Bridge Busting

(This has turned out to be a very difficult post to write for a number of reasons - hence the delay. I think I'm getting my point across now, but we'll see.)

Mike and I met Monday night to try out the highly anticipated Devil's Cauldron game recently released by Multiman Publishing.

The Devil's Cauldron covers the northern half of Operation Market Garden – the Allies attempt at an airborne-based conquest of Arnhem and Nijmegen. This is, I believe, Mike's favorite battle of WWII. TDC features a new rules system “Grand Tactical System” primarily designed by Adam Starkweather. TDC is the first game to be released with this rules system, though others have been placed in MMP's preorder system for likely future release.

The game itself is very big. 12 countersheets, four full-size maps (three are backprinted with scenario-specific maps) and three letter-sized map extensions. There's the series rulebook, game-specific rulebook, rules summary booklet, and an extensive historical booklet.

In preparation for our play, I'd been reading through the rules, trying to get things into my head. I never really had time to push any counters around, so I hadn't actually worked through the game mechanics to get practical experience. Turns out, Mike hadn't either. He commented as we were getting set up that he might have been the least prepared for this as anything we'd tried to that point. Fortunately, I'd printed out some flowcharts available for download on the TDC support website. I'd heard they were handy, so I figured it couldn't hurt.

With all this taken into account, we decided to play Introductory Scenario #1 as a joint endeavor to learn the mechanics. A good thing, too. If we had been concentrating on competition vs. learning, a lot of things would have been missed. After massive rulebook page shuffling (more on this later) we got through a somewhat contrived turn of the first introductory scenario in something over an hour. Probably closer to two.

We both felt we were as prepared as we were going to get for the 2nd Intro scenario, so we gave that a go. I took the Axis, and Mike took the Allies. In this scenario (“Little Omaha”) the Allies are trying to capture the road and railway bridges in Nijmegen within two turns (four hours), while the Axis are trying to hold them off. In our run through this scenario, Mike's 82nd Airborne 504th PIR pretty much walked through their left flank and overwhelmed the small defending force in the fort north of the bridges. Group Hot's job, however, was to take the city-sides of the two bridges while the 504th PIR took the north side. Group Hot didn't do so well. Some of Mike's legendary die rolling came into play (I believe he failed a 70% rally chance for one particular unit on 6 of 7 die rolls) and I had an apparently highly-motivated SS unit defending the south entrance to the road bridge at Hunnerpark. (The city hexes of Nijmegen can be seen here - the two bridges to defend are in 38.63 and 41.64.) After the first, turn, Mike didn't see any possible way he could take both bridges and win. The number of activations you get are deceiving, however, and Mike made much more progress than he expected. By the end of the scenario, he had taken the fort at 37.60 north of town, and the railway bridge. He had also taken the northern entrance to the road bridge, but that SS unit still held the southern entrance. Per the victory conditions, this was a draw.

I think we were feeling a lot better about the system by the end of the 2nd scenario. We finished both scenarios including setup and some counter punching and LOTS of rulebook shuffling in about 5 hours.

Thoughts About the Game System

This is the first released game using the new Grand Tactical Series ruleset. This system functions much differently than other games I've played for a variety of reasons.

Scale

The ground scale of this game is 500 meters per hex. Other tactical games I play have scales of 200m/hex (Panzer Grenadier) or 30m/hex (Combat Commander). OCS, on the other hand is either 2.5 (Sicily) or 5 (all others) miles/hex. The scale provides a grander scope than the PG or CC, but provides more intimate and tactical detail than OCS. (Which is expected as it's “grand tactical” and not operational.) Counters usually represent companies of infantry, tanks, or engineers. Again, at a higher level than PG's platoons and CC's squads.

The time scale is 2 hours/turn – 7 turns per day with an additional, restricted, night turn. Again, much higher than the 15 minutes/turn of PG and the nebulous, but short, time markers of CC.

The higher level lets large battles (such as Operation Market Garden) be played out, but without completely overwhelming you. The campaign map for Devil's Cauldron is approximately 100 hexes by 60 hexes (50 km by 30 km). I think the ground scale is well chosen. It will be interesting to see what other battles are covered in the future. I wouldn't want to attempt more than a four-map game at this level. It will be interesting to see how the full Market Garden campaign plays out after When Eagles Dare is released and how many people actually attempt to play the full thing.

Turn Sequence

This is a chit-pull system. A differentiating feature to this game system is that not all the chits you pull are the same. In the campaign game, every turn will see chits in the cup for each division that's in play, a “Direct Command” chit for each side, and some number of formation chits representing individual formations in play.

At the beginning of a turn, each division spends dispatch points to buy its formation chits to put in the cup. You can pay 1 dispatch point to put a formation's chit in the cup next turn, or 2 points to put it in this turn. A division will acquire no more than three dispatch points per turn, though, (and could even lose one) so you're not going to want to burn these too quickly.

What you can do depends on which chit is pulled. Every division has command points, and these are spent on unit actions. How you spend them depends on the chit that's pulled.

Formation Chits: these are the most flexible (but remember you spent at least one dispatch point putting it in here.) This activates all units in that formation (and the counters are color coded by division and formation) and allows them complete freedom of actions for no cost in command points. A unit can perform a 2nd action immediately after its first for 1 command point, but the action cannot be the same one it just performed. (So it can't move twice in one activation, for example.)

Divisional Chits: these activate ALL units in a division (all formations) and allows restricted actions for no command point cost. This free action cannot involve combat or moving into an enemy units fire zone (basically any hex an enemy unit could fire into). For 1 command point, the unit can immediately take a second, unrestricted action. This does lead to units passing their first action, then spending a command point to fire on an enemy unit. Something they can't do for free under a divisional action. This is also when you roll for the division to see how many additional command and dispatch points it acquires.

Direct Command chits. Finally, each army has a single Direct Command chit that allows you to activate ANY in-command unit for a cost of one command point from that unit's division. They cannot perform second actions under this type of activation.

As you can tell, if you put a formation's activation chit into the cup, units in that formation could be activated up to three times in a turn, and perform up to five actions. This allows units to do more than you'd initially expect in a turn, and the chit-purchase system allows you to focus energy in places you require it. In the end, this creates a pacing mechanism that keeps you from using all your units all the time.

Production

This is a rather good looking game. The maps are among the best looking I've ever seen. As you can see in the upper right corner of the map image I linked to earlier, all non-city hexes are outlined in stars, not full hexes. This puts the hex into the background and pulls the terrain forward. The terrain type for a given hex is indicated by the color of the dot in the middle of the hex. Now, we only played on a VERY small portion of the map, but I was concerned these two human factors would make the map difficult to play on. In the end, it seemed to not matter. There was a fair amount of picking up counters to check terrain types, but nothing too bad. The “disappearing” hexes worked. Hopefully we see this style on more maps in the future.

The counters, however, leave me a bit cold. I don't have a problem with the watermarks as opposed to some, but I'm NOT a fan of each army using native symbology for the different units. German infantry units are indicated by a different symbol than British. And (from what I've seen in counters for the upcoming games) they're keeping up the differentiation with the French and other armies. I don't like this. It looks fantastic, but unless you're really familiar with the German symbology, it hurts you in figuring out what a piece actually is. There's a lot of information on the counters (up to 7 different ratings), but in the end we really didn't have a problem remembering which number was which.

Rules

The rulebook, however, is where this game goes off the rails. There are three – a series rulebook, a series summary rulebook, and a game-specific book. Given the split with the two series rulebooks, I expected something like Games Workshop's Warmaster rulebook – the verbose, illustrated, example-ridden rulebook in the front, and then a concise, detailed, complete summary. With TDC, you get feeble attempts at both, and actually receive neither.

The summary is just that. A summary. It is not complete, and is only useful for an introduction into the rules. It is not usable alone, even as a reference tool after you know the rules. Much information simply doesn't exist in there. The most useful thing it provides is the sequence of play on the back.

The game-specific rulebook is pretty good. The inside cover provides a required summary of all the different symbolgy found on the counters. Next is a description of terrain effects with lots of illustrated examples of tricky bits like raised roads, ferries, and viaducts. Also covered are paradrops, the Club Route, and army specific rules. Last come the scenarios, with requisite detail. I have no real quibbles with the game-specific book.

The series rulebook, however, is a mess. It's written in a conversational style with lots of repetition when rules need to be brought up in multiple places. Well, that's what they claim. The organization, however, is atrocious. As an example, multiple times throughout the rulebook they say you can attempt to avoid becoming suppressed by taking a cohesion hit. Great. Except, they haven't told you what the effects of taking a cohesion hit are to that point. No prob, go look in the table of contents. (there's no index.) Nope. Nothing there. Okay, maybe the Rally section? Nope. That just tells me that I can try to remove them, but not if it's in an enemy fire zone during the day. The cohesion hits rules actually in the combat results section that's a 3rd level header not shown in the table of contents. And, there's a number of times when suppression or cohesion hits can occur that are NOT in combat. So why put those rules there?

Most rulebooks of any significant length have a “definition of terms” section towards the front that introduce you to the terms as they're used in the game and point you to the rules where they're defined. Not this rulebook, no sirree. The glossary is in the back. And over the 52 entries in the glossary, want to know how many refer back into the rules? Zero. In fact, there are rules embedded in the glossary. For example, the Assault Rating entry in the glossary tells you that the color of the box on the counter containing this rating determines the line on the CRT used to find the result of an assault. Is this information anywhere else in the rulebook? Nope. Not even in the description of a counter, where it should be. All it says there is that the color around the box defines the weapons class. Nothing about the game implications of that until you get to the glossary. And, of course, none of that information is reflected in the ToC.

There's also gratuitous use of whitespace around anything that involves bullet points or numbered lists. Combine that with the extensive examples, and you end up with the Assault rules (the most complicated part of the game) spread over six pages. On top of that, when using the rules as written, assaults are nearly impossible to comprehend without use of the flowchart provided on the Devil's Cauldron support site. And even THAT is incomplete as it continues the trend of not referring you back into the rules, leaving you to leaf through 6 pages of rules to figure out what you actually do in any one of the 30 different cells in the assault flowchart. (No, I'm not exaggerating. That's an exact count.)

Maybe I'm a bit sensitive as I'm a technical writer by trade and have a relatively high standard in what I consider to be a good rulebook. But, then again, maybe not. I'd estimate that around half the time we were playing our two scenarios at least one of us was rifling through the rulebook trying to figure something out. Given the fantastic rulebooks that come with games such as the OCS series, Here I Stand, and Combat Commander, a rulebook written this poorly comes off as a major disappointment. In addition, MMP has not yet published the series rules online so we don't even have access to a searchable copy. Given the useless TOC, lack of index, and minimal cross-references, finding thing in the rulebook is neigh-on impossible if you don't already know where to look.

Now, by the time we were reaching the end of the 2nd scenario, we were getting things pretty well sorted out. The game isn't really THAT complicated (outside of assaults) but deciphering how the game is supposed to be played from the rulebook is not straightforward. The game seems to shine when played in bigger scenarios that provide for many chits in the activation cup. (The 2nd introductory scenario was quite enjoyable, and we had 11 chits in play.) I'm very curious to see how difficult it will be to learn how to perform airdrops, etc. directly from the rulebook.

The Devil's Cauldron is not a cheap game. (It retails somewhere in the $160 range.) It's big. It does provide some new approaches to limiting what units are capable of at any given time, and seems to provide some game-specific rules that model various aspects of the Market Garden campaign pretty well. It seems to be a very good game and I believe rewards the time spent learning how to play it. It is sad, however, that the time spent learning it is lengthened so much by the abysmal rulebook.

I can't really give a good review of the game until I play larger scenarios. (The designer has said his favorite scenario is the 2nd Advanced scenario "A Near Run Thing" or something like that.) If I was splitting out my review score like some of the podcasts do, it would go something like this:

Production: 4 stars. It's a well produced game, not stunning. For whatever reason, I was expecting it to be in a Case Blue sized box, but it's in a large flat box - fortunately, they use the space to avoid an extra fold in the maps - something Avalanche couldn't figure out with Alamein.
Artwork: 4 stars (one of best looking games out there, but the counter imagery knocks it down to 4 stars)
Gameplay: 4 stars (possibly going higher in bigger scenarios)
Rulebook: 2 stars (and I'm being generous)
Fun Factor: 3 stars (and this will likely be higher with bigger scenarios)

Overall: If you average that out, it's 3.4 stars. I think this might go up to just under 4 when it hits its sweetspot on scenario size, but it cannot go higher without a complete rewrite of the series rulebook. It's nearly worthless as is.