FLOATER

BARBARIANS by KEITH POULTER

from KP GAMES

3 34" x 22" maps, 1000 counters, rule book, scenario book, 3 sheets of charts and tables; boxed. KP Games. In Limbo somewhere in CA. $40.

Reviewed by CARL GRUBER

Know what a “floater” is? It’s what the police call a dead body someone has dumped into the bay that has risen to the surface. Well, BROGers, we got ourselves a real floater here.

Most of you are aware, compliments of your last issue of BROG, of the somewhat sordid story concerning the initial appearance of Barbarians. (Ed. If not, check out “The Little Macs”.) We now pick up the tale as our all-too-trusting consumer opens his newly-arrived package from Cambria to inspect his latest “Descent into the Maelstrom.” After noting the change from 3W to KP Games - and wondering if the new moniker had something to do with what they used to force you to undertake every so often in the Army - those of you who wish to start humming the late Peter Allen’s "Everything Old Is New Again" might consider starting now.

It has become somewhat of a Hollywoodish trend for companies for whom the word “creativity” is not only non-existent but is probably beyond the reach of their internal Spellchecker, to re-issue - not re-do, but re-issue - games that graced our tables 10, even, 20 years ago. Seeing the actual product, one wonders if the motive for resurrecting these Oldies But Moldies isn't really a dangerous mixture of laziness with comatose imagination. If, somehow, everyone suddenly decided they also wanted to go back to rotary phones, adding machines, bellbottoms and long sideburns, we would probably be clamoring for these games. To be sure, many of the old "classics" were, and still are, worthy “games”, but the ones that are resurfacing lately, like those aforementioned waterlogged corpses, are not the finest efforts of the past. Rather, wargaming's necrophiliacs have summoned the rotting shades of such as Blue & Gray, Napoleon's Art of War and other SPI dinosaurs and dressed them up as Four Battles of the Ancient World or Seven Day's Battles. Prepare yourselves, because if you thought those titles were on the cutting edge of obsolete, devoid of any period feel, or just downright dull, wait’ll you see Barbarians, wargaming’s answer to “The Return of the Brady Bunch.”

Barbarians covers Roman Europe from the English Channel to Thrace on a scale of ten miles per hex, although no note is made of the time-per-turn scale. Roman units are legions, or the cohorts in a legion, with the usual auxiliaries. Barbarian units, both infantry and cavalry, come in smaller "war bands" which can combine to form "mobs". All units alike are rated for combat value and movement. Other units include siege towers, ballistas, fortifications, fleets and Eagles for each Roman legion.

The game turn sequence is strictly generic brand move-fight, Igo-Hugo. There are no ZOCs, and combat takes place within a hex occupied by both sides. Legions can be broken down into, or reformed from, their respective cohorts, and the same applies to barbarian "mobs" and "war bands". Stacking is limited to two legions and three auxiliaries per hex, that being doubled by the presence of a leader. Barbarians can stack 4 units to the hex and raise that to 5 in a village with a "chief" present". (On the other hand, ignore that, because each scenario appears to have its own stacking rules.) Combat is by odds, fought in rounds, with modifiers for terrain, fortifications, Sarmation cavalry and leaders. Some of the scenarios include rules for fleets, ambushes, sieges, and burning and looting, as if such occurred only at previously selected intervals.

As for the 32 scenarios, they begin with 3 of Caesar's Gallic campaigns, extend through the campaigns of Drusus, Tiberius and Germanicus in Germany, into the Thracian, Batavian and Pannonian revolts, away to Trajan's Dacian wars, and continue on to the Gothic invasions and the beginning of the end in the Roman West. This is a wealth of scenarios, but on playing them, you quickly realize that the simplistic rules make most of them foregone conclusions, so jury-rigged with special rules to fill in the gaps left by the minimalist design that it appears Rome fell because of sheer boredom. Given the overall lack of period flavor, they were not that much fun to play; even worse, their accuracy seems questionable.

One has to understand from whence Barbarians arose, a phenomenon we could easily label “The Blight of the Phoenix.” Back in the salad days of both the hobby and GDW, the latter came out with a game called Eagles, covering the period of Roman history around the Teuterburgerwald era. It was one of the first (if not THE first) ancients campaign game, and it caught on well enough for AH to gobble it up and re-issue it in a somewhat pumped up form as Caesar's Legions, a game most notable in hobby history for attracting a “Cease and Desist” order from Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas!! Caesar's Legions was a game in the mold of the “old classics”, although it never managed to achieve anywhere the status of, say, Afrika Korps or Stalingrad.

Knowing that, how would you feel about a re-issue of those two? (If you’re now saying, “Yeah, wow … where do I pay?!”, I suggest flipping the page to the next review, and we’ll see you at Avaloncon.) Sure, they’re fun to play, but so are Checkers or Parcheesi. And just like AK and Stalingrad are both almost historically sterile, you could get more insight into Roman history from reading "Asterix" or "Hagar the Horrible" than from playing Barbarians.

This, of course, brings up a much bigger question, the one which asks why we play “historical simulation games” in the first place. The answers are as myriad as the number of people who play, and, to each and every one of them, their answer is valid. However, if you’re going to invest time and energy in a history game, you should at least get SOME history out of it.

There might be some merit in taking an older game which is hard to get and still popular (maybe) and republishing it with state-of- the-art graphics and updated rules. Sadly, this game is just a reprint which adds nothing of the exciting changes in the last 20 years of wargame design.

Take those aforementioned stacking rules. The basic rules say that, in a hex covering 100 square miles of territory, players cannot stack more than 2 legions or barbarian units. Make that 4 with a leader counter. In the entire period covered you would be hard put to find a Roman army of less than six legions (the number with which Caesar whacked the Gauls); at Munda (which occurs within the time frame of the game) both sides had over 10 legions, each!! And what about those 250,000 Gauls at Alesia, huh?? Another problem is that under normal stacking rules, you can never stack enough barbarians into a hex to get anything better than 1:2 odds against a single Roman legion; not much “yabba-dabba- doo” in these Hannah-Barbarians, is there? This gets the Big Fix in some - but not all - scenarios by arbitrarily changing the stacking rules so that the “right” number of guys are there to fight. Why not just jettison ALL stacking restrictions and give the leaders a limit as to how many troops they can lead? That rule would cover all of one paragraph, far less space - and far less confusing - than having the “Basic Overruled by Scenario” boilerplate we get with Barbarians.

And while I’m into Full Whine, let me tell you about the leadership rules. They are as rudimentary as a nematode's nervous system. To begin with, ANY leader, be it Caesar or Varro, adds just one to the combat die roll, so we have no difference between good and bad leaders. Then again, each leader is given a "combat factor" to contribute to his stack. The best rated leaders like Caesar or Vercingetorix have ratings of 3. A Roman cohort has a strength of 5 so what they're telling us here is that Caesar's face on the battlefield is worth little more than half a cohort, one twentieth of a legion!! Furthermore, leaders have no function or abilities to affect march rates, make cities surrender, aid (or hinder) logistics, intercept enemy movement or raise new troops. They’re just window dressing, and rather thin and vinegary dressing at that.

So what do we get for our 40 bucks? Some very nice looking maps and lots of units and leaders. The design is simple enough that you could tweak it with some of your own house rules, or layer on rules from other games. On the other hand, if you have to do that to get a fun and accurate game, you're dealing with a "game kit" à la FGA. There is nothing wrong with re-doing old games; essentially every new game is a variation on an old one. But you have to at least try to hide your contempt for the buying public by putting in a level of effort and creativity at least one notch higher than photostatting old hash. KP’s creativity, it seems, is limited to coming up with newer and even more Dickensian ways of relieving you of your money.

The outrage of Barbarians, aside from the flagrant attempt to get people to pay $40 to playtest the sucker, is that virtually no attempt was made to provide the public with anything more than a box of recycled paper. Well, irony has its moments, and just whose body is it now that we see floating somewhere off Catalina, hmmm?

CAPSULE COMMENTS

Graphic Presentation: Very Good. Attractive and tasteful maps and counters.

Playability: Eminently playable. So is tic-tac-toe.

Replayability: For “Old Classic” freaks and the S&M crowd, only … even with 32 scenarios.

Creativity: Zero.

Wristage: Not too much.

Historicity: Covers more ground than Roseanne, but here it’s truly a question of Quantity trying to disguise itself as Quality.

Comparisons: Next to the venerable Imperium Romanum and Joe Miranda’s operational ancients system, this is a rather bloated and rotting corpse of indeterminate age.

Overall: Not enough work was done to make it anything better than a "game kit". Barbie Dull.