Kriegspiel Game Theory Part Two

Let me first start with I have dug through the internet and come up with all that I can -at this point- on Kriegspiel from its release in 1970, to the end of its production in 1979. That said, here is “The Avalon Hill Philosophy 23”, from Vol. 7, No. 3 (Published in late 1970) of The General:

Side note: Yes, that is the Gary Gygax. If you didn’t know, he was big into wargames before creating D&D.

Anyways, as I mentioned in my first post about the game, I felt it was perfectly suitable for teaching the basics of wargaming. Finding out this is what it was designed for was less of a “Haha! I was right.” and more a testament to the design they created. That being said, there is room within the structure of the game itself to allow for some expansion (like the maps in previous game theory post) to take a player from beginner to some experience (Game 1 and Game 2 in the rules), up to fairly experienced (a sort of Game 2.5 as it were). From there you can wander off into all the other various wargames that existed.

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I’ll save maps for yet another post, and instead focus on the units. In base Kriegspiel, you have only five types of troops:
-Infantry
-Paratroops
-Special Forces (what I refer to as Special Troops in my logs)
-Mechanized Infantry (only in Black army)
-Armor (only in Red Army)
This makes sense as the designers probably assume a player coming into the game has almost no knowledge of the military or their formations. Paratroops, Special Forces, and Mechanized Infantry are all just Infantry with a unique ability (move, move, and stronger/faster respectively).

Over on Boardgame Geeks forum, Dad pitched an expanded counter set:

Special Purpose Force (SPF) (name change of Special Forces). As a former Army Special Forces Soldier, the term “Special Forces” made me cringe. Actually, they’re Marine and Mountain troops, and keep their terrain capabilities (sea, mountain, and forest).

Airmobile. Vertical envelopment capability. CF and movement factors are the same as airborne; but they don’t launch from cities. They have a ten-square range; and can occupy all terrain.

Motorized. Like mechanized unit with tires instead of tracks. They’re capable of crossing rivers without movement penalty; and capable of transiting one sea square (per turn) with an additional movement penalty of some sort. Allowed in forest.

Corps Artillery. Red and Black both would have six Corps; and each corps would have one corps artillery slice. Their combat factor is the same as their infantry units, but the CF factor is lower when attacked. The artillery can range out 3 squares to an enemy unit. Allowed in forest.

Corps Artillery (SPF): Same as the corps artillery, but can also accompany SPF units (sea, mountain, forest).

Expanded Counter Set

While this expansion works for me, I think it should have only one change, in that Special Forces/Special Purpose Force be split into what they truly are: Alpine/Mountain Troops and Marines. This is because while yes, you can train Marines to do mountaineering operations or train Alpine/Mountain troops to do amphibious operations, a mix of the two are not something you see in large standing units. And yes, there might be units with this kind of multiple terrain training, Kriegspiel deals in divisions, not companies or battalions.

As they stand, Special Forces are very overpowered overall. With their ability to move across all terrain they out power most other units in the game (more so with Black Forces). With the right river connections, they can start safely in the backfield of a map and lauch an amphibious assault across the map onto a beach. And with a little luck a unit can pop in to combat, pick a moderate strategy, and then pop out of combat. A couple of them skirting around mountains or forests like this (after across map movement) would cause some havoc if done in conjunction with other forces.

Doing this would require a redone and/or expanded force organization chart for Red and Black (both have three Corps with the core game). Simply expanding to four Corps and making one for each a Marine Corp would work. With the expanded forces including an artillery slice in each Corp, the two ‘new’ Corps would be more functional, and work with the island maps idea we kicked around. Which would work with my possible idea of a random objective matrix (See afterwards/AAR of Kriegspiel Game 3).

The popped out Marine Corp would also be able to shine on the Island Maps I whipped up. Yes I typed up all three of todays post back to back, but this one was started earlier in the week, I just had to deal with house stuff and never got a chance to polish it and and detail before more stuff popped into my brain. One of the one off ideas I had was allow Marines full movement as they are, and only allow Army units to arrive at a clear beach.

Another Map Post

Here are some maps I sketched up while killing time after lights out at my medical facility. I based them off what each country was based off of (Russia for Red and Germany for Black) and made each of the island maps without a ‘host’ country to allow for replayability. Though they are a touch thematic to one or the other.

On these, cross hatching is cities, parallel lines are beaches. Roads and rivers are hard to tell, but content helps. Forests are the little pine trees, and mountains are the chevrons (the ‘A’s with out the middle line).

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Being that Black is WWII Germany, I went with Normandy as a template. Staying in WWII I went with Tinian, Saipan, and Midway for the islands. There is a short river coming from the coast on the left and an actual river on the right, allowing this to connect to the Black Map.

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The first Island Map is inspired by Iwo Jima, Wake Island, and an upside down Guadalcanal.

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Islands 2 is inspired by the Aleutian Campaign during WWII, and this is Attu Island (the ‘city’ is were the Coast Guard had a LORAN station up until 2010) and Kiska Island. For Kiska I would say there would have to be a scenario reason to land, possibly a token representing a base or airfield.

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Dad finally got a fjord map, though this is based on the Murmansk area of Russia. That big fjord with two cities on either side is Polyarny (North West side) and Severomorsk (South East side). The island off the coast is a blend of Yuzhny and Sevemy Islands. The town out East is Teriberka. For the unaware who are asking “Why the hell did he pick this area?!?” I’ll explain: Severomorsk was home of the Soviet North Fleet. Polyarny was depot for their nuclear submarines.

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In all cases, I erred on the side of game play, not terrain accuracy. Guadalcanal, Attu, and Kiska are pretty much all mountains. And Murmansk is mostly forests. But that would make them unplayable, so I left some open terrain for armor or mechanized forces to move around. Graphics wise we could still put some green or brown under them to keep things from looking too weird and remember that terrain is only changed do to the symbol on it.

Anyway, tell me what you think and I’ll pass it along to my Dad.

Kriegspiel Game Theory

So after my second game with my Dad we again started talking about tweaking the game. And during this he mentioned something that I had kinda noticed -that Red’s map had alot of mountains- and something I hadn’t noticed -Black’s map has alot of forests-, which caused a light bulb to go off in my head: Red’s forces were tailored for fighting on the Black map and Black’s forces were tailored for the Red map.

Blacks map is heavily forested

8x Mechanized Infantry

5x Special Forces (move through woods and mountains)

2x Paratroops (Airborne jumps and move through woods)

3x Infantry (move through woods)

Reds map is very mountainous

6x Mechanized Infantry

3x Special Forces (move through woods and mountains)

3x Paratroops(Airborne jumps and move through woods)

9x Infantry (move through woods)

As you can see, if you move into the enemies map, your troops gain advantages from the terrain (which with the terrain effects rules in play make infantry less sucky).

Now the Core (also: Red Map & Black Map) maps can come together with no issues, no matter the edges connecting. Because each map has four unique faces, you can get eight different configurations. Some of these configurations however, aren’t the best for game play. Like the one we just played which had the national capitals only six (cross country) to eight (roads) hex’s away from each other. In a game were occupying a hex of an enemy’s capital negates it ability to bring in reinforcements, that too damn close! Additionally as a Red player, you would be dumb to not try to use the mountains as a barrier. Which means you would be favoring two of the four side of your map. As a Black player, you have more cities on water, which gives you more amphibious assault ability to beaches. So Black players should be trying to make river connections.

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Map board configurations

Now in the Vassal module, there are two extra maps someone made: Map A and B. Heres the catch though, Map A will only connect to Red Map, and Map B will only connect to Black Map. Upon messing with A &B, I figured out that A is a repainted Black Map, and B is a repainted Red Map. So this both helps and hinders game play. It helps because you can now swap out one side and do extra combinations like Red map & A, A & B, B & Black map. Or go four deep and truly have some deep assault movement.

Black and B on top, Red and A on bottom.

However you run into the same issues with the two core maps when you do a 2×2 grid. In that the Red map and Black map have to touch, and then A & B have to be touching their partner. With attrition and denial of reinforcements the only two paths to victory, having maps that don’t add much to the game play isn’t helping matters.

To correct this I tried inverting horizontally maps A and B, to allow them to connect to the other color. So had now I had maps Red, Red A, and Red B (R,RA, RB). And Black, Black A, and Black B (B,BA,BB). But the same problem happens: the A & B maps will only work when touching either a Core Map (Red/Black) or another letter map (RA to BA, RA to BB, RB to RA). The poor design idea of adding A & B is now compounded. Which led me to giving the core maps a hard look.

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Giving the maps a look with an eye toward design, I noticed a few things:

Black Map	Red Map
Roads – 36	Roads – 40
Rivers – 34	Rivers – 20
Forests – 15	Forests – 8
Mountains – 3	Mountains – 18
Beaches – 3	Beaches – 5
Cities – 5	Cities – 5

I averaged these to get starting points for terrain on my expansion boards.

Also I noticed that the roads served no purpose in connecting to another map, only the rivers did. The roads simply divided the map -notionally- in half along the long axis and in thirds along the short axis (for wont of a better way of describing the maps). The rivers were then either above or below long axis roads, and either inside or outside the width axis roads. Finally the roads divide the map up by five hexes, then a road, and then another five hexes (and in the case of long sides: another road and another five hexes).

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Now with this information, I fiddled with adding two boards as well, but with an eye to them being usable as either a Black/Red map checker board or all one color on each side of the table. I used Hex Kit (the cost of this and all its tiles sets was the same as the base program of a dedicated wargame map making software) and knocked out the core maps in a very colorful style. Sadly it wasn’t until I’d done ALL the maps and layouts that I realized I’d added a half hex to the maps (they go five hexes/road/five hexes/road/five hexes along each long edge). Which meant they didn’t line up right till I cropped them in Power Point (used too show layouts to Dad). Oops.

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I added colored borders to – one: differentiate between each map; and two: to enable connections if sides swapped maps. Allowing Red to start on the Black map (and Black on the Red map), shifts the game from offensive in nature to more defensive. Now you have to assault through your weaknesses, into your enemy’s strengths.

My expansion maps I designed while I was at work and I didn’t have space to lay them out all together (save the Bridge map), which caused trouble when I did them at home yesterday. I went with diagonal layouts (Black connections on a long and short, Red on the others). The idea was good, but execution was off. But first, my Bridge map, which is meant to only work between the core maps.

I thought about making a “reverse” side to this, but didn’t remember to do so before moving on to the other maps. None of which I saved in Hex Kit at all, like a dumbass. I did export them to PNG files and cleaned them up in GIMP. So we can at least see them.

As you can see on the Bridge map, Red gets more mountains, and Black gets more forests. With the ways the map is now, it lengthens the playing area. It also forces the attacking player to use the proper troop types to clear avenues of approach for the rest of their forces. A few special troops and infantry can slow any push through to Red map. On Blacks side of the map, their limited infantry could also slow advances through the forests.

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The idea for these Diagonal maps, would be that they would be reversible. So the ones that have Black on top, would be on the two sides of one board, and the ones with Red on top would be on another. The layouts of these either gives both sides more room to maneuver and allows for offensive or defensive strategies, depending on who gets what Core map.

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I again kept things mixed 50/50 for the maps so that you don’t end up with Red sitting on a huge pile of mountains and practically no way to guard the passes, or Black getting human wave attacked by masses of infantry coming out of forests they can’t clear out easily.

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Because these were proof of concept designs (working with what I had graphics wise) I’m not too upset I didn’t save the files. I have a really good grasp of Hex Kits UI now, and could remake them in a few hours (at the correct sizes no less!). Going forward now requires hashing out troop types with Dad so that there isn’t map combinations that just let one side steam roll the other. Also I have some ideas for how to utilize Marines (after separating them from Alpine/Mountain troops) and have a couple map ideas that dovetails with them. But those are thoughts for another post. I also found PDFs of the old Avalon Hill General Magazine and combined with an article reference list (bottom of page under community wiki) on Board Game Geek I want to take a look at the designers thoughts and rules verdicts -if any- before remodeling to much more of the game.