly quickly without having to refer to the main rules more than a couple of times. Once you get the idea of moving from square to square its quite nice not to have to measure distances all the time.

The RCW add ons give the right feel for the period. So far we have used cavalry outflanking moves and propaganda offensives. It really is essential to use these extra rules for RCW otherwise, as somebody else has pointed out, you really are just playing World War One with Russian Civil War troops.

What I didn't like; Units down to one base out of four still fight. I don't think any unit in the RCW would have hung around with 75% losses, let alone still fought. The morale rules don't deal with this very well. It looks poor visually too.

Artillery can move and fire. I know we are dealing with a bigger time scale here but it still looks and feels wrong.

A unit in effect represents a combat factor and combats are a collection of combat factors versus another collection of combat factors. It feels like a board game where one stack takes on another stack. If I wanted to play a board game, I'd buy Squad Leader. A friend of mine has brought random cards into play in his games, such as "Partizans in your rear, no move from square this turn", "Re supply problem, no artillery fire this turn" that kind of thing which goes some way into bringing a bit of variety into the proceedings.

It seems very difficult to win as the defender. At the start of the game a level of aggression is rolled for, the player with the higher level being the attacker. As the Reds I played one level of aggression lower than my friend's Whites. After rolling a D6 for my units to see if they desert on a roll of 6, my forces were weakened sufficiently for the Whites to overwhelm them in short order. Even a partially successful propaganda attack by myself and my barbed wire and trench defences couldn't stop them. Should I have ended up two levels of aggression lower I would have had to test twice per unit for desertion, three levels lower means testing three times per unit and being the maximum four levels of aggression below your enemy means you have to test your units four times to see if they clear off. If you're rolling three or four dice per unit and a single score of 6 means they disappear, you aren't going to have much of a force left and as the defender you will inevitably lose. Yes you get some victory points in compensation for a depleted force, but nowhere near enough to make it balanced. If I got trounced after being just one level lower, any more than that means it's just pointless starting the game in the first place.

Overall a fairly good set of rules, there's nothing here that I dislike but can't be fixed with a house rule. I'd give them 7 out of 10. I'll play them again, along with Red Actions.

You need to be very careful with the points size of armies relative to table width – if you use small armies on a standard table the defender is going to get wiped out as they are stretched too thin. I often used to play SB on a four square wide table.

wrt pre-game losses, this is a feature of lots of PP games. If really unhappy with it why not borrow the mechanism from AK47 where they (may) become available as reinforcements later in the game – or just play historical scenarios instead.

or just play historical scenarios instead.

Generally an ideal solution, except that it is pretty hard to find the detail for the RCW.

When you do, you get back to the issue that you should be using small armies on a table, as troop densities were so low. (Tiny compared to the WWI that SB was written for.)

If you beef up density then you kill any feel of the RCW, and it becomes WWI. Cavalry needs to have space to move.

Better to change the attack/defence force ratios, I reckon.

To be honest sometimes I want to play bigger games than company level, whilst still playing RCW. That's not to knock Red Actions, they are a great set and I played them the other night, a glorious victory for my Soviet Heroes, dealt admirably with those Kornilovsky "Class Enemies", but somehow I want more!!!

So after some searching around I found Martin Rapier's (I assume it's our erstwhile fellow gamer from a couple of postings up) Spanish Civil War variant site and altered a word or two and deleted a few things that weren't relevant IMO. That left me with this…

Each side draws three cards at the start of the game, they may hold up to three cards at any one time, but may play them at the beginning of each phase of the turn based on initiative. Only one card may be "active" for a square or specific unit, and any conflicts are going to have to be sorted out amicably or just say the first one played takes precedence. At the end of the turn they may discard any cards and draw cards from the deck to make them back up to three. Some cards are "must play" cards and must be placed immediately when they are drawn, so take effect next turn, other cards are specific to one side or the other, or apply to both sides.

MUST PLAY
• Bad Weather: All units must roll 3+ to move next turn (x 1 card)
• Friendly Fire: Randomly pick own square with 2+ units in it. Make one roll on the kill! table (x 1 card)

BOTH SIDES
• Artillery Ammunition! One square may fire guns at +1 to hit and to kill (x 3 cards)
• Enthusiasm! One square must assault an adjacent enemy (x 2 cards)
• Betrayed! All units in one square must retire one square if they have not already moved (no effect on baseline) (x 2 cards)
• Dispatches arrive! All units in one square may move (x 2 cards)
• Vehicles breakdown! One vehicular unit or gun may not move this turn (x 2 cards)
• Wrong ammo! One unit of any type may not fire. It has an assault/defence value of 1 ( x 2 cards)
• Heroes! May negate one morale failure (x 3 cards)
• Determined Assault! Assault values of up to three units in one assault are +1 (x 1 cards)
• Traitors! Launch a propaganda attack against a square of your choice (x 1 card)
• Reorganisation! Any one destroyed unit reappears on your baseline (x 2 cards)
• Political Re-education! The inhabitants of one controlled town square are re-educated. Stops enemy recruiting militia, and +1 VP if retain control (x 2 cards)

Affect Reds only
• Workers Arise! If you control any unreeducated town squares, one base of raw militia infantry appears in a controlled town. Subsequent cards add to the unit until it is full strength (x 1 card)
• Ideological Debate! One Red square is immobilised (x 3 cards)
• Old weapons! One unit of any type may not fire. It has a notional assault / defence value of 1 (x 2 cards)

Affect Whites only
• Long Live The Tsar! If you control any unreeducated town squares, one base of raw militia infantry appears in a controlled town. Subsequent cards add to the unit until it is full strength (x 1 card)
• Cossacks on Rampage! One White square is immobilised (x 1 card)

I can claim no credit for the idea here, it's Martin's handiwork but I think it would certainly go a long way to solve the problem of fighting RCW battles with WW1 figures and of course for the company level stuff, you really can't beat Red Actions.

Alan, can I perhaps post this this version to Pygmy Wars? (With credit to you and Martin, of course.)

Of course, though as I said, all I really did was adapt it for RCW. Feel free to post it Mark. I don't think it will entirely get around the problem of "playing WW1 with RCW figures" but I think it does go some way towards fixing it.

I was actually trying to think of big RCW battles that Square Bashing might be good for. Tsaritsyn and the Red's attacks on Wrangel in the Crimea spring to mind but after that I run out of ideas. Perhaps you or someone else could think of a few more?

The only other thing I don't like about Square Bashing is that you often get battalions down to one stand, usually the command stand. It looks awful and it's certainly unrealistic IMO. I haven't worked out a "fix" for that yet.

There are a limited amount of historical actions where the fighting was side to side over a decent length.

The attack on Kakhovka in 1920 certainly: tanks assaulting set positions with wire, dug-in artillery etc. This is what SB is perfect for.

The fighting around Radzymin, just outside Warsaw. Again tanks, and many defenders well dug in.

These two one can find decent information about, so have a chance of doing a half-way realistic refight. The rest would have to be just approximations.

There were other actions associated with the fighting around Warsaw which were linear and pretty intense. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the second Battle of the Niemen probably is another. Perhaps Tukhachevski's original drives too.

Iudenich's drive on Petrograd, just at the climax, I think.

Some of the others are tricky because either one side or the other is entirely mounted and I don't know how well SB copes with that. Many of Budienny's battles would seem to be suitable -- the attack on L'viv, the attack on the Poles near Kiev, Komarow. There were also a couple of really big cavalry vs cavalry fights late in 1920, such as Yegorlykskaya and the peak of Wrangel's drive north of Nikopol'.

Komarow might be an interesting game on a biggish table, especially if played with an umpire and somewhat hidden movement.

The Red cavalry start on one end and have to fight across to the other. The Poles line up at 90º and try to stop them.

"I assume it's our erstwhile fellow gamer from a couple of postings up"

Yes, I'm afraid you have me to blame for this.

I found SB worked very well for the SCW, and again, quite low density stuff in many cases. I didn't usually bother with the game victory conditions but designed scenarios instead so the unit density didn't matter so much.

The random event cards worked quite well and added a but of fun into something which could have been quite dry. IIRC the 'Ideological Debate' cards were originally called 'Mass Debate' cards. Yes. I was involved in student politics….

wrt the 'one stand battalion' thing, I don't have a particular problem with it – I rather like the idea of the handful of survivors heroically hanging on. Very WW1 (and SCW), but maybe not appropriate for RCW?? I don't really know that much about the RCW. You could always leave all the battalion stands on and just mark hits or remove one stand per two losses or something.

Just a quick update for Square Bashing.

As well as the card system I mentioned earlier on, I intend on making a few more changes, just to see how they run, I think they will give a better, more balanced game.

As stated earlier for each aggresion level difference between attacker and defender, the defending player has to test each of his units to see if they disappear, losing them on a score of 6 on a D6. Four levels of difference means four tests, ie rolling 4 dice per unit, if just one dice comes up a 6 that unit is gone, and so unless he gets very, very lucky, he is beaten before the game starts.

I intend to change this as follows; One level of difference, defender loses units on a score of 1 on a D10, two levels of difference he loses units on a score of 1 or 2 on a D10, three difference levels and it's 1 to 3, four difference levels and it's 1 to 4. The attacker still gets some advantage but the defender isn't wiped out before the first turn.

Square Bashing allows players to move artillery pieces and still fire. I accept that this is a big scale battle with a big time scale to match, but it still looks and feels wrong. So I intend to amend the rules to forbid moving and firing with artillery.

So with these rule amendments, combined with the Proletariat to Horse supplement and the add on rules in the main ruleset itself, I hope to be able to have an easy play set of big battle rules that still keep an RCW flavour.

I've been playing Red Actions quite a lot, they're a great set for smaller battles (though counter battery fire is waaaaay too easy to hit with IMO), but they do require an awful lot of fiddly bits; troop cards, officer counters, terror markers, pinned markers etc, plus the time taken to select officers and colonels, that often it seems to take longer to set up and put away than it does to play! Not that it will stop me playing them, it won't, they're a gem of a set for company level stuff, but I want to retake Kiev, as well as storming hamlets on the Don.

Oddly, I had come to the opposite conclusion about counter-battery fire in Red Actions! (Perhaps because I play with larger tables, and so it mostly occurs at +1 to hit, which makes a huge difference).

Back to Square Bashing: I have an issue with the artillery in SB being able to fire from the square behind. I see this as a WWI situation -- where artillery operated a long way back. Almost all RCW fire was over open sights or a spotter a few hundred metres forward and so the rule looks very wrong to me. (Only for an emplaced defender, with ONE assigned spotter directly in front, would I vary this.)

Good point about artilery in SB Mark. That's easily fixed by a house rule saying that in WW1 the range is two squares, in RCW it's one.

How would you define emplaced though? Trenches? In a built up area? Blockhouses?

We found in Red Actions, played on a 6 foot x 4 foot table that whilst it is hard to get Direct Hits against mortars and other artillery pieces as you need to score 10 or above on two D6, it is easy to kill the enemy ordinance with the actual battery fire that follows the Direct Hit attempt.

The firing artillery has a factor of 18, there is no "long range" for guns so there are no negative modifiers for range and no negative modifiers for counter battery fire either. Looking at the Shooting Table on the 13 – 18 column a roll of 9 or above on two D6 is sufficient to cause 2 Terror Markers and thus rout the enemy gun crew. Even if they rally they will have one Humiliated Marker on them that never goes away, making them unable to fire and giving them a minimal hand to hand capability.

Unless I am reading the rules wrongly or missing something, that seems waaaaay too easy to me.

Alan: the range of 1 in SB is my thoughts exactly. It makes it less flexible, since it can't cover so many spots.

Emplaced, for me, means a formal position established, with ammo lined up ready to go, and a dedicated telephone line up to the spotters. No need for anyone to be in trenches (although in such a situation the infantry might well be, and the MGs almost definitely). Its more about having a formal, organised defensive line rather than just having your artillery behind hoping to spot someone.

For Red Actions: the numbers seem right. But real counter-battery at less than 1 km was a pretty bloody and quick affair.

Don't you find in such a situation that the defenders destroy the attacking artillery before they have even ridden up and unlimbered though? In which case the attackers would be best to either set up someone uncovered be enemy artillery, or not come on until the attack is in full swing.

There are various counters which make my games somewhat different.

I play deep tables for Red Actions and have a "long range" modifier for artillery. So most shoot at 11 to direct hit and factor 9. (Anyone foolish enough to stay limbered while under fire would get slaughtered, so guns don't get within 1 km of each other.)

Much of my artillery is factor 16, and I have a slightly amended table with a lower column for that value.

I limit ammo supply greatly. If defenders waste it on counter-battery, then they have nothing for later. Nor can an attacker winkle out dug-in MGs easily if they have no shells left.

"In which case the attackers would be best to either set up someone uncovered be enemy artillery,"

should be

In which case the attackers would be best to either set up somewhere uncovered by enemy artillery,

Sheesh!

To comment on the rules section to dice for unit loss at the start of the game, I agree rolling for each unit is a bit much. I have C&K as well as PBI. may i suggest using C&K rules instead. I don't know what the morale grades in these rules but there are 4 in C&K. Lets call them D,C,B and A. A being the best. Ok if I recall you roll for half of your D units and half of your C and b units combined. It might actualy be 1/3 not 1/2.

Chris P

Thanks Chris, I'm not sure if that would work in Square Bashing as there are 3 morale grades but I'm willling to try it.

The other options are using a D10 as I sugested below

One level of difference, defender loses units on a score of 1 on a D10, two levels of difference he loses units on a score of 1 or 2 on a D10, three difference levels and it's 1 to 3, four difference levels and it's 1 to 4. The attacker still gets some advantage but the defender isn't wiped out before the first turn.

or possibly using a D8, I'll have to playtest to see which works best.