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Well, Sam Mustafa has done it again – produced another excellent and innovative set of rules.

Well, I have done it again – taken a perfectly good and simple set of rules and added complications and changes to suit my own particular tastes. Specifically, for my old “imaginations” campaign set in 1930s Mitteleuropa where the nations from the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” (Freedonia and Sylvania,) Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (Tomainia, Bacteria and Osterlich,) Hayao Miyazaki’s “Porco Rosso” (The Free State of Fiume,) Biggles (Maltova and Lovitzna,) Orwell (Oceanea and Eurasia,) Dilbert (Elbonia,) and of course, the grandaddy of all imaginations, Ruritania, all battle it out for supremacy in “Danubia.”

Eisenhower is the latest game from Sam Mustafa. This time he handles multi-divisional sized battles in Europe in World War II. The details are here:

Like all of Sam Mustafa’s rules, Eisenhower is ruthlessly stripped down, with only three basic troop types: tanks, leg infantry and motorised infantry. (Although advance rules and traits do add more unit types and variations in troop quality.) Artillery and airpower are abstracted out to cards and dice. I wanted to see if it could be made compatible with the troops that we have for Danubia, everything from Landwehr to armoured trains, with aircraft and artillery included. (Why you ask? Because we have the toys and I damn well want to use them – that’s why! But restoring artillery units removes an over-simplification in the Eisenhower rules that your artillery is always where you want it, when you want it.) This involved grafting the nuance and granularity of the rules that we used for the Danubia battles, “The War To End All Wars” (TWTEAW,) onto the simpler Eisenhower systems, to see if both sets still worked. The result is Napalini.

The man himself: Benzino Napalini, (or, sometimes Napoloni,) Duce of Bacteria, Presidente e Maresciallo di Campo, Grande ammiraglio della flotta, Dictator, Statesman, Impresario, Activist and Influencer, Chairman of the Bacterian Geographical and Exploration Society, Poet Laureate, Jurist and Chairman of the Judicial Appointments Committee, Patron of the Arts, visionary, preux chevalier, Gentiluomo, Man of Destiny, fashion guru, Scientician, amateur yachtsman, manufacturer of rain gauges and bespoke canal locks to the gentry, and Snowman. (Photo: United Artists.)

Eisenhower is designed for a 6’ x 4’ table with 6” grids for 15-20mm figures for up to six divisions. (So, 12 x 8 squares.) In Danubia’s smaller world I used a Big Red Bat mat with a 4” grid for our 2mm toys, with two divisions (Danubian “armies”) each, on a 24” x 32” table, (so, 6 x 8 squares,) to fit my dining table. The grids are not obtrusive to look at, and they remove the need to measure movement and ranges so speed everything up greatly. I had worried that they would impose a rectangular look on the terrain, but this was not the case as the squares were big enough to accommodate any curve or angle. There would be no problem enlarging the Danubia table size for battles with more divisions.

In Eisenhower rules as written, (RAW,) everything is deployed in plain sight, so the players have a god-like view and full knowledge. I just grafted the hidden unit deployments and dummies from TWTEAW onto the system. Yes, it takes longer to set up this way, but the added uncertainty and removing the helicopter view makes it well worth it.

Before the onslaught: The table with most units still hidden. The Bacterians are on the right. The 50 cent coins are the three initial objectives. I intend to replace these with spiffy flags of all the waring nations.

So far, I have had two games testing the amalgam of rules. In the first game Bill’s Bacteria took on Freedonia led by me. Bill chose to attack so had a 25% strength point advantage, as per the Eisenhower set up. Although 25% didn’t sound like much of an advantage to me it worked well. The OBs were taken from the Danubia campaign, so they were not symmetrical. The Bacterians brought overwhelming airpower with them.

Porco Rosso and the Dalmatia Sky Pirates take on Freedonian Gladiators. The Gladiators' days are numbered - there are three more Bacterian fighter wings where Porco came from.

Eisenhower entails the use of an A4 sized off-table “SHAFE” command post for each player to faff about managing dice and cards. But Danubia already has on table HQs, artillery units and aircraft, so with the addition of little markers for “operations” and “stockpiles”, and cotton wool smoke to show which artillery had fired, all the extraneous paperwork can be dispensed with, and the focus returns to the table, not the off-table SHAFE. The only thing that needed recording was the accumulation of victory points.

In Eisenhower players alternate in allocating “operations,” (initiatives for a division to move and fight,) in a three square by three square grid. In the original rules you determine how many operations you have for a given turn by first throwing dice and then allocating them for use with certainty. Napalini flips this a bit – you allocate the ops, but don’t dice to see if you can actually execute them until you try to use them. The chance of losing an operation is the same in both sets, but Napalini can derail a perfect plan. To partially ameliorate this, I have grafted the “HQ Prompt” rule from TWTEAW into Napalini. This gives you a limited number of options for the general and his HQ, (you,) to pay particular attention to. One of these options is to increase the chance of getting an operation, all well and good, but other options include coordinating barrages and airstrikes, using stockpiles, sorting out engineering tasks, and more good stuff that you might want to do. You are unlikely to have enough prompts to do everything that you want... decisions, decisions. All divisions have a minimum of one operation per turn, and a maximum of three.

Air power in Eisenhower is a zero-sum game. A card driven system, with either one side having it all, or the other having it all, or neither side having it. Air power in TWTEAW was the opposite, a game-within-a-game with detailed movement and combat, that was fun, very pretty, and had lots of Dakka, Dakka, Dakkaring; but was time consuming and was quite often irrelevant. Napalini seems to split the difference nicely. Fighters vie for air superiority in one dogfight and the resulting balance of air power determines the chance of observation and ground attack aircraft penetrating to their targets. I was afraid that given the Bacterian four-to-one superiority in fighters we wouldn’t get a good test of the rules. I was wrong. Yes, the outnumbered Freedonian Gladiators did not last long, but late in the battle some plucky Freedonian DH4s overcame overcast weather and Bacterian fighters to strut their stuff. So, although your odds will vary, nothing is a foregone conclusion. “Overcast” is another bit of added granularity in Napalini. In Eisenhower weather is either good, or bad with no flying and restricted ground movement. In Napalini overcast does not affect ground troops and reduces, but does not eliminate, air effectiveness.

Against the odds: Breaking through the clouds, and the Bacterian fighters, Freedonian DH4s put warheads on the foreheads of the Bacterian artillery and cavalry below.

Played with divisional operations alternating from side to side, the game has a good interactive feel. The defender can always “pass,” the attacker cannot. Because there is a stacking limit of three combat battalions in a square the system pushes you to think in terms of brigades without having to keep track of actual organizations. I liked this feeling. I saw myself deploying defending brigades, having reserves in brigades, and counterattacking in brigades, all without having to keep track of any brigades. We deployed 14 different ground troop types instead of the three basic types in Eisenhower. It had occurred to me that this diversity might clutter the system but really it was not a problem. After all, you only have to remember whether your unit moves one or two squares and throws one, two, or three dice in combat. That is not difficult.

Eisenhower has a very clever “Objective” system that gives you a good reason to fight for a location, but not an overwhelming incentive to die unnecessarily when attacking or defending that location. This keeps the game focussed and tense, and allows for the strategic initiative, in terms of who has ‘the momentum” and can take the first operation, to change. The game plays quickly. We got through four turns – the length of a standard Eisenhower game - in the time it took to play one Noel Coward and one Marlene Dietrich LP… musical atmosphere has always been important in Danubia.

Bill proved that you can take the boy out of the Pennines, but you cannot take the weather out of the boy, and for much of the battle he managed to get overcast with a good West Yorkshire clag that reduced the amount of ground-pounding my chaps had to suffer. Despite the narrow front it was a very fluid battle with attack, counterattack, and counter-counterattack. Combat is attritional so you can take a square but find yourself so weakened that a well organised counterattack will do for you, and this happened several times to both sides, so there is lots of tension. Nighttime and card play allows you to rebuild and reorganize. I thought that I was winning until the last couple of initiatives of the last turn when my armoured counterattack that had been going great guns suddenly wasn’t going any guns at all.

The End is Nigh! On the right the Bacterians have retaken the town. On the left the Freedonians have re-taken the first objective in the centre and it looks like their armour, top left, will sweep all before them... they won't!

For the second game Jeff’s Ruritania took on Freedonia and their Osterlich allies commanded by Tony this time. Again, the attacking Ruritanians had a 25% points advantage.

From left to right: General James Custer-Dump; King Rudolf VII of Ruritania; and Hercule Poirot.

For this game the hidden deployment came into its own. I use counters of the right “footprint” with the unit identity or its dummy status written on the underside so you can quickly swap them for the real units when the visibility rules determine. This of course gives full play to use aerial and ground reconnaissance, but King Rudolf didn’t get where he is today by mindlessly heeding military college platitudes like: “Time Spent in Reconnaissance is Seldom Wasted….” So, Jeff hammered straight in and put his schwerpunkt on his right, hoping to roll into the two objectives behind the Freedonian lines, but unbeknownst to him Tony had already selected this area of woods and gentle hills as the perfect area to conceal his best units for an intended thrust into the Ruritanian rear, (ouch!)

The battlefield: This aerial photograph flattens out the hills which are in the 3-4 o’clock and 10-11 o’clock positions. Ruritania is attacking and will deploy in the bottom two rows. Napalini uses many more terrain types than Eisenhower. In the RAW only the two towns at 2 o’clock and 9 o’clock, the two villages, (classified as “bocage” in Eisenhower,) at 6 o’clock and 11 o’clock, and the two woods at 1 o’clock and 7 o’clock, would have appeared on the battlefield. The other roads, railways, tracks, gentle hills, open woods and treelines, groves and farms would have disappeared as “flat” terrain. The additional Napalini terrain adds much more tactical nuance, and, just as importantly, looks nicer.

The two sides were evenly matched in the air, even down to both using the same make of fighters. The weather was good, so planes had no problem finding their targets. The Freedonians edged air superiority on the first day, (which in Danubia consists of two turns compared to only one turn in Eisenhower,) but the Ruritanian groundcrew equivalents of Biggles’s Flight Sergeant Smyth did sterling work patching their crates up overnight and they turned the tide on the second day.

Clearly one of the big winners in the Danubian Wars is the Gloster Aircraft Compamy.

Having unknowingly picked the toughest part of the Freedonian line to begin their initial assault, the surprised Ruritanians were handily repulsed. King Rudolf then called up his airpower to attempt to bomb their way through, but although the strikes easily found their targets, they bombed abysmally. Now was the time for Custer-Dump to launch a spirited Freedonian counterattack.

Ruritanian Lysanders and Gladiators, backed up by Lovitznan Ju 52 bombers marked by their distinctive brown crosses, attempt to blow a path through the Freedonian spearhead – And fail miserably.

The key to the Eisenhower system is the interplay between alternating operations by formations of both sides If your preference is for an IGOUGO game where you move and fight everything with flawless precision, and then your opponent does the same, then Eisenhower is not for you, and Napalini even less so since I have made the allocation of operations a tad more uncertain. In addition to this back-and-forth by-play the number of operations allocated to formations, (and the number allocated by your opponent to the enemy formations facing yours,) has a big impact. Every formation must have at least one operation allocated to it, but the real question is how do you allocate your remaining operations? Do you go for an even split or do you favour one formation over others? If two opposing formations have only one operation each you can expect a slow skirmish. If both have multiple operations, then you can expect a slugfest. But if a formation has several more operations than its opponent you have the chance to pile on the pressure with multiple movement and combat options. It was these dynamics that dominated the game. Tony favoured his left flank counterattack, whilst Jeff adopted a more balanced approach.

On the Ruritanian left flank two battalions of the International Regiment[2] and a regiment of cavalry are about to make life unpleasant for a lonely battalion of Osterlich Landwehr at the very bottom of the picture. Airstrikes by Osterlichian Fairey Foxes, and Freedonian DH4s will hurt the attackers but not save the Landwehr. Meanwhile Ruritanian forces mass on the highway to assault the town.

On the Ruritanian right flank the Freedonians made steady progress. By nightfall they had pushed the Ruritanians back six miles, right to their baseline, although with both sides grievously damaged. On the Ruritanian left a well-orchestrated assault on the town stalled when the operations dice didn’t oblige. But this proved to be a blessing in disguise, as instead of just using their advantage in operations for a stand-up, and no doubt mutually bloody, fight through the rubble of a built up area, the Ruritanians used their advantage in operations to by-pass the first town (which was not a victory objective,) seize the objectives beyond it (which included the second town,) pick off the Freedonian reserves, and overrun a Freedonian HQ.

Nighttime is logistics time in Eisenhower, when both sides use “stockpiles” to rally exhausted units, and restore badly damaged units. In a normal Eisenhower game the attacker has four stockpiles and the defender two. This considerably ekes out the attacker’s only 25% advantage in points, all the more so since the Freedonians had to rebuild their lost non-combatant HQ, whereas the Ruritanians could focus on restoring more combatant units. This disparity in logistics did not bother me. The Eisenhower game system is designed to provide equal but asymmetrical opportunity between the attacker and defender, not an identical same number of points set-up that you get in most other game systems. The attacker must attack to take the victory objectives and 25% more hardware and twice the logistics by no means makes this easy. In any event I intend to use these rules in my campaign, where strengths in men, materiel and logistics will be determined by the overall strategic situations, not by concepts of balance and fairness. And, in fairness to the original design, in much bigger Eisenhower games, the difference between two and four stockpiles, would not be as significant as in smaller Napalini games.

Thus, the sun rose over a relatively much stronger Ruritanian army, and, still holding the momentum because they held the objectives, the Ruritanians moved first and quickly to put the final pressure on the Freedonians. A plucky Freedonian counterattack gave up the first town to temporarily re-take the second, but this just left the Freedonians depleted and out of their prepared positions…. By noon it was all over, and King Rudolf was knighting his commanders on the battlefield.

Although pushed back to their own baseline the relatively stronger Ruritanian tanks and artillery hit the Freedonians in the flank at dawn. The little circular jeep marker is used instead of an unsightly dice to mark the centre of operations, activating the units in the adjacent squares.

I had a good feeling when I first read Eisenhower, and, having played it, I have an even better feeling. The basic system is very bland, but that is an advantage because I think that you can add nuance and granularity to taste, without breaking the core system and overloading its simplicity. Danubia has its own requirements, and I appreciate that you may not have a hankering to include the armoured trains and river gunboats that I love so much, but you could easily tinker with any 20^th Century historical period and add bells and whistles until you have the level of period flavour that you prefer. For example, you could have a simple matrix showing type of tank defending against type of gun attacking with the result being either a +1, or -1, or = on your dice throw; or you can add unit types or terrain effects to taste.

I am now inspired to finish Napalini, the rules attached here are still a work in progress, about 85% complete and are still needing a few tweaks. After that, who knows what might happen in Danubia . . .

[1] Really, it’s by Peter Hunt. But to run my 1930s Danubia campaign I stole the great concept of “Warfare in the Age of Poirot” from this chap: https://jozistinman.blogspot.com/2019/01/ruritanian-elbonian-war-of-1925-battle-1.html

[2] Idealists from Britain and France who come to Danubia not: “… [for] Glory, revenge, or pay: /We came because our open eyes/ Could see no other way.” (C. Day-Lewis, “The Volunteer.”)