A Tale of Two Systems
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2011

As the first week of our new organization winds down, I’m still getting used to working as a game tsar, developer and designer instead of doing all that AND running the company. There’s still a lot of transitioning to be done: Far too much vital information resides only in my brain, and I have to dig it out and hand it over so John Phythyon can effectively run the company.

Even so, I’ve had a chance to work on games, and I’ve been thinking about games outside our usual series — we want to publish a lot of stuff in 2011, and we can’t survive as Panzer Grenadier Press alone. With the advent of our Playbook series of smaller games tucked inside a book with rules, strategy and background, there’s an opportunity to bring our older game series back to life in a new format.

There are two game systems, which share the same ground and unit scale, but otherwise are very different. Brian Knipple designed both of the game systems. The “chit-draw” system appeared initially when he worked for me at another firm, with a game that we would eventually release here as Operation Cannibal. Players have chits that allow their units to move, fight or both and they draw these from a container. More capable armies have more such chits in the container, increasing their odds of being allowed to move and/or fight, and the chits themselves often allow the more capable force to do more. The “armor/morale” system is much more of a traditional wargame engine: each unit is rated for attack, defense, movement, morale and armor or anti-tank capability. They move and fight in a more rigid sequence, but like the other system the units are companies and battalions with a handful of small regiments.

Each system has its strong suits: the chit-draw system is very good for showing armies of differing command and movement capabilities. The armor/morale system shines for tank battles and other clashes where hardware makes a difference.

We’ve done games in both systems and they’ve pretty much had similar sales; while the best-seller is from the chit-draw system (Blood on the Snow) I strongly suspect that’s because it was small and inexpensive. Games of the same size/price in the two systems have sold about the same. I like the chit-draw system much better myself; Brian has always claimed not to favor either of his children but I’ve always thought he liked the armor/morale one better.

There are two traditional wargames currently on the schedule, Red Desert on the 1939 Battle of Nomonhan and Army of Lappland covering the many battles in the far north of Finland and the Kola Peninsula from 1941 to 1944. At some point I had to decide which system to use for each of them. It was pretty easy for Army of Lappland: I’d always meant to bring the “Finnish games” Blood on the Snow and Winter Fury back into print, and add two more small games to the set besides those. So I wanted Army of Lappland to be compatible with them.

Panzer Grenadier superfan Jay Townsend suggested converting the game to his favorite system, which would not really be a conversion but cancellation and replacement. That would not only dismay fans awaiting the operational game, but as was pointed out to me internally such a move would also short-circuit the marketing push envisioned by the series of Finnish playbooks to start with Winter Fury. Those should do well sales-wise and will move a lot of copies of Army of Lappland over time. I would like to do a Panzer Grenadier game set in the tundra but the operational game also will be a good entry in our line thanks to the aid of the smaller games.

The chit-draw system is also a natural for this theater; for starters, there’s little armor and the ability to activate and move formations is paramount. There’s rough terrain and severe limitations on supply and command, exactly the areas where this system excels. Army of Lappland has turned out to be a very good model of the theater, and I think gamers are going to like it. It also has a nice large set of scenarios, covering three distinct campaigns, and that’s always popular.

Red Desert required more thought. The chit-draw system seemed a natural for it, but it’s not really suited for tank battles. And I wanted the game to focus on tanks. There wasn’t a whole lot of disparity in command capability at the battle; both sides pretty much got their troops where they wanted them to go. The Japanese suffered from lack of supply more than the Soviets, so that was a vote for the chit-draw system, but as Alamein showed the system can handle supply issues very well (just in a radically different way). So while there was a case for either system, I went with the tank-oriented one because gamers like tanks.

It was fairly easy to assign values to the Red Army; we’ve done them before in old, out of print games like Red Steel and Red Parachutes so there was already a scale at hand and just to be sure it wasn’t too hard to compare the formations that fought at Nomonhan to those that saw action at Kishinev. The Soviets have good infantry, but not great, with most units have a morale of 4. These are peacetime regular formations for the most part, and so they’re very good compared to most of the Red Army of 1939 but less capable than the Japanese foot soldiers.

Where the Soviets have an enormous advantage is in their supporting arms: their armor and their artillery. These are shown very well by the armor/morale system. Artillery can fire offensive or defensive support, and has to account for ammunition use through a very clever and easy-to-use little subsystem. The Soviets have bigger and better guns, and more of them, and can fire them more often. The Japanese are outclassed with no medium or heavy battalions at the division level. The difference is not as great as one might think (Soviet divisions had their artillery component upgraded after this conflict) but it is still telling.

In terms of armor, there really is no comparison. The best Japanese tank in the game is outclassed even by the worn-out T-26 tanks of the Soviet rifle division support battalions and nowhere near as capable as the BT-7 fast tanks the 11th Tank Brigade brings to the battlefield in the later scenarios.

While the Soviets were pretty easy to work into the game system, the Japanese posed a problem; Brian designed the chit-draw system specifically to model the Imperial Japanese Army at war and as a result it handles that force very well. Most aspects worked fine in the armor/morale system, and in particular it really shows the IJA’s weakness in artillery and the poor quality of its armor.

Where the system posed a design problem was with the excellent Japanese infantry. The Japanese fought Soviet tanks essentially with sheer bravery— small hunter-killer teams seeking out tanks and destroying them with Molotov cocktails, demolition charges and similar improvised weaponry. At this scale, that would be best represented by morale differential, which gives the side with higher morale many advantages.

So how high should Japanese morale go? The newly raised 23rd Infantry Division has a standard morale of 5, compared to 4 for Soviet regulars. The long-service Japanese 7th Infantry Division has a morale of 6. In this system, very few units have a 7 morale, only elite units like German paratroopers. Even the New Zealand Maori Battalion is only rated 6.

I thought about lowering the combat strengths for the Japanese, due to their lack of support weapons, and upping their morale to 6 and 7. Brian cautioned that this could warp the system’s mathematical model, so 7 should be used sparingly and nothing should go higher than that. So as it stands, a Japanese force from 7th Infantry Division fighting a Red Army force that includes tanks would get the odds increased by two levels for their superior morale (6 – 4 = 2) and lowered back one level because the Soviets have tanks and the Japanese do not (armor quality does not come into play when one side has no tanks). Is one increase in the odds level enough? I went with good combat strengths and 5 or 6 morale, and it seems to work right, but I’m still a little unsure.

Does all this mean you can play either game with the other game system? Not exactly; while they use the same ground scale the units are rated somewhat differently. Chiefly, since the chit-draw system has no morale rating equivalent units have higher (or in exceptional cases lower) values and more “steps,” or strength levels. The combat results are also built to reflect units with more gradations in strength. I suppose we could someday issue alternative downloadable counters but I can’t see anyone really caring enough to mount them and cut them out.

While Army of Lappland will have the support of a whole series of playbooks, I’m not sure what we can do to back Red Desert in a similar manner. A Panzer Grenadier game on the same topic would probably help, but there aren’t a lot of other Soviet-Japanese clashes to cover in the same system. The Soviets and Japanese fought a much smaller battle at Lake Khasan in 1938, and I’ve thought about doing that as a promotional download. But there’s not, as far as I can see, a Playbook topic as perfectly suited to promote this game as Winter Fury is for Army of Lappland.

Most of all these two systems need better names than “chit-draw” and “armor/morale.” There are a lot of wargames on the market these days, and gamers have even less time to play them. Getting across the idea that these are games you already know how to play is critical. We have some branding work to do.