At first blush, the connection between my first GMT game, Cross Bronx Expressway, and my next, Solitaire TacOps: Ortona, might seem tenuous. However, the connection is quite simple – I have an affinity for urban settings and how they serve as representations of human modernity.  Cross Bronx Expressway explores this through the social, political, and economic domains. Solitaire TacOps: Ortona explores it almost exclusively through the force domain. 

Urban warfare is a very small niche of wargaming which shows up mostly as either scenarios within tactical systems, or stand-alone operational games. Both of these scales offer views into the nature of urban conflict, but each, removed from the other, loses the context to make those views complete. In order to model the dynamic impacts of urban warfare, Solitaire TacOps explores both tactical and operational considerations. 

Maneuver and Effectiveness 

Maneuver and effectiveness are at the center of this design. They are both quite specific, yet very flexible concepts that I believe have some interesting applications for game design. In game terms, effectiveness is the strength or quality of one’s ability to shift the game state toward one’s objectives. Maneuver is the means of manipulating the game state to provide advantages which increase effectiveness. In adversarial or competitive contexts these two concepts reveal their inverse, as maneuver can also focus on manipulating the game state to decrease opposing effectiveness. 

Contested effectiveness is a limited resource, so,, with time, it is not always a matter of who is the most effective, but rather who loses their effectiveness at the slowest rate. Chess is a perfect example of this. Big effective maneuvers in chess have the potential to immediately end the game, yet, with well-matched players, games will often go until the pieces remaining for one side are clearly more effective than the opposition. Chess as an abstract strategy game represents the effectiveness contest well. Warfare is the place where the contest is literalized.  

Military eras (ancient to modern) are often broken down by degrees of maneuver and there are whole fields of military study dedicated to effectiveness from strategic (a nation’s military effectiveness) to tactical (the combat effectiveness of particular weapons systems). While there are many games and systems that include one or both of the concepts, few have literalized the relationship between them.

As a designer, my approach centers on modeling dynamics over events. I believe that well-modeled dynamics can arrive at the desired events, whereas even the best modeled events begin by limiting the scope of what they can depict. So even before I knew the first volume for Solitaire TacOps would be set in Ortona or even was certain that the idea was a viable design, I was collecting sources and doing the research, to answer the question – what are the dynamics involved in the relationship between maneuver and effectiveness and how can they be expressed through the mechanics of a board game?

Scale for Effect

Because effectiveness can straddle so many scales, clarity around where the model is focused is important. By example my interest is not at the strategic scale of national military effectiveness. Indeed one of the reasons I started down this path  in the first place was my own struggle with strategic or even some higher scale operational hex and counter wargames. Every time a regiment or division counter takes a step loss and is flipped or removed from the game, I stop and ponder what actually just happened there? It makes for good food for thought, but can slow playing down to a halt, much to the chagrin of my gaming partners.

The act of taking a step loss at the strategic scale is a bit deceiving. I’m not sure there has ever been a case of a full regiment let alone a division being completely wiped off the map. What it represents in the abstract however is a loss of effectiveness. Pieces are removed from the map not because everyone is gone, but because the map and pieces are visualizing each side’s combat effectiveness. The in-game situation led to a point where the effectiveness of one side was able to reduce the combat effectiveness of the other to nil. 

Understanding how that happens requires zooming in, but it is important not to lose the bigger picture. The closer you get to the tactical scale within gaming, the more isolated the concept of victory becomes. From an operational standpoint, however, each tactical engagement is a part of a bigger effectiveness picture. The tension created here between scales is something mostly only hinted at abstractly in games. There will be tactical modifiers in an operational game, or operational tracks in a tactical game. They exist adjacent to the design where TacOps works to make them central.

Players move between scales at different parts of the campaign, and are presented with decisions reflective of the role they occupy at that scale. At the operational scale they are responsible for all of the logistics of the campaign – personnel, materiel, force composition, deployments, etc. Their choices shift play to territorial maps where the player goes down to  command the deployed forces. On any given turn on the territorial maps, an activation will occur for a small formation of that deployment where the player is in command of their tactical decisions. Once the outcome of the scenario has been determined on the territorial maps, play shifts back up again to the operational scale until the next deployment. 

The combined decisions that players make across these scales, provide a unique gaming experience, which lends itself to an appreciation of the command responsibilities and implications between them all. As a dynamics system, applied to historical campaigns, it allows for deeper exploration of how the interplay of command between scales factored into the outcomes. It is particularly well suited to urban campaigns because it situates players with enough perspective to appreciate the broader task, without abstracting the tactical requirements to accomplish it.

The Road to Ortona

During territorial disputes, cities can become key points for their logistic and cultural importance. Culturally, the capture or defense of cities can become an analog of national morale. To gain, hold or lose a city can be a key factor in the broader will to fight. During the Italian Campaign of World War II, where the first volume of Solitaire TacOps takes place, the Allies sought to capture and the Germans sought to hold the city of Rome because of the acknowledged morale value the city held for its global stature. But, there were also logistical considerations.

The plans for a large-scale invasion of France were already in the works. A strategic goal of the smaller invasion in Italy was to contest the effectiveness of the Axis forces ahead of it. Until the Germans withdrew, their level of defense in Italy decreased their available effectiveness for the coming invasion in France. Once the Germans withdrew, they in effect gave the Allies dominance over the logistically important Mediterranean theater.

The capture of Rome was mostly symbolic; it happened on June 4, 1944, two days before D-Day. The retreating Germans had declared it an open city, so there was no epic battle punctuating it. The epic battles were the operations leading up to it – Salerno, Anzio, Cassino and the Adriatic port town of Ortona.

Up the coast from Ortona is Pescara, where a road cuts across the mountainous country to Rome. The Allied plan from fall 1943 was to use this approach from Pescara to flank the Germans in Rome. However, to accomplish this, the Allies would first have to take Ortona. 

After a grueling fight for the Sangro, by December 1943, Ortona was in reach. From the banks of the Moro River, the Canadian First Infantry Division took over the operation, led by Major-General Christopher Vokes. Before them lay Italy’s coastal terrain with plateaus, gullies and escarpments that gave the Germans a strong defensive advantage. Vokes would lead his division through a series of operational maneuvers to cross the Moro, and proceed through “The Gully” on an approach to Ortona and where they would fight to take control of the town. There would be no reinforcements and indeed while organizationally a division, the Canadian First Infantry Division consisted of regiments that were only battalion-sized. Even though the German 90th Panzergrenadierdivision would be relieved by the 1 Fallschirmjägerdivision midway through the campaign, the resources and the effectiveness they afforded, were limited on both sides. 

What followed is what I believe to be one of the finest contests of effectiveness in the modern era. While a victory for the allies, the plan to approach Rome from Pescara never came to fruition diminishing the strategic value of the success. The battle remains a case study in the field of urban warfare because of what happened once the Canadians got inside Ortona. Contextualizing those tactical achievements with how they were able to maintain their effectiveness for the whole campaign provides a lens into the demands the urban environment puts on military forces.

This is the focus of the Solitaire TacOps campaign system. It gives players a model of a historical campaign where they will make operational decisions, and then tactically play to achieve those objectives while retaining the combat effectiveness needed to see the campaign through to its end goal. The game system manages an opposition as flexible as their historical counterparts, that will contest the players’ plans every inch of the way, with the ability to shift its posture based on player decisions. All of this comes together into a campaign system that challenges players tactically while evaluating them operationally.

In the following parts of this series we will explore the mechanics that make the Solitaire TacOps system unique and see how those mechanics come together to model history in the first volume Solitaire TacOps: Ortona.

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