Hellfire Pass is the latest entry to hit the GMT P500 from Consim Press. This release pays tribute to the classic Beda Fomm game design by Frank Chadwick, and covers not one but two separate battles — Operation Battleaxe and Brevity. As publisher, Beda Fomm will always hold a special place in my heart — it was our initial Consim Press release back in 2010 and reflects our brand focus to release games that model the Redmond Simonsen (SPI) approach to physical systems design.

Since many are familiar with Beda Fomm (the original 1979 GDW Series 120 release or our edition), we’d like to share how the game system has evolved to cover the protracted nature of combat during the Battleaxe and Brevity operations. What follows is a preview of Designer’s Notes from Frank Chadwick. I asked Frank to summarize the key design challenges and highlight game concepts he is refining or introducing to best capture the historical nature of the battles.

We hope you enjoy Frank Chadwick’s inside look into Hellfire Pass and we hope it will entice you to preorder this game with confidence!
— John Kranz, Consim Press

Hellfire Pass is based on my earlier design Beda Fomm, which also covered a sprawling mobile battle in the Western Desert that covered several days. The battles triggered by the British operations Brevity and Battleaxe involved a similar mix of armor, infantry, and artillery. Beda Fomm, however, was essentially a meeting engagement between a scraped-together British advanced guard and an unprepared retreating Italian force. Battleaxe, and to a lesser degree Brevity, were different. Both sides were prepared for battle and brought more balanced forces to the fray.

My intention in Hellfire Pass was to retain as much of the system as possible and elaborate on it rather than alter it. Some of these elaborations cover the more protracted nature of the battles in this game, some cover the greater availability of certain weapons (primarily AT guns), and some are just fine-tuning of the system.

Antitank Reserves
Antitank (and German heavy AA guns used in the antitank role) were often used to ambush tanks, but when the counters are on the map these ambushes are fairly easy to avoid. I did not want an elaborate system of recording where particular guns actually were, in part because they were sometimes moved into position in response to enemy encounters. The antitank reserve rule is a simple way of using these assets largely as they were used in the actual battle.

Armor Grouped in Companies
To keep the number of counters manageable, and to provide historic units, I show tanks in their actual companies with a step down available. This also makes each unit less sensitive to armor losses than in the original game. Fairly small numbers of tanks were critical to the fighting at Beda Fomm, in large part because the British side was almost pure tank and the Italians could only match them with tanks of their own. In Battleaxe and Brevity, both sides fielded more balanced forces.

That said, the Germans had a few platoons of Panzer II tanks as scouting and escort assets in their tank battalion and regimental headquarters, and those are shown as platoons.

Armored cars are shown in platoons as that better suits their use as dispersed scouting assets. Making their loss or morale failure irrelevant to the parent unit morale is done so that they can be used fairly aggressively without fear of crippling the parent unit. Scouting assets, after all, are supposed to take some risks, and everyone knows they are likely to suffer losses in the normal course of doing their jobs.

Separate Defense Strengths
The original game relied on unitary combat strengths—a single value served both for attack and defense. Given the limited mix of units in the earlier game, this was possible, although a bit of a stretch in places. With the broader range of units we needed to break attack and defense into separate values, particularly for units such as the Matilda infantry tank, which had the same armament as the British “cruiser” (medium) tanks but much heavier armor. Likewise artillery has considerable firepower but a fairly low defense value. We also split the defense value of armored vehicles and gave them different strengths against barrage (artillery fire) and direct fire. The wide variation in armor, which gives armored units in the game conventional defense strengths ranging from 1 to 5, has less effect on artillery fire.

Protracted Combat
In the Beda Fomm battle, both sides brought most of their supplies with them, and the fight was one long action interrupted periodically by nightfall. Both the Brevity and Battleaxe offensives were examples of protracted combat, where both sides were challenged to sustain their efforts in the field while also maneuvering aggressively over a wider landscape. The Supply (14), Repairs and Regrouping (15.2), and Morale Recovery (15.1) additions all speak to that need to sustain operations in the face of losses.

Air Power
Hellfire Pass is first and foremost a ground combat game. Although air power exerted enough influence on the battle that it cannot be ignored, I wanted it to have a minimal “footprint” in the rules, and so simply made it an extension of barrage combat.

The System Overall
When I first designed Beda Fomm back in 1979, I did not set out to design a universal operational game system for fighting battles in North Africa. I simply wanted to recreate that very unusual battle which climaxed O’Connor’s Operation Compass. It’s been a little surprising to see how adaptable the system is to other North Africa battles, and I suspect that given enough interest from gamers I may venture a try at some other maneuver battles in the desert in the future.

Frank Chadwick

Author: John Kranz