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[April 4, 1970] Twixt Scylla and Charybdis (S&T's The Flight of the Goeben)

April 4, 2025 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

by Gideon Marcus

A little over half a century ago, the actions of two ships changed the entire course of human events.

SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau bombarding Phillipeville on the French-Algerian coast (W. Malchin, 1915)

In 1912, two warships of the German Kriegsmarine were stationed in the Mediterranean. The battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, in the event of war, were to raid French shipping between Africa and Europa. When war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Serbia on July 28, 1914, the vessels were in the Adriatic port of Pola. Admiral Souchon, commander of the German duo, decided he didn't want to be bottled up, so he took his ships to the central Mediterranean and waited for orders.

They arrived: head east for the Aegean Sea and ultimately the Dardanelles, the strait on which Turkish Istanbul was situated. There, Souchon was to offer the two modern vessels to the aging and inefficient Ottomans. In return, the Sultan would bring Turkey into The Great War on the side of the Central Powers.

Thus ensued a grand chase, which the British lost. The rest is history.

But what if Souchon had been given different orders? What if the British had had different priorities? Such are the What Ifs that compelling parallel universes are made of—and the subject of the newest game to arrive in the magazine Strategy & Tactics.

The Game

Flight of the Goeben is a two-player S&T magazine game, which depicts the cat-and-mouse game played between the small German task force (the titular Goeben and escort, Breslau) and the entire British Mediterranean fleet. The British player has the twin tasks of hunting the German ships and also protecting a convoy of French ships escorting troop transports from Algeria to Marseilles. The German player has a random objective that is not determined until six turns into the game; it could direct the Kriegsmarine ships to go to Turkey, as historically, or head out through Gibraltar to join the main fleet. On the way, the ships may get points for shelling French ports and sinking the aforementioned transports.

The game is played blind, like Battleship, with each player having his/her own copy of the board—a strategic hex map of the Mediterranean. Ship-to-ship combat is handled simplistically, though provisions exist for using the strategic game as a scenario-generator for detailed tactical ship combat. Tactical rules, based on Fletcher Pratt's naval game, are published in the same issue. I have not played them yet.

There are very few counters: in the basic game, the Germans have two warships and three colliers. The British have seven warships, and the French have three warship group counters and three transport counters. This all makes Goeben a very portable game, ideal for coffee-house playing! Particularly given its short length: like Crete, a typical (basic) game takes 2-4 hours.

Playing against Dan in our "War Room"

The Germans start in the Adriatic or Ionian seas three days before war has broken out between the British and the Hun. All of the British ships start out in the island port of Malta. The game is played in 6-hour turns from August 2 to August 12, during which both sides have variable (and secret) objectives. The Germans do not know their victory conditions until they make their secret die roll in the middle of August 3, and the British don't know theirs until the end of the same day.

Nevertheless, one thing is known: the Germans have the overriding goal of getting their ships out of the Mediterranean before the game is done. But the British get more or fewer points for preventing a German escape to the East or West, and more or fewer points for getting the transports safely to France. At the end of the game (once the Germans have escaped, been sunk or time runs out), whoever has the most points wins.

The Rules

Goeben really breaks away from the old operational hex-and-counters and Zones of Control dynamic. Each turn, both sides move their ships simultaneously, 1-3 spaces per turn. Each ship has a finite amount of coal, which gets burned up at increasingly rapid rates as speed increases. Ships refuel in ports (the British can refuel in French ports, the German at Pola in Austria-Hungary; the Germans can also refuel slowly and illicitly in Italian ports or, somewhat faster, by linking up with one of their three unarmed colliers). After all movement is concluded, if a player's ship entered a coastline or port or strait, he/she must inform the other player of this fact. Except at night—then there is a 50/50 chance of making the move without being spotted. Night turns take place on last six-hours of every day. British ships cannot move along Italian coastlines because the Italians are neutral. Sort of; the Germans have no such restrictions.

After movement, a player may search for the other in Battleship (or Midway) fashion. First, the player calls out the Sea he (or she) has a ship in. If the other player has a ship in that sea, the fact must be reported. The searching player may then elect to call out the Area (subdivision of the Sea) containing a ship. Again, the other player must answer. Finally, the searcher may call out the Hex a ship is in. If both sides have ships in the Hex, combat may occur—night offers the searched player a 50/50 chance of not having to report position. The same is true if the Hex being searched contains islands.

Both game boards, side-by-side, from above

As can be seen, searching is a two-way street. The more specific the searcher is, the more information passed on to the opponent. The German colliers act as decoys as well as sources of fuel, and the British might chase one all over creation thinking it's the Goeben. Once a ship is found, it can be pursued rather than detected in the conventional fashion. The German ships tend to outrun their British counterparts, but it takes a lot of fuel.

Combat (forbidden until war breaks out on August 5!) is handled very simply. Each side rolls a die for each ship, potentially damaging an opponent. Big ships must fight big ships first. Little ships get an adverse modifier when attacking big ships. Little ships get sunk quickly. Big ships can take speed and armament damage before sinking.

There are special rules governing the French ships in the basic game. The French battlegroups start in Toulon and, on August 3, make their way slowly to three different African ports, where they will escort the transports back to Toulon. Once the convoys are underway, they can be attacked by the Germans. The French get two shots at the Germans, and if the Germans survive (likely at least the Goeben will), the transports are sunk.

The Advanced game allows for all of the Mediterranean major powers' navies to come into play, and the French get real ships rather than escort counters. Both sides also get to roll on the What-If tables, and all sorts of neat alternatives can happen, including the British and Germans getting extra ships to play with.

Gameplay

Playing against Janice at the local diner

Even the basic game presents a wide variety of strategic options. The tricky part is that neither side knows what it needs to do at first. It's easier for the British, who need to cover all of their bases. The Germans have to watch out as, if they gamble too strongly on one direction early on, they may find they have to go clear across the map to get any victory points. Using the night turns is essential to keep one's moves a secret—sailing through the Italian straits to get to the Western Med, for instance. The Germans have to wisely use their colliers not only as mobile fuel depots but as decoys.

It is a tense nail-biter for both sides: f or the British, the Germans are elusive buggers who could be anywhere, and there are too many spots on the map that are far enough from Malta to be untenable stations for the coal-hungry vessels; for the Germans, the British seem to be everywhere, and the colliers are easy, slow targets.

From what I can tell, the game is pretty well balanced. And because of the hidden victory conditions, no one really knows who's winning until the end.

The Breslau is spotted by the second British cruiser squadron off the coast of Sicily

Conclusion

Dave Williams, the designer of Anzio and Anzio Beachhead, really hit it out of the park with this one. It's innovative, fast, and very playable. Strategy does not become quickly stereotyped. I do not know how the advanced game plays yet (I suspect it is superfluous), nor have I tried the tactical game (which seems like it would only really be fun in the advanced game). Even just taking the basic, strategic game, Flight of the Goeben is really quite fun. It has already replaced Crete as my game of choice.

Five stars.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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[February 4, 1970] To Rome, with love (SPI's wargame, Anzio Beachhead)

February 4, 2025 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

by Gideon Marcus

When you talk about destruction…

Two months ago, Jim Dunnigan started a revolution. He took over the wargame fanzine, Strategy and Tactics, and not only worked to revitalize it, he started the novel practice of releasing a new wargame in it every issue! Avalon Hill, the previous, undisputed king of the wargame publishers, comes out with one or two new games a year, whereas S&T plans to put out six to twelve (there are two in the current issue) of these magazine inserts in the same time—plus a whole line of regular releases. In fact, a number of them are already out as limited series test prototypes, which some of my friends are playing. Once they get through this round of testing, we should see some or all of them in a more finished form on our hobby store shelves.

Wow!

Last issue's wargame was Crete, which I was well pleased with. The two games in this issue are Bastogne, which looks very cumbersome, and a cutey called Anzio Beachhead, which we've had a lot of fun with. Let's take a look.

Reconnaissance

If the name strikes a chord, it's because we've already played a game with "Anzio" in the title—namely Anzio, which billed itself as "A Realistic Strategy Game of Forces in Italy… 1944"!

Which is funny because the game actually covers from the Salerno landings in September 1943. Anzio is a strategic game that covers the entire Italian campaign in WW2, with invasions treated very abstractly. The invasion of Anzio in January 1944 was planned as a flank of the Germany "Gustav Line", against which the Allies had stalled. The hope was that the Allies could pierce through at a weak point and destabilize the German front. Instead, the Allies were bottled up for four long months. The front didn't move again until the Allies bashed headlong into the Gustav Line, and General Mark Clark took the Anzio forces to Rome, claiming the Italian capital concurrently with the invasion of Normandy.

(This was the wrong move, strategically—by going for glory instead of providing an anvil for the Allied hammer, against which the retreating Germans would be smashed, it meant that the Italian campaign remained an agonizing meatgrinder until the end of the war.)

But that's neither here nor there. Anzio Beachhead depicts the landings and initial expansion at an operational level, covering the early part of the campaign. In fact, it's by the same fellow who designed Anzio, Dave Williams. Here's what Jim Dunnigan has to say about it:

"Anzio Beachhead was seen as another situation like the Bulge, where the attacker had a rapidly declining edge. The original American commander was not bold, and lost. So the idea with Anzio Beachhead was to explore the what if's. At that time, I had been working on designing games for about eight years (since I first discovered the Avalon Hill games.) Before that, I was always interested in the details of history, and how they were connected. Avalon Hill wargames were the first time I saw someone else thinking the same way, and doing it in a novel way. I was always building on that."

"I had been designing a similar game, called Italy, which incorporated the rest of the Italian theater, with a smaller scale map of the Anzio area (ie, two interrelated games, one strategic and the other operational). But when Dave's game came in I thought it did a better job of the Anzio section. We had come up with some of the same solutions, and his game was more compact and suitable for the magazine."

Vital Statistics

Anzio Beachhead seats two players and is seven turns long. A complete game takes about 6 hours. The map is black and white (I made a color version tinted with pastels).

The whole game takes two pages of rules, almost half of which are "optional rules", which we always played with.

Instead of the traditional "Player one moves, then fights; Player two moves, then fights" sequence, each turn is divided into six impulses. Each side gets two moves, while the other side gets a half-move inbetween, during which they can't move into an enemy's "zone of control" (the six hexes surrounding a unit). Zones of Control (ZOCs) are really sticky. You can't move from one to another, and if you move out, you can only move one space. Thus, it's easy to slow an enemy unit down just by parking next to it.

Combat is pretty typical, adding combat factors of attackers and dividing them by the combat factors of the defenders, determining a ratio, rolling a die, and finding the result on the Combar Results Table. Unlike Crete, but like most wargames, good results don't really happen for the attacker until 3-1. 1-1 isn't generally worth it.

There are some fiddly rules which allow the Allies to use naval guns and fighters to add strength to their troop stacks during one impulse per turn. This becomes a fun game of trying to outthink the other. The Allies cannot defend all of their pieces, but the German player can never know which defender is augmented. A miscalculation can result in losing a lot of attackers!

If the Germans engage units with 30 or more strength factors on turns 4 and 5, there is the chance that the Allies will break morale, allowing the Germans to swarm the lines. You can bet that those two turns will see a lot of action—sometimes desperate action.

The Germans win if they slaughter lots of Allies or if they manage to park units next to Anzio. The Allies win if they avoid that.

How does it play?!

After the initial irruption onto the map, which may not see a single combat, it's all defense for the Allies, setting up a defensive perimeter using rivers and cities as barriers. The Germans are looking for weak points in the line. Both sides have reinforcements come in, the Allies get most of them earlier, the Germans getting more later.

Allied play is fairly simple, if unforgiving. Keep your lines strong and counterattack where appropriate. German strategy is tougher. A lot depends on understanding how to use the two movement turns, as there is no advance after combat rule. The allies can break their lines to hit bad guys one hex away and then get back in line in phase 2, which is nice. Indeed, as the Allies, many is the time I pounced south of the Asturia River to preemptively break up Germany attacks.

A good Allied player will not let the Germans have more than 2-1 odds at any point, to ensure that the Germans have to risk ugly exchanges. Both the Germans and Allies have a few very powerful units, and those serve as anchors for defense, linchpins for assault.

Experience

I've played four games of Anzio Beachhead, and each was a different experience. I lost as the Allies quickly in the first game because the rules say that the Germans can show up behind enemy lines at the Asturia River line unless you block it with your units' ZOCs. I won as the Germans as quickly the second time, piercing the Allied line such that they never regained cohesion.

The last two games went down to the wire. I was the Allies both times, winning the first game (the Germans couldn't quite collapse me fast enough) and losing the second game (bad luck, mostly).

There are some games where you can be pretty free-wheeling with your strategy. Crete for instance. Sure, throw yourself at the enemy at 1:1 and see what happens! You might open up a hole.

Not so, Anzio Beachhead. With two skilled players, every unit, every hex feels like the most critical, and a single wrong move could lose the game. I know I played almost perfectly as the Allies except for abandoning Corroceto Station too early; this was barely balanced out by a less than optimal German placement early in the game. Otherwise, it was like a rigorous chess match.

That kind of game can be exhausting, and it takes a long time. There's no room for 85% thinking. On the other hand… boy, it sure is rewarding when it all pays off!

Final thoughts

As Dunnigan said, wargames are all about "what if"s. What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if the Germans had won the Battle of the Bulge? The interesting thing about Anzio Beachhead is that the what if is not "what if the Allies have broken through to Rome or crushed the Germany Wehrmacht in Italy?" because that was flatly impossible, no matter how well they'd done at Anzio. As one person put it, "a corps was given an army's job."

I suppose the hypothetical is actually "what if the Germans had utterly crushed the Italian invasion?" It would have given German forces more freedom of movement and been valuable for morale and propaganda purposes, but the long-term results would have been the same. Either way, the ramifications are beyond the scope of the game.

But taken as a primer in operational invasions, it's a lot of fun, whether you're the Allies trying to make a bigger pimple in the Germany side, or the Germans trying to hurl the Allies back into the sea. It's a taut game with a lot of interesting new mechanics, very evenly balanced. Its only drawback is that it's a bit lengthy for what you get.