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.Continuing from part 1

The background:

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.

6.1 Map system

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Hex grid (Borodino) versus point-to-point (Attack in the Ardennes). I could stop right there. Hex grids are the lingua franca of our hobby. Whereas point-to-point systems are the exception, at the time of print it was a mere novelty. Chadwick’s defence of the choice — the Ardennes is a road network operationalised — is correct, but it remains the minority approach in 1944 Western Front games. Most other Bulge titles (Avalon Hill’s Battle of the Bulge in three editions; OSG’s Dark December; Hexasim and GMT titles since) use hex grids and accept the abstraction that comes with them. Then of course todays monsters, Last Blitzkrieg, Time for Trumpets, Last Gamble are monster multi map games all hex grid based.

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The implication for play: the hex based game lets the player move forces with positional precision (you can flank a hex by occupying the adjacent hex) and asks the player to think in terms of frontages, ZOCs, line-of-sight, and stacking. The point-to-point game lets the player move forces with an operational viewpoint (this division is at this town or it isn’t; the road from this town goes here) and asks the player to think in terms of node capacity, route choice, supply trace, and timing. The two map systems demand different kinds of play and thought; they are not interchangeable.

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6.2 Combat resolution

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Odds-ratio CRT (Borodino) versus hits-and-step-reduction (Attack in the Ardennes). The CRT is more granular per engagement ( as far as the 1-3-6-1 CRT with a 1d6 goes 😊 ); the hits system is more granular over time. A 3-1 attack in Borodino either succeeds or it doesn’t, with specific casualty results. A combat in Attack in the Ardennes generates hits, which accumulate, which eventually reduce or eliminate units, which rebuilds the campaign-scale attrition curve more cleanly than the CRT would. Neither system is “better”; each fits its design. The attrition in Ardennes was key I believe, the Yanks wore down those enemies that still had fuel, through sheer grit and steadfastness. .

6.3 Time per turn

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1 hour versus 12 hours. Sixty turns of mid-campaign movement in Attack in the Ardennes‘ time scale would be a day and a half of play; in Borodino‘s time scale, the same play time covers an hour of one battle. The time scales correspond to what the player is being asked to decide, and to the operational reality of the period.

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6.4 Supply

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Implicit (Borodino) versus explicit and load-bearing (Attack in the Ardennes). Napoleonic battle, on the day, is not a supply problem — the men already have their cartridges and the artillery already has its rounds. Mechanised offensive across an operational depth is, fundamentally, a supply problem — Manteuffel knew it, Eisenhower knew it, and Chadwick’s design refuses to abstract it away.

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6.5 Weather and air power

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None (Borodino) versus weather-dependent air interdiction and movement effects (Attack in the Ardennes). 7 September 1812 was a normal September day in Russia; weather is invariant in the design. The Bulge ran from the foggy 16 December (which suppressed Allied air, decisively) through to the clearing on 23 December (which freed the IX Tactical Air Command and the RAF and broke the German offensive’s freedom of movement). Weather in Attack in the Ardennes is operational, not flavour.

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6.6 Reinforcement and political constraints

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Borodino‘s Russian “no movement north of the Great Redoubt before turn 11” rule is an pure historical design for effect: it’s how Young encodes Kutuzov’s pre-battle deployment, his initial misreading of the French main effort, and his slow correction in real time. Attack in the Ardennes encodes its political constraints differently — the Allied counter-offensive units (Patton’s Third Army, the British XXX Corps) arrive on a schedule that reflects when the actual command decisions could have got them there. Both designs use reinforcement schedules to facilitate the historical command-and-control reality, but at different scales (battlefield-internal in Borodino; theatre-strategic in Attack in the Ardennes).

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6.7 Victory conditions

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Borodino‘s victory conditions are tactical: the player who held the field, inflicted disproportionate casualties, or controlled key terrain at game’s end wins. The historical result was a French tactical victory and a Russian strategic one, and the game scenarios are calibrated so that those two outcomes are differentially achievable. Attack in the Ardennes‘ victory conditions are strategic-operational: drive supplied units off the west map edge for a decisive German victory, or accumulate victory points by 26 December for a marginal one. The German player has to think in terms of the campaign’s goal (the Meuse, Antwerp); the Allied player has to think in terms of denying that goal. The mismatch between the two sides’ victory conditions is itself a model of the historical asymmetry — the Germans attacking, the Allies absorbing and counter-attacking.

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7. Leader contrast

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The two campaigns put very different command cultures across the same table from each other, and the games expose those cultures.

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7.1 Napoleon and Kutuzov

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The Borodino confrontation is a clash of two fundamentally different theories of war.

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Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) was, by 1812, the Emperor of the French and the most accomplished battlefield commander Europe had produced since Frederick the Great. The S&T #32 article calls Napoleon’s military system “frustratingly difficult to summarise” because it is in fact the entire Napoleonic synthesis: the corps system as the operational unit, the bataillon carré march column, the central position, the rapid concentration of force at the decisive point, and to a lesser extent the exploitation by cavalry pursuit after the breaking of the enemy, all wrapped around a logistical revolution that allowed armies to move at almost twice the pace of their pre-Revolutionary predecessors. The system worked because Napoleon trusted his corps commanders (Davout, Masséna, Soult, Lannes, Ney, Murat) to operate independently within his strategic framework, then rejoined them at the decisive moment.

He was sixteen years younger at Borodino than at his prime; he was probably sick; he was operating at the end of a longer logistical tether than any Napoleonic operation had ever managed; and his corps commanders were the ones who had survived a decade of war, with the dead and disabled (Lannes, dead 1809; Bessières, dead 1813; Berthier increasingly estranged) replaced by men of lesser ability.

By 1812 the Napoleonic system was fraying around its margins, and at Borodino the system met an opponent who refused to play to its strengths. Napoleon’s operational genius was the ability to dictate the form of battle. At Borodino, Kutuzov dictated the form, and Napoleon’s only response was to push his men through it head-on. The decision not to release the Old Guard at the Great Redoubt around 4 p.m. — the moment when, by every other Napoleonic precedent, the Guard should have been committed to break the Russian centre — has been argued ever since as either prudent (the Guard was the last reserve, a thousand miles from France) or fatally cautious (the moment passed, the Russians retreated overnight, and the army was never again in a position to deliver the killing blow). The S&T article’s “Pyrrhic victory” judgment captures the consensus: Napoleon won the field but lost what the field was supposed to buy him.

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Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov (1745–1813) was sixty-seven years old at Borodino, with one functioning eye (the result of a wound at the siege of Ochakov in 1788), the protégé of Suvorov, the survivor of Austerlitz, and the recently appointed commander-in-chief of all Russian armies. He has a complicated reputation. He was politically astute, deferential to Tsar Alexander, capable of stage-managing his own image as the simple Russian general against the German-trained Barclay.

He was also tired, conservative, and committed to the Barclay strategy of trading space for time even though he could not openly say so once Moscow itself was at stake.

Borodino was his concession to political necessity, the battle Russia had to fight to satisfy Moscow and the Tsar but it was a battle fought from a defensive position chosen for its terrain, with the explicit option to retreat in good order afterwards. He never released the Russian Imperial Guard either. He let Bagration’s left be ground up because the alternative — a major counter-attack to retake the flèches, would have committed the same reserves the longer campaign needed.

He left the field before darkness fully fell, with his army intact, his positions broken but his command structure functional. And he abandoned Moscow eight days later because the army mattered more than the city, a calculation Tsar Alexander accepted for the same reason. Which strikes me as odd. The Tsar was influenced to force an attack, but then abandons Moscow?

Kutuzov’s command at Borodino is not a brilliant operational performance; it is a competent defensive performance by a commander who knew he could not match Napoleon manoeuvre-for-manoeuvre and so refused to try. The Russian official line has always celebrated Kutuzov as the saviour of Russia. The Western Napoleonic literature (Chandler, Esdaile, Lieven) is more measured: Kutuzov did exactly what was needed and not much more, but exactly what was needed turned out to be enough.

The supporting cast at Borodino on each side deserves some acknowledgement.

French: Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout (the hard-driving III Corps commander, advocate of the rejected wide left-hook, wounded in the assault on the flèches); Marshal Michel Ney (“le brave des braves,” commander of III Corps after Davout’s wounding); Marshal Joachim Murat (the cavalry reserve, the King of Naples, by 1812 increasingly self-aggrandising and tactically erratic); Eugène de Beauharnais (Napoleon’s adopted son, commander of IV Corps, the assault on the Great Redoubt); General Auguste de Caulaincourt (Master of the Horse, killed leading the cavalry charge on the Great Redoubt).

Russians: Prince Pyotr Bagration (Second Western Army, the dashing Georgian, mortally wounded in the morning); General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly (still in command of First Western Army even after Kutuzov’s appointment over him; the strategic mind behind the campaign, performing a defensive role he had largely written); Lieutenant General Alexander Tuchkov (killed at the flèches); General Alexander Kutaisov (artillery commander, killed leading a counter-attack); General Nikolay Raevsky (commander of the Great Redoubt and one of the few Russian generals who emerged with reputation enhanced).

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The game places Napoleon and Kutuzov at the level of the player; the marshals and corps commanders are absorbed into unit ratings. This is the right abstraction for the design, but it does mean that what was, historically, an interaction between named personalities — Davout’s argument with Napoleon over the morning’s plan, Murat’s insistence on committing the cavalry reserve, Bagration’s defence and death, Raevsky’s stubbornness — is flattened into a more anonymous push-pull. Whichis whyI think more granular treatments that come from Clash of Arms and Marshal Enterprises etc will show off these leaders. The Imperial Guard Rule is the one place the design lets the player feel one of those personality decisions (Napoleon’s caution about the Guard) as a player-side choice.

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7.2 Eisenhower–Bradley vs Manteuffel–Dietrich–Peiper

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The Bulge confrontation is a clash of command structures more than of individuals.

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Allies: Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower at SHAEF in Reims, with Bradley’s 12th Army Group below him (Hodges’ First Army on the north, Patton’s Third Army on the south, with Simpson’s Ninth coming up), and with the British 21st Army Group (Montgomery) on the northern flank. Patton was ordered to wheel his Third Army from south to east and relieve Bastogne a movement Patton had anticipated and pre-planned, allowing him to deliver the relief in a famously quick five-day pivot. The Allied command structure was dispersed, multinational, and politically fraught; the Eisenhower–Montgomery dispute simmering, and post Bulge outright insulting as Monty claimed glory. What worked was the structural delegation: Eisenhower set the framework, Bradley and Montgomery commanded their halves, the corps and division commanders below them — Hodges, Ridgway (XVIII Airborne), Middleton (VIII Corps), Gerow (V Corps), McAuliffe at Bastogne (acting commander 101st Airborne, the “NUTS” reply) handled the local engagements. The Allied victory at the Bulge was a structural-system victory: not brilliant individual command, but enough good-enough commanders at enough levels that the system absorbed the shock.

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German: Field Marshal Walter Model commanded Army Group B with the three armies: SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army (the SS shock force; Dietrich was a Hitler favourite from the Beer Hall Putsch days, militarily limited but politically untouchable), General der Panzertruppe Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army (the Wehrmacht professional, the best operational commander on the German side of the Bulge, the man who actually executed the centre breakthrough), and General Erich Brandenberger’s Seventh Army on the southern flank (the supporting infantry shoulder). Above Model was Hitler, who designed the offensive personally and refused operational latitude to the field commanders. The German command structure was rigid, ideological at the top (the SS divisions answered to Hitler more directly than to the army group), and operationally constrained by Hitler’s micromanagement. Manteuffel’s ability to drive the centre breakthrough on 16–18 December was a function of his own operational skill plus the fact that Hitler’s interference reached him less than it reached Dietrich.

Within Manteuffel’s army, the named commanders mattered: Major General Heinrich von Lüttwitz (XLVII Panzer Corps, the lead element); Colonel Meinrad von Lauchert (2nd Panzer Division, the deepest German penetration, reaching Celles on Christmas Day); Major General Fritz Bayerlein (Panzer Lehr Division); Colonel Heinz Kokott (26th Volksgrenadier Division, the Bastogne siege). Within Dietrich’s army, the celebrated commander was SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper (Kampfgruppe Peiper, the SS spearhead of 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte), responsible both for the Malmedy massacre (17 December — 84 American POWs murdered by SS troops at the Baugnez crossroads) and for the most famous SS armoured operation of the campaign, ending in his force abandoning vehicles at La Gleize. Peiper’s tactical aggression was real palpable.

The game places the player at the operational level of the Manteuffel / Dietrich / Bradley / Patton command tier, with the divisional and regimental commanders absorbed into the units they led. This is the right abstraction as even current titles, abstract these commanders and their influence away at the Grand Tactical scale, but as with Borodino it flattens a set of historically named-and-arguing-with-each-other commanders into an anonymous unit-rating system. The personality differences between the SS and Wehrmacht command styles (which mattered in the actual offensive — the SS units fought differently and were used differently than the Wehrmacht units), between the Eisenhower-Bradley-Patton triangle versus the Eisenhower-Montgomery-Bradley triangle, between McAuliffe at Bastogne and the men he was commanding, are all subordinated to the rule-set. You have to draw a line somewhere and for this scale of game its all good. This is fine for what the game is. It’s worth noting because the historical literature on the Bulge is rich precisely with personality and with the question of how command culture shaped operational reality — Peiper’s aggression, Patton’s pivot, Montgomery’s after-the-fact spin, Manteuffel’s professional skill, Dietrich’s ideological dependence — and a game can only do so much of that.

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7.3 The asymmetry of leadership

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The two battles have a structural asymmetry in their command cultures. At Borodino, both sides had hierarchical, personality-centred command Napoleon at the top of one structure, Kutuzov at the top of the other, with marshals and generals as direct extensions of the central commander’s will. At the Bulge, the Allied side had a system ; distributed command, redundant authority, structural delegation. While the German side, by 1944, had Hitler’s operational micromanagement plus a separate SS chain of command plus the army group / army / corps / division layering of Wehrmacht doctrine. A key factor to the Allies winning the Bulge was due to their system being more robust to a specific kind of shock, in a malleable way. Napoleonic battle was, by contrast, a personality clash; the Bulge was a system clash.

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This is the longest-running theme in operational history and worth flagging because my private BigBoard wiki has a Theory hub on it ([[operational-art-foundations]]) , that I am building out. The Napoleonic synthesis is the late-personality phase of pre-modern operational command. The Bulge is the early-system phase of modern operational command. Borodino models a battle that turns on the choices of two named commanders. Attack in the Ardennes models a campaign that turns on the redundancy and delegation of the Allied system against the brittleness and ideological fragility of the German one. The two games capture the two historical worlds. Its one of the reasons I like the contrast.

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8. Similarities between the campaigns

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For all the evident contrasts, the two campaigns share more than first inspection suggests. Both are gambles. Napoleon invading Russia in summer 1812 was a strategic gamble. the assumption that one decisive battle would break Tsar Alexander’s will and produce a peace, as he had done to other leaders before. Hitler launching Wacht am Rhein in winter 1944 was the same kind of gamble, his assumption that one decisive offensive would split the Western Allies, retake Antwerp, and force a separate peace before the Soviets in the East could finish their winter offensive. Both gambles were rejected by the field commanders’ professional staffs (Napoleon’s marshals had argued against the Russian invasion since 1810; Manteuffel and Model both argued for a more limited “small solution” that would have aimed for the Meuse rather than Antwerp). Both gambles were imposed by a head of state operating against the better judgment of his uniformed advisors. Both gambles failed because the strategic premise (one battle / one offensive can force a peace) was at its core wrong given the circumstances at the time, and the operational execution, however creditable, could not rescue a strategic concept that had no historical precedent for working at that scale and against that opponent.

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Both depended on a logistical revolution that didn’t quite work. The Napoleonic system, “an army marches on its stomach,” depended on living off the countryside in a short, decisive campaign. By the time the Grande Armée reached Smolensk in mid-August 1812, the Russian scorched-earth policy and the operational depth had broken the system; by the time it reached Moscow on 14 September, the army was eating its horses. The German offensive in 1944 depended on captured Allied fuel. There was no German fuel reserve adequate to support panzer operations from the start line to the Meuse, and the operation’s plan explicitly included “capture and use Allied fuel dumps” as a logistical assumption. When the SS Panzer spearhead drove past the Allies’ major fuel dumps without reaching them, when 2nd Panzer Division ran dry near Celles on 24 December, the offensive had run out of the fuel the operation’s logistics had assumed would be available. Both campaigns are, at the operational level, logistic failures masquerading as combat outcomes.

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Both turn on a chokepoint that absorbed the offensive. At Borodino, the Russian centre the Bagration flèches and the Great Redoubt were the manmade chokepoints absorbed the French shock and bled away the Grande Armée’s last reserves of cohesive, experienced striking power.

The Russian position did not collapse; it gave ground in good order. The French could not destroy what they were attacking; the army that left Borodino was no longer capable of the kind of pursuit and exploitation that would have turned the tactical victory into strategic effect.

At the Bulge, Bastogne played the same role a natural chokepoint, reinforced by determination. The 101st Airborne and the supporting units arrived at the chokepoint; they stood their ground; they absorbed everything Manteuffel sent at them; they bled away the offensive’s tempo, in essence breaking the OODA loop of the Germans; they kept the road network from feeding fuel forward to the units past them. Manteuffel’s men took some satellites of the perimeter but never the town. This broke the German schedule. Bastogne in 1944 is structurally what the Russian centre was at Borodino: not the place the offensive had to take to win, but the place it had to take to keep moving, and not taking it at the speed required compounded into the campaign’s failure. Both games do a job on this if you look for it. Tthe SPI Borodino title through the Russian centre’s defensive value and the optional rules around the Imperial Guard; GDW’s Attack in the Ardennes through Bastogne’s road-junction status and the supply trace that runs through it.

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Both have a “what if” that historians have argued for two centuries respectively eighty years.** Could Napoleon have committed the Imperial Guard at the Great Redoubt around 4 p.m. on 7 September and broken Kutuzov’s centre? The literature is divided; the SPI game lets the player run the experiment. Could the Bulge have reached Antwerp, or even the Meuse in force, if Manteuffel had been allowed to push past Bastogne on the night of 18 December rather than committing to the siege? The literature is divided; the GDW game lets the player run that experiment too. Both games offer their respective “what if” as a player-side choice; both refuse to legislate the answer.

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Both are a study in how command culture interacts with operational reality

Napoleon’s personalised command worked when he could dictate the form of battle; it broke down when the enemy refused to be dictated to. Hitler’s centralised command worked when the offensive’s premise held; it broke down when reality intruded via fuel, Allied grit, and rapid responses. Both games encode the limits of their respective command cultures through victory conditions (positional / casualty-based for Borodino, operational-strategic for Attack in the Ardennes) that make those limits player-felt rather than just historically named.

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9. Differences between the campaigns

The differences are also instructive.

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Scale. Borodino was one battle on one battlefield in one day. The Bulge was an eleven-day operational campaign across hundreds of square miles of forested terrain, involving multiple corps-scale formations operating along separate axes. The games’ scales (one day vs eleven days; one battlefield vs an operational depth) reflect this directly.

Combined arms. Napoleonic battle was a relatively narrow combined-arms problem: infantry, cavalry, artillery, with the three operating in close proximity and recognisable relationships (artillery preparation → infantry advance → cavalry exploitation). The Bulge was a much more complex combined-arms problem: armour, mechanised infantry, leg infantry, tank destroyers, assault guns, motorised artillery, towed artillery, engineers, signal, supply troops, and critically air power on the Allied side once the weather cleared. The two games approach this complexity differently.

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The role of weather. A non-issue in Borodino (one day, in a normal Russian September). A campaign-decisive factor in the Bulge (the fog of 16–22 December was the operational precondition for the offensive’s initial success; the clearing of 23 December was a nail in the coffin). The games handle this exactly as the historical reality demands.

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The political endgame. Both situations saw leaders swinging for the baseball fence or the cricketers “6”, Napoleon’s Russian invasion was a test of whether one decisive battle could force Tsar Alexander to abandon Britain’s Continental System. The political endgame depended on the Tsar’s response, not on the strictly military outcome. Hitler’s Bulge was a test of whether one final decisive offensive could force the Western Allies to accept a separate peace before the Soviet front collapsed. The political endgame depended on the Allied governments’ response, which was never plausibly going to be peace. The unconditional-surrender doctrine at Casablanca (1943) had foreclosed it, and the Allied publics in late 1944 were committed to total victory. The games don’t model the political endgame in either case; both are confined to the military theatre. But it’s worth mentioning that both campaigns lost not because the military outcome was decisive but because the political premise was wrong. Neither game is a strategic-political simulation; both are operational simulations of campaigns whose strategic outcomes depended on factors the operational simulation excludes. Well anyway a lot of theory there.

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The character of defeat. Napoleon survived Borodino in fighting condition, took Moscow, and was then destroyed by the retreat, by winter, by typhus, by Cossack pursuit, by his own exhausted logistics. The retreat from Moscow to the Niemen cost the Grande Armée roughly 380,000 dead from the 600,000 who had crossed in June. The Wehrmacht survived the Bulge in worse condition than it started, but its operational existence on the Western Front did not collapse for another four months. The strategic defeat in both cases was decisive; the operational aftermath played out differently. The games do not run past their respective end conditions.

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10. BigBoard theoretical frame

[Note I leveraged AI reading of my sources to attempt to pull some threads together here]:

The historical and design analysis above can be sharpened by applying BigBoard’s own Theory hubs — the conceptual scaffolding the wiki has built. Five Theory pages bear directly on the two campaigns and the two games, let’s use a few of them.

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Move / Strike / Protect — Leonhard, Fighting by Minutes

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Robert Leonhard’s framework [leonhard-fighting-by-minutes] decomposes operational action into three time-bounded modes: MOVE (closing distance, repositioning, manoeuvring toward decision), STRIKE (engaging, applying force, seeking decision), PROTECT (sustaining the force, defending the means of future MOVE and STRIKE — supply, communications, lines of operation). Leonhard’s central claim is that operational time is the scarcest resource, that every commander must apportion time across the three modes, and that the failure modes of operations almost always involve a mode that ran longer than the time horizon allowed.

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Borodino under M/S/P. Napoleon’s Russian campaign was a STRIKE-dominant operation — the entire premise was that one decisive battle would end the war. The MOVE phase (Niemen to Smolensk to Moscow) was supposed to be brief and was not; the PROTECT phase (logistical sustainment, lines back through Poland) was supposed to be short-duration and was not. By the time the Grande Armée reached Borodino on 7 September, Napoleon had spent his MOVE budget twice over, his PROTECT budget was bankrupt (the army was eating its horses), and the STRIKE he sought was therefore over-leveraged: he needed the strike to break the Russian army outright because he had nothing left for a follow-up. Kutuzov’s defensive choice — accept the strike, absorb the shock, conserve the force, retreat in good order — was a PROTECT-dominant response to a STRIKE-dominant attack, which is a structurally winning move when the attacker has run out of operational time. The Imperial Guard non-commitment around 4 p.m. is, in Leonhard’s terms, Napoleon recognising that his STRIKE could not be sustained without the Old Guard as final reserve — a PROTECT decision masquerading as caution. .

The Bulge under M/S/P. The German offensive was MOVE-dominant in its initial phase: the success of Wacht am Rhein depended on the panzer divisions covering the operational depth between the start line and the Meuse before the Allied PROTECT (Bastogne, Saint-Vith, the broader road-network defence) could be activated. Manteuffel’s bypass of Bastogne on 18 December was a MOVE decision — keep the tempo, push past the chokepoint, deal with it later. The decision became wrong not because it was tactically reckless but because the German PROTECT (fuel trace, supply forward) couldn’t keep up with the MOVE; the offensive ran out of operational time at Celles on Christmas Day, four miles from the Meuse, with empty tanks. The Allied response was the inverse: initial PROTECT failure (the line broken, divisions shattered), recovered through structural redundancy and rapid lateral repositioning (Patton’s pivot — itself a MOVE, but a MOVE in service of restoring the PROTECT chokepoint at Bastogne). Eisenhower’s command genius was apportioning time correctly: he gave Patton three days to redeploy, gave Bastogne five days to hold, gave the weather one week to clear. All three time horizons converged on 23–26 December, and the offensive collapsed.

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The framework converts both campaigns from “Napoleon attacked, Hitler attacked, both lost” into a precise diagnostic: each offensive failed at a specific mode-mismatch (STRIKE without PROTECT for Napoleon; MOVE without sustainable PROTECT for Hitler), and each defensive success was a mode-match (PROTECT against STRIKE for Kutuzov; lateral MOVE serving PROTECT for Eisenhower).

The games present the M/S/P framework differently. Borodino gives the player STRIKE primacy — combat is mandatory between adjacent units, artillery is range-limited, the CRT delivers decisive results — with PROTECT abstracted away (no supply) and MOVE constrained by terrain. The single-day scope means the player never has to apportion time across modes, only choose which combat to commit to which turn. Attack in the Ardennes gives all three modes mechanical weight: MOVE through the road network, STRIKE through the hits system, PROTECT through the supply trace. The player has to think in M/S/P terms because the rules force the apportionment. This is one of the deeper reasons the two games feel so different to play: the Leonhard framework is implicit in one and explicit in the other.

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Classical vs Operational Strategy .

The Theory page [classical-vs-operational-strategy] is the wargamer’s primer for which strategic mode a given game rewards. Classical strategy — Jomini, the decisive-battle tradition, force-on-force on a contained battlefield — measures success in terms of who broke whom on the day. Operational strategy — Svechin, Naveh, the Soviet/American post-1980s synthesis — measures success in terms of campaign tempo, lines of operation, depth, and the sequencing of battles toward strategic effect. Most games reward one mode or the other; very few reward both equally.

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Borodino is a classical-strategy game in pure form. The single battle, the contained battlefield, the day-long resolution, linear force depositions, the casualty-and-position victory conditions, the absence of supply rules — these are the design’s signature, and they reward classical thinking. The player who concentrates force at the decisive point, who exploits artillery preparation, who coordinates infantry assault and cavalry exploitation, wins.

Attack in the Ardennes is the opposite an operational level game. The eleven-day campaign, the road network, the supply trace, the victory-by-map-edge-exit these reward operational thinking. The player who pushes hardest in the first 48 hours and burns out his tempo loses. The player who paces commitment, who protects the supply trace, who recognises that Bastogne is a chokepoint not a tactical objective, wins (or at least doesn’t lose). Classical-style “concentrate force, smash the line” play loses to the supply rules potentially.

The historical campaigns are themselves cases of the two modes. Napoleonic war is classical strategy with operational-doctrine prelude — Napoleon’s corps system was operational, but the ‘purpose’ of the operational manoeuvre was always to set up the classical decisive battle.

The Bulge, by 1944, is an operational-strategy problem on both sides: the German offensive was an operational gamble (could the campaign tempo reach the Meuse in time?), and the Allied response was an operational defence (could the chokepoints hold long enough to disrupt the campaign tempo?). Neither side at the Bulge was thinking in classical-decisive-battle terms; both were thinking in campaign-tempo terms. The games inherit the strategic mode of their respective periods, which is why the design choices feel “right” for each.

.Decision Analysis — Good Decision ≠ Good Outcome

The Theory page [[decision-analysis-in-wargames]] applies Buynoski’s distinction: a good decision is one made with the information available at the moment of choice, applying defensible reasoning; a good outcome is one where things turn out well. The two are independent. A good decision can produce a bad outcome (the dice betrayed you, friction intervened, the enemy’s response was atypical); a bad decision can produce a good outcome (the dice favoured you, the enemy made a worse decision than yours). Disciplined post-action analysis evaluates the decision separately from the outcome. .

Napoleon and the Old Guard at 4 p.m., 7 September 1812.

The decision: hold the Old Guard in reserve rather than committing it to break the Russian centre at the Great Redoubt. The information available: the Grande Armée was 1,000 miles from France, the Old Guard was the last fully effective reserve, the Russian centre had bent but not broken, casualties on both sides were horrendous, darkness was approaching. The reasoning: commit the Guard now for a tactical breakthrough, and the army has no operational reserve for the campaign that follows; hold the Guard, and accept the tactical victory without exploitation. The outcome: tactical victory, strategic disaster — Kutuzov retreated overnight, the campaign continued, the Old Guard was eventually destroyed in the retreat anyway. The decision was defensible at the moment of choice; the outcome was bad because the strategic premise (one decisive battle would end the war) was already wrong, regardless of whether the Guard had broken the centre. Decision-quality: good. Outcome-quality: bad. The retrospective verdict that Napoleon should have committed the Guard depends on knowing what the player at the moment of choice did not know — that the campaign would not survive the army that won the day.

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Manteuffel’s bypass of Bastogne, 18 December 1944

The decision: push 2nd Panzer Division past Bastogne toward the Meuse rather than committing to reduce the town. The information available: the road was open, the American defence at the town was thin (the 101st had not yet arrived), the offensive’s timetable demanded the Meuse by 23 December, and following infantry waves were expected to handle Bastogne. The reasoning: tempo over consolidation, MOVE over STRIKE (in Leonhard’s terms), push the panzer arm to operational depth and let the trailing forces clean up the chokepoints. The outcome: by morning of 19 December the 101st had arrived; Bastogne held; the supply trace through it became contested; 2nd Panzer ran dry at Celles on 24 December. The decision was defensible at the moment of choice , the alternative (commit 2nd Panzer to a town siege on 18 December) would have stalled the offensive’s tempo at exactly the moment Manteuffel needed to be pushing west. Decision-quality: good. Outcome-quality: bad.

Both campaigns offer the same lesson: the player who replays them through the games can re-examine these decisions in their original context, separate the decision from the outcome, and reach a more disciplined judgment than the post-hoc literature usually offers. This is what the games are for in the Buynoski / decision-analysis frame: not to produce different outcomes, but to let the player feel the decision space the historical commanders inhabited. Borodin‘s Imperial Guard Rule and Attack in the Ardennes‘ supply mechanism are both, structurally, decision-analysis pedagogy: they isolate the decision from the outcome and let the player evaluate each independently.

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Strategic Alternatives — the Zitadelle parallel

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The synthesis hub [[zitadelle-strategic-alternatives]] asks whether Operation Zitadelle (the Kursk offensive of July 1943) was the only or best strategic option Germany had. The hub draws on the user’s own Kursk Reconsidered [see blog] article and traces the alternative-strategy literature. The same question applies, structurally, to both campaigns under analysis here.

Was Borodino the only option for Napoleon? Both the S&T #32 “Napoleon at War” article and Chandler’s Campaigns of Napoleon [Nofi no doubt leveraged Chandler] note that Napoleon’s marshals had argued against the Russian invasion since 1810 — Caulaincourt’s Mémoires are explicit. The alternative was acceptance of the Russian withdrawal from the Continental System and reorientation of the Empire toward economic consolidation. By August 1812, when the Grande Armée was at Smolensk and the Russian army had refused decisive battle, the alternative was a winter pause at Smolensk and a 1813 resumption — a strategy the army’s own logistical condition recommended and which Napoleon rejected. Borodino was a battle Napoleon imposed on a campaign that was already failing strategically; the alternative was to recognise the strategic failure and not commit the army to one more decisive engagement.

Was the Bulge offensive the only option for Hitler? The literature is even clearer. Manteuffel and Model both proposed the “small solution” (a limited offensive aiming for the Meuse rather than Antwerp). The Wehrmacht professional staff opposed the operation entirely. The alternative was to use the strategic reserve in the East against the Soviet winter offensive, which began in mid-January 1945 and overran most of Poland and East Prussia in two weeks. Hitler chose the Western offensive against unanimous professional advice for the same reason Napoleon chose Borodino: the strategic premise of the war required the decisive battle/offensive, and the alternatives all admitted the strategic premise had failed.

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The structural parallel between Borodino and the Bulge is not just operational (chokepoints, logistics, command culture); it is strategic-decision. Both campaigns are cases where a head of state imposed a battle/offensive on a strategic situation that no longer warranted it, against the better judgement of the professional military command, because the alternative was to admit the strategic premise of the war had failed.

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What does it mean?

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Applying these Theory hubs in parallel — Move/Strike/Protect, Classical vs Operational, Decision Analysis, Strategic Alternatives — converts the comparative analysis from a side-by-side description into more of a lesson.

The games differ because they reward different strategic modes (classical vs operational), and the rule-sets are tuned to those modes. The campaigns differ in their M/S/P mode-mismatch (STRIKE-without-PROTECT for Napoleon; MOVE-without-sustainable-PROTECT for Hitler), and the historical leaders’ decisions can be evaluated in those terms. The historical decisions both played out as good-decisions-bad-outcomes, with the strategic-alternatives layer revealing that both campaigns were imposed against professional judgement because the strategic premise of the larger war had already failed.

My goal here is by writing manually, and via some AI aided heavier research & reading and distillation against specific battle sources, that I can then compare contrast against military theories. Is there any thing new here? New to me? That makes me more informed or more conceptually aware of the history, choices etc. I hope so. Time will tell.
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From all this, I see a cool topic – Offensive as gamble! What titles could we explore to dig into this notion!?
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Primary game and design sources

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– `Lib_gamescans/Games/Borodino (S&T032).pdf` — the original 1972 SPI Borodino game scan. Image-only PDF; needs OCR pass to make body text searchable. Until then, work from the mapandcounters review and the magazine.

– `Lib_gamescans/Games/Attack in the Ardennes (GDW).pdf` — the original 1982 GDW game scan. Image-only PDF; same OCR limitation. The mapandcounters review carries the design substance.

– `Magazines/Wargame Magazines/S & T/S&T 032.pdf` — Strategy & Tactics number 32, May 1972, the issue that contained the SPI Borodino game. Includes John Young’s accompanying article on the battle (the Borodino article was a fold-out insert that may not be present in the PDF scan — the magazine article material is the broader “Napoleon at War” piece by Albert Nofi). Text-extractable. Osprey History of Napoleonic war and Osprey Ardennes 1944.

– `mapandcounters-blog/posts/SPI/2009-04-spi-Borodino-1972.md` — the canonical online review of the 1972 SPI design. Detailed on game mechanics, scenarios, and design choices.

– `mapandcounters-blog/posts/2009-05-game-analysis-spis-battle-of-Borodino.md` — a deeper analytical follow-up on the SPI design.

– `mapandcounters-blog/posts/2009-09-gmt-Borodino-2004.md` — the GMT 2004 Borodino, useful as a comparison point for how the same battle gets re-designed thirty-two years later.

– `mapandcounters-blog/posts/GDW/2009-08-gdw-attack-in-ardennes-1982.md` — the canonical online review of the GDW design. Detailed on the point-to-point system and the relationship to A House Divided.

– `mapandcounters-blog/posts/AH/2009-04-tahgc-battle-of-bulge-1965.md`, `…2010-07-tahgc-battle-of-bulge-1991.md`, `…2011-04-tahgc-battle-of-bulge-1981.md` — Avalon Hill’s three editions of Battle of the Bulge as the canonical hex-grid alternative to Chadwick’s point-to-point design. Reading these alongside the GDW review is the cleanest way to see why Chadwick’s choice was unusual but defensible.

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Footnote references— Borodino / Napoleon

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– `[[chandler-the-campaigns-of-napoleon]]` — David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (originally 1966, reprinted 2009). The standard one-volume operational history of every major Napoleonic campaign. Chapter on Borodino is detailed and authoritative; Chandler’s overall framework (the Napoleonic system, its strengths, its decline) underpins almost all subsequent English-language Napoleonic operational scholarship. Tier: secondary-academic.

– `[[nafziger-napoleon-s-invasion-of-russia]]` — George Nafziger, Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (2009; first edition 1988). The most detailed English-language operational history of the 1812 campaign specifically. Nafziger is exhaustive on order-of-battle and unit movements; less elegant on narrative than Chandler, more useful for specific operational questions. Tier: secondary-academic.

– `[[fisher-the-napoleonic-wars]]` — Todd Fisher, The Napoleonic Wars (1): The Rise of the Emperor 1805–1807 (Osprey Essential Histories, 2014). Volume 1 of the multi-part Osprey survey; volume on the Russian campaign would be a separate entry. Useful for orientation and for the Osprey illustrative material; not a deep reference. Tier: secondary-popular.

– `[[mercer-journal-of-the-waterloo-campaign]]` — Cavalié Mercer’s primary-source memoir, focused on Waterloo not Borodino, but the closest primary-source British perspective on Napoleonic battle in BigBoard’s library. Tier: primary.

– `[[corrigan-wellington]]`, `[[chandler-the-campaigns-of-napoleon]]`, `[[field-grouchy-s-waterloo]]` — additional Napoleonic context if Borodino expands into a broader Russian-campaign or Napoleonic-system project.

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12.3 Cal_lib entries — Bulge / Western Front 1944

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– `[[macdonald-company-commander]]` — Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (1947). The canonical American junior-officer memoir of NW Europe 1944–45, including the Schnee Eifel sector overrun on 16 December 1944 (the very German breakthrough Manteuffel’s army achieved). MacDonald himself was the historian of the Bulge later (his A Time for Trumpets, 1985, is the keystone American operational history). The entry is populated; this is the natural starting point for any Bulge AAR. Tier: primary.

– `[[atkinson-the-guns-at-last-light]]` — Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945 (2013), volume 3 of the Liberation Trilogy. The best modern narrative history of the Western Front in 1944–45, with substantial Bulge coverage. Tier: secondary-academic.

– `[[neillands-the-battle-for-the-rhine-1944]]` — Robin Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine 1944: Arnhem and the Ardennes (2014). Operational-narrative coverage from a British perspective; useful for the Eisenhower–Montgomery dispute and the British role in the northern half of the bulge. Tier: secondary-popular.

– `[[boesch-road-to-huertgen]]` — Paul Boesch, Road to Huertgen: Forest in Hell (2018, but originally 1962). Adjacent geography (Hürtgen Forest, on the German frontier just north of the Bulge area), useful for the operational context American infantry was already in by mid-December 1944. Tier: primary.

– `[[hillery-paths-of-armor]]` — Vic Hillery, Paths of Armor: The Fifth Armored Division in World War II (2017, originally 1949). Divisional history from the unit that fought through the Hürtgen and into the Roer crossing. Tier: tertiary-hobby.

– `[[gilbert-winston-s-churchill]]` — Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume VII: Road to Victory, 1941–1945 (2015 reprint). The Allied-strategic perspective on the Bulge from the Churchill–Roosevelt–Stalin coalition level. Tier: secondary-academic.

– `[[meyer-the-12th-ss]]` — Hubert Meyer, The 12th SS: The History of the Hitler Youth Panzer Division. German-side perspective on the divisional level, although the 12th SS was in the northern half of the Bulge under Dietrich, and the more relevant German-side memoirs (Manteuffel; Bayerlein; Peiper trial transcripts) are not currently in BigBoard’s Cal_lib. Tier: secondary-popular.

Wiki cross-references

– `[[ww2]]` — period umbrella; canonical era for the Bulge.

– `[[wwii-western-europe-1944]]` — sub-period page, with the existing battle pages and AARs.

– `[[napoleonic]]` — period umbrella for Borodino.

– `[[napoleon-bonaparte]]` — commander page, with the Russian-invasion sources cross-linked.

– `[[bernard-montgomery]]`, `[[george-s-patton]]` — commander pages relevant to the Bulge; missing pages: Eisenhower, Bradley, Manteuffel, Peiper, Dietrich, Manteuffel.

– `[[wwii-foy]]` — existing battle page on Foy (December 1944, LNLT scenario), the only existing Bulge-area battle page in the wiki.

– `[[operational-art-foundations]]` — Theory hub on operational doctrine; both Borodino (as the Napoleonic synthesis under stress) and the Bulge (as the late-war German offensive-doctrine breakdown) belong in the eventual full version of this hub.

For Borodino, the priority pull is Nafziger’s *Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia* (kepub format; needs Calibre conversion to PDF or text for verbatim extraction). The book has the operational order-of-battle and movement detail that the SPI game’s reinforcement schedules and unit ratings should be tested against. Chandler’s *Campaigns of Napoleon is the deeper interpretive reference; chapter on Borodino is essential. Beyond Cal_lib: Adam Zamoyski’s 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (2004) is the modern English-language standard and would deserve its own Cal_lib entry if it lands in the library. Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon* (2009) is the Russian-perspective standard for the same campaign and similarly worth adding.

For the Bulge, the priority pull is MacDonald’s *Company Commander (already populated, PDF post-Calibre conversion). The book is on the American junior-officer experience of the very breakthrough Manteuffel achieved — Schnee Eifel sector, 16 December 1944. Atkinson’s Guns at Last Light gives the broader operational frame. Beyond Cal_lib: Hugh Cole’s official US Army Green Book The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge (1965) is the canonical operational history and not currently in BigBoard’s library. Charles MacDonald’s own later A Time for Trumpets (1985) is the keystone American synthesis. Antony Beevor’s Ardennes 1944 (2015) is the most recent major English-language treatment. Peter Caddick-Adams’s Snow & Steel* (2015) is the other strong recent English-language synthesis. Any of these would be worth adding to Cal_lib.

The reference-library reflib catalog (`[[rl-napoleonic-acw]]`, `[[rl-wwii]]`) carries additional 1812 and 1944 material, mostly in the form of game scans and Osprey campaign volumes, that can be pulled on demand once specific operational questions emerge.

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