First Time Into the Breach, Dear Son

This last weekend, I taught Mister one of my old and basic war games, The Major Battles and Campaigns of General George S. Patton. I started war gaming when I was 10 with naval miniatures from Alnavco. I bought an American Fletcher class destroyer and Japanese Hibiki in 1:1200 scale. They were expensive (for a ten-year-old) and my mom was pretty sure I'd been ripped off. I bought the game Sea Power, but couldn't afford the prices so I made clay models from the catalog. I actually did a fair job eventually in taking the time to make decent looking models. I started with Pacific theater World War II to go with my two actual lead ships. Eventually I got bored and smashed most of them to make European theater Brits, Italians, and Germans to go with the American refugees from the Atlantic. I even smashed all these and went to World War I stuff for a little while. Lots of fun.

Today I have 1:2400 scale ships from Alnavco and also less expensive models from Panzerschiffe, with lots unpainted waiting for that mythical time when I have time. They can go with the unpainted modern and World War II armor, the unpainted Mediaeval knights and Saracens, the Gaul and Romans for the Battle of Alesia, and all the World War II and modern infantry that needs to be painted or remounted based on a new organization that I started many years ago. I have plenty of painted onesIve been collecting armor miniatures since grade school. Oh, and as long as were talking things to do when I have spare time, add in the three dozen books I have waiting to be read (and let's not even discuss my wish list on Amazon).

Time. It is a precious commodity. When do I get to retire?

Anyway.

Back to the Patton game. I figured Mister was ready for this game. He has played the old Sid Meier's Civilization for DOS and loves it. He smashes the computer chess even on the highest level. So Patton, which I got when I was 12 from my brother, and which started me on to a collection of board war games (and how many of those have I never played? Ok, probably almost everything after the age of 24. Time, again.)

So Saturday afternoon after lunch, I asked Mister if he wanted to learn a war game. He said sure. So I pulled it out and explained the basics. I told him what scenarios there were and who was involved. We chose the longest Sicily scenario and he chose to be the Allies at my suggestion. Being on strategic defense is tougher and less exciting and I figured the whole Italian defection rule would be pretty discouraging to him. Plus, as the Allies he didn't have to figure out how to set up his troops. They would slowly arrive, giving Mister the time to get used to the movement and combat system.

I set up and explained why I did some things. I also asked him what the effect of an alternative would be based on his question of why I deployed so many units out in the northwest near Palermo on the beaches. He didn't quite get it enough to tell me but when I then explained he seemed to understand.

So basically, I set up a light screen to keep him from waltzing into Messina, deployed two-thirds of my armor plus some infantry near Palermo, held Catania strongly, held the western-most beaches on the south, and posted one strong battlegroup in the southeast with infantry posted inland as a screen. I decided not to contest the beaches just to be nice on game one.

Mister landed his troops in a good manner, providing contiguous support. He didn't try to hit my strongly held beaches after I explained the price of failing to roll higher than me. As he built up his bridgehead, he finally moved inland to try to take his first city that would cause defections. I won that first battle. He hit me again and drove me back. I retook the city. All the while, I slowly stripped about half of my armor from the Palermo region and edged them closer to the southeast. Reinforcements just weren't coming for me as yet. But I had advised Mister on the value of keeping some units off the map so I couldn't completely abandon my beach defenses up there. He got that concept right away.

Finally, on his third try, Mister grabbed his first objective and I pulled back, letting Mister see the first defections. He really liked that rule.

As I fell back with a screen and a couple battlegroups to threaten attacking columns too exposed, Mister struck west on the south coast road into my infantry blocking units. He kept banging at them and I kept falling back. He was using only three armor and two infantry, but fighting only a couple infantry of mine at worst, I could not stop them as the got menacingly close to my western defection cities. In the southeast I kept pulling back trying not to lose too many of my infantry screen so I'd have units to lose to defections, and launched a couple sharp counter-attacks that started to kill off some of his armor. But I could not hold and kept retreating northeast.

I made one big play to stop his western force by waiting until he got close enough and rushing my three armored units to attack with infantry moved into blocking position to cut off the Allied force. Rolling three dice to his four, I lost an armored unit for my troubles and retreated; and then Mister attacked and wiped out my last two armored units. I had only four or five scattered infantry units and started getting them out of the way, using them to block roads until they defected.

Mister swept the western cities, landed his last infantry on Sicily seeing he needed no more off map reserves, and began a little gloating. I try hard to instill a little more sportsmanship than that but he was feeling his oats. And to be fair, I had made a blunder in the west. Mister also didn't over-commit to the west, keeping most of his army in the southeast ready to advance north. It actually looked a little bad for me.

So, with my forces concentrating on the eastern and northern coastal roads to protect the northeast corner, I pulled back outlying units to save them in order to defect. By the time the last objective city outside my small enclave fell, I was down to six armored units (I started with 9 armored and 24 infantry. I'd killed 4 or 5 Allied armor and perhaps a few more infantry, so Mister had 8 or 9 armor and about twice the infantry.

But he then made the classic mistake. He forgot that time is his enemy as much as my army. Thinking he'd won the war, he saw no reason to finish me off quickly.

So he slowly advanced his victorious Allied army on a broad front, inexplicably up the center of the island. I asked him why he was going that way. I would ask him questions to see if he'd adjust. But though he made minor changes he kept his slow advance going, bringing every last unit up before jumping forward again. And as he did, I started getting some reinforcements. Before long I had a dozen armored units defending on a three wide front. When he finally hit me, I could shift armor easily to the most threatened part making sure I had 5 dice. I only worried about some attrition without infantry to absorb losses. But I bounced him back again and again and finally received some infantry reinforcements. So when he punched into my center and drove my defenders back into Messina, I could counter-attack on multiple axes and push him back, losing infantry while killing his armor as he tried to put more dice into play by leaving infantry behind.

Before long, I had more combat power and way more armor than the Allied force and Mister started to realize that his gloating had been premature.

We ended the game with Messina secure. Mister was quite disappointed but was amazed that nearly four hours had gone by while we played. I was actually impressed with his grasp of some of the basics of fighting the campaign. I did emphasize that he took time for granted and that by failing to hit me hard while I was on the ropes, he let me recover. A lesson all generals should learn, I think. You have to be ruthless once you start a war game just like you must when at war in real life.

But we had fun. And I explained to Mister that I spend a lot of my youth playing these. In high school I had one good friend to play these with and we played in a group with a number of adults and we were the only minors. All the way through college, playing with friends, sometimes until dawn and often while drinking (I'm thinking Traveler, Star Fleet Battles, and Avalon Hill's Civilization here in particular), was common. I didn't explain the drinking part, of course. After my divorce, I managed to get a couple gamers together once a month but one is in law school and one has a new baby girl so gaming is lower in priority. I should try to gather them up again. Another is fairly close and interested but hasn't been able to cough up the time. Another is across the country. I keep buying games and more and more I have games with counters not even punched out. That would have horrified me as a youngster. Still does, actually.

But as time goes on, I may have an in-house opponent! How cool is that? This is something that kids can compete with adults on an even footing.

And I think I'll have quite the opponent based on the early round.