I'm with Paul on the issues of surprise and the 360 degree fight.av8rmongo wrote:Another technique that can be used to bring some maneuver back into the game is to think outside the box ....
Rules rarely promote or even permit the idea that an "off board" flank is vulnerable. But some fights are 360 degree fights. We have off board artillery why not off board movement.
Some rules may provide for off-board maneuver, as he has described. But if your rules don't, simple mechanisms can be created by the game master to give similar effect.
For example take the game I inserted pictures from above. Go back to the first, distant, picture. It was a pretty quick pick-up game. One fellow, James (Palo Alto from this forum), responded to my invitation for a battle.
We agreed on a Barbarossa battle -- early July, 1941, somewhere on the road through the baltic states. I set up a pretty big board, but wanted to keep the battle fairly tight. So I put a cross-roads, village, and some outlying farms near the center. To reflect the confusing circumstances that Soviet commanders faced, and to intentionally "waste" a lot of the battleboard, I gave James odds for which edge he would enter n, and had him role the dice in secret. I was forced to set up an all-around defence, with some sense that he was most likely to come at me from the west. He didn't! Fortunately my screening force delayed him enough for me to re-deploy my defenses. But it was a tight-run thing.
No parking lots of tanks, advancing in a line wheel-to-hub, while rolling buckets of dice. I think its all in the game set-up. Thinking outside the box is right. Scale your forces, and use a little creativity.
