Side By Side Series No. 1

Preamble:

Those of you who have followed or read BigBoard for a longer time, might recall my Side by Side series of game plays where I took two titles on the same topic and played both and compared the first was A Victory Denied and PanzerGruppe Guderian [SPI deluxe edition]. As a corollary to that over the past few months I have been taking stock of the massive amount of digital content, resources, books and games I have. How best to learn from them? Use them? Find what is of value?

This might be the beginning of such an endeavor to utilize and glean value from all the crap I have collected for decades 😊. So an occasional look at games and system, books and magazines that we can look for similarities in design and differences in outcome and all that sits in between.

Two Battles, Two Designs: SPI’s Borodino (1972) and GDW’s Attack in the Ardennes (1982)

A comparative analysis or perhaps better assessment, of game design and historical context across 132 years and two utterly different ways war was fought.

Sources: S&T #32 (1972) · mapandcounters-blog posts on SPI Borodino and GDW Attack in the Ardennes · Digital Library entries (Nafziger, Chandler, Fisher, Neillands, MacDonald, Leonard) · `Wiki/periods/wwii-western-europe-1944.md` · `Wiki/commanders/napoleon-bonaparte.md` · related reference library game scans.

1. Why these two

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These two games were chosen because, on the face of it, they could not be less alike. SPI’s Borodino, the John Young monthly game in Strategy & Tactics number 32 (May 1972), is the canonical 1970s SPI hex-and-counter-CRT title;  division scale Napoleonic combat, one-hour turns, 400-metre hexes.

It has a chassis that anyone who learned wargames in that decade can teach themselves in an afternoon. GDW’s Attack in the Ardennes (1982), Frank Chadwick’s contribution to the long shelf of Battle of the Bulge titles, is the contrarian’s Bulge: a battalion / regiment-scale point-to-point game; a notable early (possible the 2nd such game?). With twelve-hour turns, no scenarios shorter than the full eleven-day campaign, and a combat system imported wholesale from A House Divided and Soldier King — neither of which, on first reading, has any business in a 1944 Western Front title.

Map and Counter Blog Posts:

As a way to honor our now departed blogger from Map and Counter, Joe I hope to use his thoughts and feelings on older standards and classics as a starting point, then proceed from there. .

SPI, Borodino (1972)

BORODINO is a historical simulation of the three-day battle between the main French and Russian Armies on the road to Moscow in September, 1812. BORODINO was originally published as the insert game for S&T #32; later it was reissued as an independent game in the standard SPI flat plastic game tray format. BORODINO was designed by John Young, and published in 1972 by Simulations Publications, Incorporated (SPI).

DESCRIPTION BORODINO is a grand tactical (division level) simulation of the bloody, seesaw battle between the French Army, led by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and the main Russian Army, commanded by Marshal Prince Kutusov, on 7 September 1812, near the Russian village of Borodino. The Russians, approximately 120,000 strong, were deployed in powerful prepared positions astride the Moscow road and along the banks of the Kalotchka River. After a sharp clash on the 5th, between the French advanced guard and the Russian left at Schevardino,

September 6th was relatively quiet; Bonaparte used that day to reconnoiter the Russian line, while the bulk of his army, some 135,000 troops, massed at the front. Fortunately for Napoleon, the Russian Army did not interfere with the assembling French troops, Kutusov choosing, instead, to make modest adjustments in his dispositions in anticipation of the impending French attack. That attack began with a massive artillery bombardment at 6:00 am on 7 September. This is the situation confronting the Russian and French players at the beginning of the 7 September Grand Battle game.

The historical result of the battle was a tactical victory for Napoleon. But it was a strategic victory for Kutusov, since he was able to withdraw with the bulk of his army, approximately 90,000 men, still under arms. Napoleon failed to achieve the decisive battlefield victory he had sought since his invasion of Russia began in late June 1812;

Kutusov missed his best opportunity on 6 September to defeat the French Army in detail. It is up to the players to see if they can do better than their historical counterparts did.

Each game turn in BORODINO is divided into two phases: the movement phase, and the combat phase. The French player is always the first player to act. Reinforcements, if called for, arrive at the beginning of the movement phase, and move normally on the turn of entry. Combat is mandatory between adjacent units, and all units adjacent to attackers must be engaged, either by direct combat, or by artillery bombardment. Artillery may attack enemy units at either one hex (adjacent) or two hexes (bombardment). Artillery may fire over intervening units, but terrain (forest, for instance) blocks artillery fire if the blocking terrain is in an intervening hex.

BORODINO is a must-own for anyone who likes the Napoleonic era. It is a great introductory game for beginners, and it is an even better “beer and pretzels” game for more experienced players who want a break from the bigger, more complicated titles.

BORODINO offers three short scenarios, and one extended game that combines all three days of the battle. The three short scenarios each cover one day of the battle. They are: the 5 September, Battle Game, which covers the French advanced guard’s assault on the Schevardino Redoubt; the 6 September, Battle Game, which, historically, was a day of relative inactivity for both armies; and the 7 September, Battle Game, which simulates the climactic clash between the defending Russians and the fully assembled French Army. The Grand Battle Game combines all three days into one simulation. The longer game allows both players to refight the entire battle beginning with the opening clash at Schevardino. To simulate Kutusov’s initial failure to recognize the danger to his left flank, in both the 5 September and Grand Battle Games, the Russian player may not move any of his units north of the Great Redoubt until the 1500 game turn. On the 1500 game turn, one Russian unit is freed to move.

Thereafter, one additional unit is released from this restriction on each succeeding game turn. Two optional rules are included by the designer to increase historical realism, and/or improve play-balance: the Imperial Guard Rule, which limits both players in the use of their respective Imperial Guards; and the Moscow Militia Rule, which allows the Russian player to receive eleven Moscow Militia units as additional reinforcements. These militia units enter, one per game turn, on the east map edge beginning on game turn 11.

One final note: BORODINO is only one of a large collection of SPI titles designed by John Young that span the period from the Napoleonic Wars, through the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War, and up to and including World War II.

I confess that I am a big fan of Young’s many games. His designs are almost always innovative, interesting, playable, and fun. Despite his tragic and untimely death many years ago, John Young leaves behind a library of some of the very best game designs that, in my opinion, SPI ever published.

Design Characteristics: Time Scale: 1 hour per game turn Map Scale: 400 meters per hex

Unit Size: brigade/division

Unit Types: infantry, militia (Russian only), cavalry, artillery, and information markers

Number of Players: two

Complexity: low

Solitaire Suitability: above average

Average Playing Time: 2½-6 hours (depending on scenario)

Game Components: One 22″ x 34″ hexagonal grid Map Sheet 100 ½” cardboard Counters One 6″ x 11″ map-fold Set of Rules One 8½” x 11″ Errata Sheet (31 May 73) One small six-sided Die One SPI 12″ x 15″ x 1″ flat 24 compartment plastic Game Box Recommended Reading See my blog post Book Review of this title which is recommended for those visitors interested in further historical background information.
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GDW: Attack in the Ardennes (1982)

ATTACK IN THE ARDENNES is a historical game of World War II combat on the Western Front in winter 1944. The game was designed by Frank A. Chadwick and published by Game Designer’s Workshop (GDW) in 1982.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

At 0530 on 16 December 1944, a massive German offensive, code-named “Wacht am Rhein,” jumped off with a violent, hour-long artillery bombardment from 1,900 guns along eighty-five miles of the Allied front line in the Ardennes region of Belgium. As soon as the barrage lifted, the 250,000 men and 1,100 tanks of Field Marshal Model’s Army Group B smashed into the dazed defenders of this thinly held section of the American line. The German offensive that would come to be known as the “Battle of the Bulge” had begun. The German plan was to tear a hole in the American front and then to rush powerful panzer forces through the newly formed gap. At the center of the American front, Hasso von Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army quickly broke through General Middleton’s US VIIIth Corps. After a short, sharp fight von Manteuffel’s panzers shattered the American 28th Division and began their drive west through the Ardennes.

On the night of 18 December, elements of the 2nd Panzer Division unexpectedly ran into an ad-hoc American unit, Task Force Harper, and a short violent clash erupted. TF Harper could not stop the Germans, and 2nd Panzer soon pushed its way over and through the outnumbered Americans. At this point in the campaign, 2nd Panzer could have swept unopposed into Bastogne, but the Germans bypassed the town, and by the next morning, the opportunity had passed. During the night the 501st Parachute Regiment arrived and immediately took up defensive positions around Bastogne. If the Germans wanted the town now, they would have to fight for it. The rough terrain and forests of the Ardennes, even today, make off-road movement for both wheeled and tracked vehicles difficult and often impossible.

In December, 1944, roads — particularly roads running east to west, and their junctions — were crucial to the German offensive timetable, and seven different roads passed through Bastogne. Although the initial wave of panzers had bypassed the town, the Germans knew that they had to capture Bastogne: possession of this Belgian hamlet was crucial to the continued supply of their armored spearhead driving towards the Meuse.

The Allies, also recognizing the importance of Bastogne, had rushed the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division forward to occupy the town and dig in. The newly-arrived American defenders had been ordered to hold Bastogne whatever the cost; the attacking Germans were just as committed to its capture: one of the great sieges of World War II was about to unfold. And its outcome would be a key factor in the success or failure of the German offensive.

DESCRIPTION ATTACK IN THE ARDENNES is a grand tactical (battalion/regiment) simulation of the first eleven days of the last major German armored attack against the Western Allies in World War II.

Unlike almost all other games on this topic, this title uses a point-to-point rather than a hexagonal map system. One player commands the Allies (American and British forces); the other controls the Germans. The game system, although a little unusual, is not difficult to learn, and even novices will typically grasp the basic substance and intent of the game rules fairly quickly.

ATTACK IN THE ARDENNES follows a simple game turn sequence: the first player (German) Moves and initiates Combat, and then Moves any eligible units and initiates Combat again; the second player (Allied commander) repeats the same sequence, after which the game turn ends. Rules governing supply, although comparatively simple, are important to play and to the German victory conditions. Combat is resolved on the basis of “hits;” a system that is virtually identical to that used in GDW’s SOLDIER KING (1981) and A HOUSE DIVIDED (1981).

The game uses a modified (inverted counter) step-reduction system to account for combat losses. As might be expected, rules governing bridges and river crossings are critical to the German advance. In addition, weather plays the same critical role in the game that it did in the actual battle. The German player wins by accumulating more victory points than his Allied opponent does by the end of the 26 December game turn. Alternatively, the German player can win an immediate, decisive victory by exiting a specific number of supplied units (depending on the game turn) off the map edge west of the Meuse River, at any point prior to game end.

ATTACK IN THE ARDENNES offers only the standard Historical Campaign Game, and there are no optional rules. The game is twenty-two turns long. It begins on 16 December, and ends at the conclusion of the 26 December 1944 game turn. Unlike a number of other games on this topic, there are no shorter scenarios; so barring an early German breakthrough and decisive victory, players should be prepared to slug it out to the bitter end.

A PERSONAL OBSERVATION Every game designer, at some point in his career, just has to try his hand at a “Bulge” game, and Frank Chadwick, it seems, is no exception. ATTACK IN THE ARDENNES, however, is a game with a difference. And, although I needed another game about The Battle of the Bulge about as much as I needed an IRS audit, I decided, years ago, to pick up the GDW version and see how Chadwick had decided to approach the legendary battle.

However, the first thing that I had to get over was the box art: it was, to be charitable, a little off-putting. I don’t know what it is about The Battle of the Bulge, but the subject seems to attract ugly graphics like “free buffets” attract “senior citizens.” If you don’t believe me: take another look at TAHGC’s BULGE ‘65 or OSG’s DARK DECEMBER; and those are just for starters. Be that as it may, GDW promised that the game would be a lot like A HOUSE DIVIDED, and since I liked that game a lot, that’s where I pinned my hopes.

Besides, it is what is inside the box that really counts, I told myself, so I sent off my order and check to GDW and, by and by, the game arrived in the mail. Despite having already read the ATTACK IN THE ARDENNES ad slick, I wasn’t really sure what I would find when I finally pulled the box lid off and began to examine the game. I have to admit that as soon as I had read the rules, I was immediately skeptical about the game’s mechanics.

However, much to my surprise, after a couple of face-to-face matches, I found that the game system worked surprisingly well. The Ardennes — because of its difficult, forested terrain — magnifies the critical importance of the area road net. Thus, the Ardennes is probably one of the few modern battlefields where Chadwick’s choice of a point-to-point movement system for a battalion/regimental level game actually makes sense. ATTACK IN THE ARDENNES takes a little getting used to, but once it has been learned, it is eminently playable and loaded with action. Is it the greatest “Bulge” game that I have ever played? No, far from it; but based on my own experience, I would say that if a player likes A HOUSE DIVIDED, then he should enjoy this game. Design Characteristics: Time Scale: 12 hours per game turn (one am and one pm turn per day) Map Scale: (irrelevant) point to point movement system Unit Size: battalion/regiment Unit Types: armor/panzer, tank destroyer, assault gun, armored cavalry/reconnaissance, mechanized infantry/panzer grenadier, motorized infantry, infantry, parachute infantry, glider infantry, motorized artillery, artillery, Nebelwerfer, engineers, and information counters Number of

Players: two Complexity: average

Solitaire Suitability: average

Average Playing Time: 3-5 + hours

Game Components: Two 17″ x 22″ point-to-point Map Sheets (with Eliminated, Scrapped, and Replacement Unit Boxes incorporated)

320 ⅝” cardboard Counters One 8½” x 11″

Rules Booklet (with Errata from 28 July 1982 included)

One 8½” x 11″ Turn Record Chart One 4″ x 6″

GDW Customer Survey Card

Two six-sided Dice

One 9¼” x 11½” x 2″ bookcase-style Game Box

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The Gap

What makes the comparison productive is the gap or disparate differences as we shall see. Both games are operational. Both take well a documented campaign and are asking the player whether better choices could have produced different outcomes. Both ship with rules that a normally intelligent person can read in one sitting; a blessing in today’s rulescape.

The design differences are stark between the two. As are the design philosophies underneath them. A side-by-side reading exposes how much the period shaped the game. Pretty natural to see this, but even SPI’s early generic approach acknowledges the issues for Napoleonic warfare. Napoleonic battle is most often a one-day affair on a contained set piece battlefield where massed columns of infantry and lines of artillery need to be moved across a relatively open landscape; the right design abstraction is a high-resolution hex grid with everything-attacks-everything rules.

The 1944 Ardennes is the opposite: a densely forested operational depth where roads dictate everything, where a battalion two miles east of a junction might as well be on Mars unless that junction is held, and where the design problem is to make road geometry and seizure of named towns feel like the actual combat in a way a hex grid could/would struggle with. Chadwick’s choice to use a point-to-point map for Attack in the Ardennes, dismissed at first glance as an oddity, turns out to be the most defensible decision in the design.

This report walks both halves in parallel. First the historical battles, with enough biographical and operational background that the game decisions make sense. Then the games themselves: design characteristics, rule differences, the major design choices each one made and the implications. Then the leaders on both sides of both battles — the two campaigns are bookended by very different leadership cultures, and the games appear to encode those cultures in their rules and victory conditions.

Finally a synthesis on similarities and contrasts, with pointers to deeper sources in the BigBoard reference library and a touch of Military theory to round off the chat. This article will be in two parts. .

2. Borodino, 7 September 1812 — historical context

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2.1 The campaign

Napoleon Bonaparte had crossed the Niemen on 24 June 1812 with the largest army Europe had ever assembled in one operational theatre — somewhere between 600,000 and 685,000 men in the Grande Armée, against an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 Russians scattered across three commands along the western frontier. The proximate justification was the Tsar’s withdrawal from the Continental System, the economic blockade of Britain that Napoleon had built across Europe by 1810; the deeper cause was Napoleon’s growing conviction, audible in his correspondence from 1811 forward, that a single decisive battle on Russian soil could force Tsar Alexander I to terms before the campaign’s logistical realities consumed the army. The plan was to defeat the Russian armies in detail before they could combine, force a decisive engagement, dictate peace, and be back in Vilna or Smolensk before the Russian winter closed. Classic Napoleonic thinking that we saw executed deftly against the Prussians and Austrians time and time again.

Almost none of that worked. The two main Russian armies — General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly’s First Western Army and Prince Pyotr Bagration’s Second Western Army — successfully evaded Napoleon’s pincer through July and most of August, withdrawing east, trading space for time, applying scorched earth to the rural economy that the Grande Armée was supposed to live off (per the Napoleonic logistical doctrine that S&T #32 describes in detail: the logistical system that worked in central Europe collapsed in Russia within weeks). By the time the Russians united at Smolensk on 3 August, the Grande Armée had already lost a third of its strength to heat, exhaustion, desertion, dysentery, and the disappearance of supply at the operational scale Napoleon’s army had been built for. The Battle of Smolensk on 16–18 August was supposed to be the decisive moment; the Russians fought a sharp rearguard action and slipped away again. By the end of August the Grande Armée in the field was perhaps 156,000 (a 70% reduction), with many tens of thousands of stragglers and wounded scattered along the line of advance.

Tsar Alexander, under intense political pressure from the Moscow nobility and the Orthodox church to fight, replaced Barclay de Tolly with the elderly, half-blind, politically connected Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov on 17 August. Barclay had been right about strategy — keep the army intact, draw the French deeper into a logistical pit — but his Baltic-German background made him an unsustainable choice once the Russian capital itself was threatened. Kutuzov inherited Barclay’s army on 29 August, by which time Moscow lay only some 110 miles to the east. Politically he had to fight; militarily he held the same view Barclay did, but with one concession. He would offer one battle, in a position of his choosing, with most of his strength still concentrated, and he would accept retreat afterwards if that battle did not break the French. The position he chose was at the village of Borodino on the new Smolensk road, astride the Moscow approaches and behind the sluggish Kalotchka stream.

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2.2 The battle

Approximately 120,000 Russians faced approximately 130,000–135,000 French and allied troops along a six-mile front. Napoleon had reconnoitered the Russian position personally on 5 and 6 September and rejected, against the advice of Marshal Davout, the wide left-hook through the woods south of the position that might have rolled up Bagration’s flank without a frontal attack. The reasons remain debated — fatigue, illness (Napoleon was probably running a low-grade urinary tract infection through the entire battle), or the conviction that any complex manoeuvre in front of a determined Russian army would risk losing the battle through dispersion. The decision committed the French to a frontal grinding attack against a dug-in defender across the Russian centre and left, where the redoubts, flèches, and fortified Bagration positions waited.

The battle opened with a French artillery bombardment at dawn on 7 September and lasted until darkness. The Bagration flèches in the Russian centre-left were taken, lost, retaken, and taken again at appalling cost; Bagration himself was mortally wounded around 10 a.m.

The Great Redoubt — Raevsky’s position on the Russian centre-right — held until mid-afternoon despite repeated French infantry assaults and a celebrated cavalry charge by Auguste de Caulaincourt, who died leading it. The Russian cavalry raid on the French left under Uvarov and Platov around midday provoked a French response that may have delayed the commitment of the Imperial Guard for the decisive blow against the Russian centre — Napoleon refused throughout the day to release the Old Guard, the force that historically broke battles of this scale. By nightfall the French held the field; the Russians had retreated several miles in good order. French casualties: somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000, including 49 generals. Russian casualties: 40,000 to 45,000, including 23 generals, notably Bagration mortally.

By the brutal arithmetic of Napoleonic battle, Borodino was a French tactical victory: they held the ground and inflicted more casualties than they took. By every other measure that matters namely; strategic, political, and operational, it was the moment the campaign was effectively lost. Kutuzov had preserved the bulk of his army. Napoleon had spent the Grande Armée’s last reserves of fighting strength on a position the Russians chose, on a day the Russians dictated, for the city the Russians then abandoned anyway. The French entered Moscow on 14 September; the Russians withdrew through Moscow and beyond it; Moscow burned that night and for most of the following week; Kutuzov’s army re-formed at the Tarutino camp south-east of the city; and on 19 October Napoleon, unable to extract a peace, started the retreat that would destroy what was left.

2.3 What Borodino is asking the player

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The S&T #32 article on Napoleon at War, which is the historical lens through which the magazine wants players to view Borodino, is explicit on the doctrinal point: Napoleonic battle was meant to end campaigns, with what would be known as Clausewitz like defining moments.

Bonaparte’s central operational concept, derived from the Revolutionary innovations and systematized by him into doctrine, was to manoeuvre to bring the enemy’s main army to battle on terms favorable to the French and then to destroy it through combined arms shock — l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace. The corps system, the lived-off-the-land logistical revolution, the bataillon carré march column, the central position between separated enemy forces — all of these existed to create the battle of annihilation that left the enemy without a field army. Napoleon won most of his campaigns this way: Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstedt, Friedland, Wagram. As a side note this is on of the get reasons to play Napoleonic titles as the operational scale. Kevin Zuckers 2x,4x etc systems provide this amazing operational tempo and result, as does the Great Campaigns of the ACW by Joeseph Balkowski .

The pattern broke in 1812 because the Russian army never gave him the battle on his terms, and at Borodino, when the Russians did, they fought from a defensive position that absorbed the French shock and bled away the Grande Armée’s last reserves of striking power without breaking. The S&T article calls Borodino a Pyrrhic victory in the same breath as Waterloo: Napoleon’s two great battlefield disappointments, the two times the system that worked everywhere else didn’t.

The game, then, is asking whether John Young’s hex-and-CRT system can let the players relive that question. Could Napoleon have committed the Imperial Guard at the Great Redoubt around 4 p.m. and broken Kutuzov’s centre? Could Kutuzov, less constrained by political optics, have stayed engaged through to dusk and turned the French exhaustion into a counter-attack? Could the Schevardino Redoubt on 5 September — historically a single afternoon’s clash — have been pressed harder by the French to derange the Russian deployment for the main battle? The Grand Battle Game folds all three days into the same simulation; the optional Imperial Guard Rule constrains both players in their use of their respective Guards (each side held back its elite reserve in the actual battle, for different reasons); the Moscow Militia Rule lets eleven Russian militia units trickle in from the eastern map edge from turn 11 onwards, modelling the political constituency that would have demanded their commitment if available. These are exactly the historical contingencies the S&T magazine’s editorial line asks players to test.

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3. The Battle of the Bulge, 16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945 — historical context

3.1 The campaign

By December 1944 the Western Allies had pushed the Wehrmacht out of France, taken most of Belgium and Luxembourg, opened Antwerp as a forward port (29 November), and stood on the German frontier from the Vosges to the Maas. The Allied operational reality was less heroic than the situation map suggested. Patton’s Third Army had outrun its fuel and was stalled in Lorraine; Bradley’s 12th Army Group had thinned the Ardennes sector to the bare minimum (four divisions across an eighty-five-mile front, with two battered divisions resting and two green ones learning the trade) so that the offensives north and south could be supplied; supply lines back to the Normandy beaches and Cherbourg were consuming a vast share of available transport. The Allied armies were operationally winning but logistically exhausted, and the Allied command structure was on the cusp of the long-running Eisenhower–Montgomery dispute over whether the final advance into Germany should be a single thrust on the northern axis (Montgomery’s view) or the broad-front advance Eisenhower had committed to. Into this seam, Hitler poured a counter-offensive he had been planning since September.

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The German plan, codenamed Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine — a deliberately defensive cover name), was the last strategic offensive the Third Reich would mount on the Western Front. The objective was Antwerp: drive across the Meuse, split the British 21st Army Group from the American 12th, retake the port that the Allied armies depended on, and force a separate peace with the Western powers before the Soviet armies in the East could finish their winter offensive. The instrument was Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B, with three armies arrayed north to south: SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army on the right (the SS shock force, including Kampfgruppe Peiper), General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army in the centre (the Wehrmacht professionals, with the Panzer Lehr and 2nd Panzer divisions), and General Erich Brandenberger’s Seventh Army on the left (the supporting infantry shoulder). Total commitment: roughly 250,000 men, 1,100 tanks and assault guns, against perhaps 80,000 American defenders in the initial sector.

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The Sixth SS Panzer Army’s drive in the north, against the dug-in 99th and 2nd Infantry Divisions on the Elsenborn Ridge, stalled within forty-eight hours: the American defence held, road conditions stymied the SS panzers, and Kampfgruppe Peiper — the SS spearhead — drove past the Allies’ fuel dumps without reaching them, ran out of fuel itself near Stoumont and La Gleize, abandoned its vehicles, and walked back to German lines on Christmas Eve. Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army in the centre achieved the breakthrough Dietrich’s failed to: through a thinly held VIII Corps sector, shattering the 28th Division, opening a gap that produced the famous “bulge” on the operational maps. By 18 December Manteuffel’s spearheads had bypassed Bastogne (a critical road-junction town held by the 101st Airborne, Combat Command B of 10th Armored, and elements of 9th Armored — units rushed in over the previous forty-eight hours, with the 101st arriving before its full equipment); had run into ad-hoc American resistance at St-Vith (held by 7th Armored Division for a critical six days under Brigadier General Bruce Clarke); and was driving west toward the Meuse. By Christmas Day, 2nd Panzer Division reached Celles, four miles short of the Meuse at Dinant — the deepest point of the German advance — where it was caught by the U.S. 2nd Armored Division and fuel exhaustion together. Patton’s Third Army began arriving from the south on 22 December, having pivoted ninety degrees from its Lorraine front in five days; the 4th Armored Division relieved Bastogne on 26 December. The Allied counter-offensive ran from 3 January through 25 January 1945; the German Bulge was eliminated by the end of January.

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3.2 The Bastogne hinge and the road question

Eisenhower’s response to the breakthrough, made within hours of the German preparation lifting, was the single decision that wrote the campaign’s outcome: Bradley placed under Eisenhower’s direct control on 19 December (formally, the northern half of the Bulge under Montgomery’s 21st Army Group from 20 December), the strategic reserve (XVIII Airborne Corps, including the 82nd and 101st Airborne) committed to the operational depth, and Patton’s Third Army ordered to wheel from south to east and relieve Bastogne. Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg was cut off from the northern half of the bulge by the German penetration, which is the immediate operational reason Montgomery got northern command. The political reverberations of that decision would last decades. But militarily, by the time the orders had reached the units in the field, the German timetable was already broken — broken on the road junctions, broken in particular at Bastogne.

This is the operational fact that Attack in the Ardennes models very cleanly arguably as good or better than any hex-and-counter Bulge game does. The Ardennes is forested terrain. Cross-country movement for tracked vehicles in December 1944 was slow and contested everywhere; for wheeled vehicles, it was effectively impossible. The German offensive was a road-network operation, not a manoeuvre across a continuous front. There were seven roads through Bastogne, and seven more through Saint-Vith, and a finite number of other named junctions — the German timetable depended on seizing those junctions, fueling forward through them, and not letting the Americans hold them long enough to derail the schedule. Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer bypassed Bastogne on 18 December because the 2nd Panzer Division saw an open road west and took it — a defensible operational choice if you trust that Bastogne can be reduced by the following infantry waves. By the morning of 19 December, with the 501st Parachute Regiment in town, that calculation no longer worked, and the Germans now had to siege a town on which their supply line west depended.

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The map for Attack in the Ardennes, then, is not a hex grid at all but a network of nodes and connecting roads, with bridges over the Our and Sûre and Ourthe rivers as critical chokepoints. Whether to cross at Dasburg, Gemünd, or Vianden; whether to push on to Bastogne or bypass; whether the supply truck reaches the panzer division before the panzer division runs out of fuel — these are the questions the game asks. Chadwick understood that the Ardennes is the rare 1944 Western Front battlefield where road geometry is decisive enough that a point-to-point system is not an abstraction at all but a literal model of the operational reality. For me as a non-fan of Point to Point maps, and hideous ones at that, the design is pretty compelling.

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3.3 What Attack in the Ardennes is asking the player

The German victory conditions in the game make the historical question the priority: drive supplied units off the western map edge, beyond the Meuse, before the offensive’s window closes on 26 December 1944. The game runs twenty-two turns (twelve-hour AM/PM cycles for eleven days). The player commanding the Germans must learn the same lesson Manteuffel learned: the offensive’s success depends on capturing road junctions on the schedule the original plan demanded, fueling forward through those junctions, and not getting bogged down in a contested location when the offensive’s tempo cannot sustain a pause. The player commanding the Allies must learn what Eisenhower learned: the offensive collapses if the road junctions hold for forty-eight hours longer than the German plan budgets, and every regiment that can be thrown into a junction on the right day buys those hours.

The game does not give the German player victory for capturing Bastogne; it gives victory for getting the enemy supplied combat power off the western edge. The only fuel source within reach is captured American fuel, and the captured fuel needs roads to flow forward, and the roads need junctions, and Bastogne is one of the junctions. The mechanism of the campaign and the mechanism of the game converge.

4. The two games — design specifications

Field	SPI Borodino (1972)	GDW Attack in the Ardennes (1982)
Designer	John Young	Frank A. Chadwick
Publisher	Simulations Publications, Inc.	Game Designers’ Workshop
First published	Strategy & Tactics #32 (May 1972) — insert game; later as boxed standalone	1982, boxed
Subject	Battle of Borodino, 5–7 September 1812	Battle of the Bulge, 16–26 December 1944
Scale	Grand tactical (division level)	Grand tactical (battalion / regiment level)
Time scale	1 hour per turn	12 hours per turn (AM / PM)
Map system	22″ × 34″ hexagonal grid, 400 m per hex	Two 17″ × 22″ point-to-point sheets
Turn count	Variable by scenario; Grand Battle covers all three days	22 turns (16 Dec AM through 26 Dec PM)
Counter count	100 ½” cardboard counters	320 ⅝” cardboard counters
Sequence	French (first player) Move + Combat → Russian Move + Combat	German (first player) Move + Combat × 2 phases → Allied Move + Combat × 2 phases
Combat system	Odds-ratio CRT with attacker and defender losses	“Hits” system (shared with Soldier King and A House Divided); inverted-counter step reduction
Ranged combat	Artillery: 1-hex direct + 2-hex bombardment, blocked by intervening forest	Implicit in combat resolution; no separate ranged-fire system
Stacking / ZOC	Standard SPI hex stacking + ZOC	Node-based; nodes have capacity and adjacency
Reinforcements	French and Russian reinforcement schedules; Russian players unable to move units north of the Great Redoubt until turn 11 (Schevardino / Grand Battle scenarios)	Both sides receive reinforcements on schedule; Allied counter-offensive units enter from south
Supply	Implicit (single battlefield, single day per scenario)	Explicit and load-bearing — bridges, road network, supply trucks, “out of supply” effects
Weather	None (single September day)	Yes — critical role; fog and overcast suppress Allied air
Air power	None	Allied air interdiction tied to weather
Optional rules	Imperial Guard Rule; Moscow Militia Rule	None — straight historical campaign
Scenarios	5 Sept (Schevardino); 6 Sept (relative inactivity); 7 Sept (the main battle); Grand Battle (all three days)	One: the historical campaign, 16–26 December
Players	Two	Two
Solitaire suitability	Above average (per the SPI evaluation card system)	Average
Average playing time	2½–6 hours depending on scenario	3–5+ hours
Complexity	Low	Average
Victory conditions	Tactical, casualty-and-position based	German: decisive victory by exiting supplied units off western map edge before 26 Dec; otherwise victory points at game end
Errata	31 May 1973	28 July 1982 (included in original rules)

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The adjacent table makes the architectural difference plain. Borodino is a single-day, single-battlefield, hex-grid CRT game built around a fundamentally simple combat model (everyone adjacent attacks; artillery has range). Attack in the Ardennes is an eleven-day, multi-axis, point-to-point game built around a fundamentally different combat model (hits and step reduction) and operational concerns (supply, weather, road geometry, victory through map edge exit) that Borodino doesn’t even have rules for. The two systems share the basic vocabulary of board wargames — players, turns, units, combat — but they’re modelling different aspects of war, and they make different demands of the player.

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5. Game design contrast .

5.1 What each game is trying to capture

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The SPI Borodino design captures the engagement itself — the pointy bits in the mechanics of Napoleonic battle when Russian and French armies are deployed across a six-mile contained battlefield and one side has to break the other through a day of combined-arms conflict. The 1-hour turn and 400-metre hex facilitate this. The scale is the resolution at which a French infantry division committed at the Bagration flèches gets one assault per turn, at which artillery batteries shift position deliberately, at which cavalry charges are events rather than continuous activity. John Young’s choice was to put the player at the level of the corps or division commander on the day. The grand tactical scale is correct for what the game is asking: “given the deployment on the morning of 7 September, what is the best the French can do, and what is the best the Russians can do, under the constraints of how Napoleonic armies actually moved and fought?” . The bigger question regarding the advisability of the invasion is for another design.

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The GDW Attack in the Ardennes design, in contrast, captures the operational campaign the core eleven-day window during which a German offensive could either reach the Meuse and produce a strategic crisis or stall and hand the Allies the war. The 12-hour turn and the point-to-point map are saying: do not worry about which side of which hill an SS company is on; worry about whether Manteuffel has pushed armour through the Clervaux defile by the night of 16/17 December! Is 2nd Panzer at Bastogne or past it on 18 December. Chadwick’s choice was to put the player at the level of the field commander — Manteuffel, Dietrich, Bradley, Patton — making the decisions that actually decided the campaign. The map is a network of nodes because the Ardennes campaign, militarily, was a network problem. But was it a foregone conclusion?

This is why over the last 20 odd years seeing design contrasts has been such a pleasure. These contrasts ‘design for intent ‘ are the one that determines almost everything else: one game is Grand Tactical the other operational, their map systems are different in the way scales of operations actually were different in 1812 and 1944. Napoleonic battle happens on a battlefield you can ride across in an hour. The Ardennes campaign happens across an operational depth that takes a panzer division three days of road-marching to traverse if everything goes right.

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5.2 Combat resolution

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Borodino uses an odds-ratio CRT — the classic SPI approach derived/inherited from Avalon Hill and used through dozens of titles. I’d say refined, but really the 1d6 CRT even in 1981 was getting tired. Attackers compute a combat ratio (attack strength ÷ defence strength, simplified to ratios.), roll a die, cross-reference the result on a table, apply attacker and defender losses. Combat between adjacent units is classic SPI mandatory, not optional — a hex with an enemy adjacent must be attacked, either through ground combat or artillery bombardment. This last rule is doing real work: it forces the Napoleonic player into the historical experience of having a corps in line of battle unable to disengage cleanly, of having to commit to the action whether the position is favorable or not. It is also forcing the more subtle point that Napoleonic battle was not chess: you didn’t get to wait for a better turn. The man in line opposite you was firing back regardless.

Attack in the Ardennes uses a fundamentally different system — the “hits” mechanism shared with GDW’s Soldier King and A House Divided. Combat is resolved on a hits basis: each unit accumulates hits until it is reduced (inverted counter) and then eliminated. The mechanism is borrowed from a system that originally modelled 18th-century and American Civil War battles, and the immediate question is whether it makes sense for 1944 mechanised combat. The mapandcounters review deals with this directly: the reviewer was skeptical at first encounter and was surprised to find that it works in practice. The reason it works is that at the battalion / regiment scale on a point-to-point map, the granular detail of who flanks whom, what arc of fire intersects what hex, is not the right resolution, unless we are delving into ‘monster game land’. What matters is that committed combat units take losses on a schedule, that some take losses faster than others (panzers vs leg infantry vs paratroopers), that a unit reduced once is still in the fight at half strength, and that a unit reduced twice is gone. The hits system models that without the false precision a CRT would impose.

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Both systems are working backward from what the design needs to encode. Borodino encodes the immediacy of Napoleonic combat — the ratio you achieved with the units you concentrated, the casualties both sides took. Attack in the Ardennes applies the attritional grind of 1944 mechanised combat — the slow accumulation of damage on units that remain on the map but lose combat power. Different periods, different mechanisms.

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5.3 Supply and movement

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This is where the games diverge most sharply, because of all the operational realities they could have modelled, this is the one each one had to handle differently.

Borodino doesn’t have supply rules at all, because supply is not a one-day phenomenon at the battlefield scale. It is a campaign-level concern. The Grand Battle scenario covers three days, but on the same battlefield with the same forces in the same logistical situation. One might argue at a more granular scale that cannon ammo becomes an issue at some point for the French?

Movement in Borodino is a typical SPI style, Infantry have X movement points, Cavlry X+ subject to terrain. Arterillery moves the slowest of course. Bridges over the Kalotchka stream constrain the French left, but at the scale of a 400-metre hex, the bridge issue is local rather than operational.

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Attack in the Ardennes, by contrast, builds the entire game around supply and movement. The German player wins by exiting supplied units off the west edge — unsupplied exit doesn’t count. Supply traces back along the road network to friendly supply sources, with bridges as gateway nodes, and weather modulating the trace’s reliability. Truck units are explicit on the map. The Allied player can deny supply by holding bridges and junctions; the German player must capture and hold both. This was the operational reality of the actual campaign — Manteuffel’s fuel crisis on 23–24 December, when 2nd Panzer ran dry within sight of the Meuse, was not a tactical defeat but a supply failure. The game brings that to stark awareness.

Movement on the point-to-point map is constrained by node capacity [a reflection of road, secondary roads and wooded trails no doubt], road type, and weather, with different unit types having different movement allowances along different connections. The result is that the German player spends a lot of attention on logistics and very little on the tactics of any individual engagement; the Allied player spends a lot of attention on chokepoint defence and reinforcement schedule. Both are exactly placing the player into the actual commanders issues on both sides.

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5.4 Time scale and the question of what a turn represents

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A 1-hour turn at Borodino means thirteen daylight turns (roughly 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on 7 September) for the main battle. In thirteen turns the players walk the battle from the opening artillery preparation through the ebb and flow of locations like Great Redoubt, the cavalry raid on the French left, the slow grinding French advance through the centre. Each turn is granular enough that the decisions feel like the decisions Napoleon and Kutuzov might of made, where to commit the next reserve, when to push the cavalry, whether to release the Guard or not. Napoleon’s documented reluctance to release the Old Guard becomes a player-side choice that may or may not swing the battle.

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A 12-hour turn at Attack in the Ardennes means twenty-two turns over eleven days, with each turn the operational equivalent of half a day’s command decisions. The German player doesn’t decide what 2nd Panzer’s third platoon does at 1130 on 18 December; the German player decides whether 2nd Panzer attacks Noville on the morning of the 18th or pushes past Bastogne and attacks Tenneville on the same day. Giving the game replay ability and a suitable level of decision making. In fact, many future titles even at monster scale have relied on the AM/PM time scale to effect the cadence we see in the Ardennes.

Both designers chose time scales that match what the player should be deciding.

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5.5 Scenarios, replayability, and the player’s relationship to history

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Borodino offers four scenarios: each of the three days as a one-day game, and the Grand Battle covering all three. The 5 September Schevardino game is short, focused, and concentrates on a single historical engagement (the French advanced guard’s clash with the Russian left-flank redoubt). The 6 September game models a day on which historically nothing much happened, but which is full of options for both players who want to test what would have happened if either side had been more aggressive on the eve of the main battle. The 7 September Battle Game is the canonical one: full deployment, full strength after a lot of to and fro. The Grand Battle threads them together, its the whole enchilada. The result is a game that scales from a 2-hour evening to a full-day campaign session, with multiple legitimate ways for the historical outcome to be replicated, exceeded, or reversed.

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Attack in the Ardennes offers one scenario: the 22-turn campaign. There are no shorter games. The mapandcounters writer – Joe expressed frustration about this — barring a quick German breakthrough that produces a sudden-death victory, you’re committing to play through to 26 December. The choice is defensible: the Bulge is not a one-day battle, the key decisions don’t bunch in any one turn, and shorter scenarios would either be slices that don’t hold together (the first two days alone aren’t a coherent historical question) or arbitrary (some chunk in the middle without start or finish). But it does reduce replayability in the practical sense — you can play the SPI Borodino three different ways for a reason. You have to play Attack in the Ardennes the same way every time, with different German timing decisions producing different outcomes, but you’re not really getting variety the way the SPI title offers. I see AitA as a historical study. You play it a few times and move it along or shelve it for nostalgia.

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5.6 The optional-rules question

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Borodino, ships with two optional rules that fundamentally change the player experience. The Imperial Guard Rule constrains both players in the use of their respective Guards, the Russian Imperial Guard at Borodino was held back by political considerations Kutuzov could not override; the French Old Guard was held back by Napoleon’s calculation that he would need it for a final blow against either the Russian centre or the political endgame in Moscow.

By making this a player-side rule, the design lets you re-litigate the actual choice Napoleon made (his refusal to commit the Guard at the Great Redoubt around 4 p.m., a decision that has been debated by every Napoleonic historian/wonk, since). The Moscow Militia Rule lets eleven Russian militia units enter from the eastern map edge from turn 11 onwards, modelling a force that historically existed but was not committed. These rules are not just balance tweaks — they’re the design’s way of asking historiographical questions in player terms.

Attack in the Ardennes, eleven years later from a different publisher, ships with no optional rules at all. The historical campaign is the only game. Whether this is a virtue or a vice depends on what you want from a wargame. The Chadwick design is fundamentally a closed system, battle/operation specific, just like many of his future designs would be: this happened, here’s the model, can you do better?

Chadwick missed a lot of what if considerations. Different weather, additional German forces, Slower responses by the Allies. Lots of history there that is sidelined for the ‘designer intent, and I suspect cost considerations. The Young design is more open: this is what happened, but here are the levers the actual commanders had, which they used or didn’t, and which you can experiment with, not by much but it has a few options.

Both choices reflect the design culture of their respective publishers. SPI in 1972 was producing magazine-insert games at the rate of ten or twelve a year; the optional rules were a way of stretching one game into multiple play experiences and engaging with the historical literature directly through the rules-set. GDW in 1982 was a different kind of publisher — fewer games, more commitment to each one, and the design philosophy of “here is the system, the system is the argument.” The two games come out of two different small-publisher cultures, and you can sense the cultures in the rule books.

 

Part Two