Red Desert: A Non-Grail Project
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2008

When we started out Classic Wargames program, we billed it as a method of bringing large or unusual games to press with the help of our customers. Most of the projects were what we call "holy grail" games, like Alamein or Battles of 1866. Others were games we knew the hard core would want, but we didn't think we could sell through our usual distribution channels, like Leyte Gulf or Plan Gold. And then there were some that were just lying around, like Tiger of Malaya.

The program had a number of flaws, not least the long period in which the game was "proposed" before we started getting it ready for press. Most of the Classic Wargames have taken much longer to get into print than we would have liked, and for many customers this seemed even longer as they counted it as "paid for" from the time they provided their credit card information. So between that effect and the large number of credit cards that expired while the games went through their proposal stages, we decided to revise the program.

When we put the revised program before the masses, there were three proposals, one of which would be declared the winner after just a few weeks. Wanting to minimize the wait between "winning" and publication, I chose a pair of games that were more or less in publishable shape. Army of Lappland had been designed years ago, when I was doing a whole slew of Finnish-themed wargames. Red Fortress, a game about the Romanian siege of Odessa, I had designed in the mid-1990s as a sequel to Red Steel. I think we put both of them in the Panzer General II computer game, but I really can't remember and deleted all my "playware" from this machine long ago.

That made for two good choices, but to make the program work as we wanted there needed to be a third. I hit up Brian Knipple for a contribution, but the third game needed to be more or less the same size as the others. Everything he had was either much larger or much smaller, and he suggested, "What about the Nomonhan game?"

We'd talked about and messed with a game on the Soviet-Japanese battles in western Manchuria since well before there was an 119694_avalanche Press, and so I added Red Desert to the list with every intention of watching it lose. It seemed a less attractive topic than the other two, at least to my eye, and we backed it with less Daily Content than the other two entries. It was intended to lose, a sacrificial place-holder.

And instead it drew by far the most orders of the three proposals. In an age where shopping has somehow become a competitive sport, where one does not buy things online but "wins" them in auctions, the people had spoken. I thought long and hard about simply ignoring them: Red Desert was also the least expensive of the three proposals, and with a smaller margin than the other two there was little to recommend it from a financial standpoint. All three could have been justified for production, but I didn't see how we could cram three hard-core wargames on the schedule. I chose Red Desert and Army of Lappland as the two highest order-takers, though Red Fortress was within a percentage point of the others.

Many things are clearer in hindsight, and I probably should not have approved Red Desert for production and only added one game to the roster. The problem with Classic Wargames from the start has been that many of them are indeed "holy grail" games — something pursued by the designer not from any rational economic motive but because they really want to work on it. A holy grail game by definition is much harder to finish, since the designer wants to tinker continually with this labor of love, and Alamein, Battles of 1866, Hearts of Iron and Empires End all suffered accordingly.

Red Desert had no such problems; it's mostly been waiting for some of the others to wrap though I did write a bunch of Panzer Grenadier scenarios on the same battles at the same time. It was a satisfying project, but I can't claim to have felt any particular obsession for it. Here's how it finally shook out.

The Pretty Pieces!

The Nomonhan battlefield fits nicely on one map, with enough room to use large hexes. The hexes are comfortably large enough to support the 2/3-inch counters we use in the Panzer Grenadier series, and so we switched over to the bigger pieces for this game even though its sisters, Alamein and Island of Death, use the standard 1/2-inch size.

That makes an enormous difference in ease of use. The game system places a lot of information on the counters: unit type, battalion designation, brigade or regiment affiliation, divisional formation, morale, armor or ant-tank strength, unit size, attack strength, defense strength, and movement allowance: a potential of 10 data points. The bigger canvas makes these pieces much easier to use, and I'm very happy with the result. Otherwise, the pieces follow the same design as those for Alamein and Island of Death.

On the Ground

The Nomonhan battles took place between May and August of 1939. The game reflects this with four scenarios plus a campaign game, as well as variations on all of the above.

The game system rules are very similar to those from Alamein, with the only really noticeable exception being some modifications to the supply rules to reflect the situation. Formations also yield fewer benefits, as neither army which fought in the Mongol/Manchurian borderlands was as efficient as the Italian Army, let alone the Germans or British.

The Soviets have the edge in artillery, supply, armor quality and quantity, and numbers. The Japanese have better infantry morale and ... not much else. Defeat in the Nomonhan battle shocked the Japanese military, not least because the Japanese thought they had committed masses of armor and artillery, only to find the Soviets unimpressed.

It's a crunchy game system, to borrow a role-playing design term, but it's a very elegant one and adapts to Nomonhan very well. There are many games out there that are much more complex than this one, but it is the most involved that we publish - what some would call a "real wargame."

In the Air

Red Desert uses the same air system found in Alamein. Each player has fighter and bomber squadrons, which are placed on missions each day: air superiority, ground support, harassment, ground strike or supply interdiction. The Japanese have a serious edge in the air, with much better fighters and often an advantage in numbers as well.

Japanese air superiority evens up the two sides in this game. The Ki.27 fighters will simply blow the Soviet biplanes out of the air, but Japan is hard-pressed to make up any losses. By the end of the campaign, the Japanese were sending second-line squadrons of biplane fighters to the front, where the Soviets promptly shot them to pieces.

This is 1939, not 1942, and neither air force is yet as adept at supporting ground forces as those seen in Alamein. The Japanese can probably force their will on the Red Air Force most of the time, but air power alone will not win this war.

The Minor Allies

One of my favorite aspects of wargame design is the opportunity to include "gonzo" units in the games — unusual pieces with special qualities. Each side has allied troops that definitely qualify as gonzo. Finding details of Mongolian and Manchukuoan military organization took a while.

On the Soviet side, there are several weak cavalry divisions and an "armored brigade" (boasting 17 armored cars!) from the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Army. The Mongolian divisions have only two small regiments each, plus an artillery battalion and an armored car company, about 2,000 men, and so they did not rate treatment as "formations" in game terms. The Red Army also treated them as smaller unit, using them to screen the flanks of the battlefield.

The Japanese have the dubious assistance of two cavalry brigades from the Empire of Manchukuo, the puppet state they established in Manchuria in 1931. The Manchukuoan troops were intended to "suppress banditry," a catch-all term covering battles against political insurgents as well as outright criminals. The Manchukuoan cavalry — mostly ethnic Mongolians themselves — fought the Mongolians in the early stages of the battle, then were re-assigned to flank protection and finally stationed in the Japanese rear areas by the battle's end.

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