Superpowers at War - The End

I finally finished my solitaire game and the end result was a NATO marginal victory. The Soviets took alot of ground but the offensive ran out of fuel by about roughly along a line leading from Venlo south towards Liege. The garrison rules didn't help the Soviets in that close to 2 1/2 divisions were soaked up as garrison units (per game rules, to get credit for seizing city hexes, they have to be garrisoned by a Soviet unit- not merely have been passed through.

Overall impression: The rules and game system need some more development and polishing. Overall, things are OK but calculating the effects of terrain and interaction of the various types of units is clunky- it's not integrated very well and you constantly have to be referring to various charts and rules. It just seems clumsy and it gets tiring after awhile.

However, it's got some interesting ideas, especially in the varying combat results depending on unit quality. Also, the airpower and air transport rules are interesting with the possiblity of both sides operating at the same time at the risk of loosing points due to anti-air fire (unfortunately, the system for recording available/expended air asset points versus points permanently lost is not very functional and it requires you to keep track on scratch paper).

Whatever good qualities this game might have are lost due to the half-baked game system development and as such, it becomes just one of a large number of hypothetical NATO vs Warsaw Pact games that were churned out during the 1970s and 80s.

As such, it's probably not really worth doing a makeover on this one- there's a number of superior designs that are out there now.

Drive on Frankfurt

I pulled out this game this weekend to play. Truely a relic of the 80s...

First impressions: It's trying to be the Central Front Series on a bit larger scale. The map graphics are ghastly in that early 80s style (Redmond A. Simonson, it's NOT). Also, the order of battle for NATO is somewhat questionable (TWO US cavalry companies to cover the border? What happened to the others? Go on leave to Paris?) and the rules are a bit ambiguous in places.

Drive on Frankfurt also attempts to use a flexible impulse system based on command activation. What's interesting is this is the first game I've seen that really attempts to integrate the effects of ECM into the game so that command, and in turn your ability to move units, can be dramitically affected by jamming.

Follow-up:

I've been trying to soldier through the first turn of Drive on Frankfurt but no joy. The system is an interesting one but it's just a tad too cumbersome and especially in terms of multi-unit attacks. The rules are a bit unclear on this point since they seem to emphasize individual movement of each unit or stack in an activated group. If you move one unit, you need to keep track of it's expended movement while moving a second unit up to also attack the same defender. Then you have to make sure that each unit has enough movement points to pay for the appropriate attack (there's three levels of attack: assault, deliberate and hasty). Finally, if the attackers succeed, they then get to use their unexpended movement to advance further. This is way too much to keep in your head.

The artillery rules are also a bit ponderous with a separate "bombardment" phase and THEN being able to use bombardment during an activation phase. Then there's the spotter rules. A bit too tactical in my book.

This system definately needed some refining and compared to the Central Front Series, Drive on Frankfurt is a distant second.

And Now Something From The Cold War...

I'd forgotten about this one but re-discovered it while surfing YouTube:



"Nikita" was quite the looker!