ANIMAL HOUSE

WHEN EAGLES FIGHT by TED RAICER

WHEN TIGERS FIGHT by L. DEAN WEBB

from COMMAND Magazine, #25 and #26

Magazine games, each with a full-sized map. Eagles contains 176 counters; Tigers, 352, about 80 of which are for other games.

Reviewed by CARL GRUBER (Eagles) and RICHARD BERG (Tigers)

Ted Raicer's "sequel" to his popular 1918 is When Eagles Fight, a strategic game purporting to cover WWI in Russia, Poland and Austro-Hungary. The issue fairly bulges with the promise of hordes of Cossacks, Russian steamroller offensives, Hindendorff, Mackensen, routing Hapsburgs and the dramatic crash and burn of three different empires. What we get is pretty much production line XTR, going Henry Ford one better in proclaiming, "You can have your game with any system you want, as long as its Krim."

The components are at the the normal, professional XTR level, with the units - mostly corps, and virtually all infantry, with some German heavy artillery thrown in - rated for attack and defense plus movement. Most of the cavalry is omitted, we are told, as it was already blown in head-on charges at the start of the hostilities. How nice of XTR to relieve us of having to make this decision.

The sequence is Igo-Hugo, with a rather nice exception being a German "Ober-Ost" marker, simulating the effects of High Command planning, control and assets, which enables nearby Germans to launch a second attack in the combat phase. The Russian sibling for Herr O-O is their Stavka marker, which provides favorable DRMs … but no second combat. Other useful chrome includes Russian ammo shortages and a nicely done Random Events Table that brings in off-map situations (Western Front) and political events in Russia. The CRT is familiar and workmanlike, odds/ratio with the usual gamut of drms and step losses as results. Dead units can be, for the most part, brought back as reinforcements.

The problem is is that I found it all rather dull, a recherché AH "classic" with a nice map and flashy counters. The mechanics are tired, the play predictable, and the content pretty much devoid of any historical interest. This is a game for people who like to play games to win; it matters little what the background is. Here, armies lurch zombie-like across the plains of Eastern Europe, beating each other senseless. If you know enough math to calculate odds, you'll win the game. The result is a strong feeling of gamesmanship, with little feel at all for the Great War in the East, noting some of the chromatic exceptions, above.

Now, lest anyone accuse me of not giving it a chance, I managed three, complete play-thrus before my neighbor's kid, during the 4th go-around, in a toddler's imitation of the Brusilov Offensive, tried to eat a dozen German units. I just simply could not get over the feeling that I was doing anything more than adding and dividing combat factors and rolling dice. Granted, there are people who enjoy the pure "game" aspect of this hobby, and if that's what they like who's to say they're wrong?

But if you seek anything more, if you wish to dig a bit deeper than "3-1 and you're home free", if you're looking for a bit more creativity than the photocopying process, you'll emerge from playing Eagles much as did MacMurphy, from the clutches of Nurse Ratchet, slack-mouthed and permanently stupified, with only enough cognitive and motor function left for the next incarnation of Krim.

Well, having heard from Carl that the Eagle has Landed with a thud, I figured, what the hey, might as well see what all the screaming was about, this time with those Fighting Tigers from XTR. No need, I assume, to dwell on the similarity of titles in the two games - one prays we don't see a third in the series, a game on dogfighting called Where Beagles Bite - Tigers covers one of those operations that has received little attention from the hobby, the 1944 Japanese offensive in China, this time to which has been tacked on the Burma Theater.

You can often tell a lot about a game by the conversations - or lack thereof - that whirl around it. Some games come and go as if they never came, just went. With Tigers, though, there was lots of hobby talk … lots. It went from is it good, to is it bad; from I can win this way, to no you can't; to why is this here, to what the hell does this mean; and so on unto the night. It matters little what gamers were saying, with Tigers they were talking.

Essentially, Tigertalk split into two camps, pretty much along "party" lines. "Too XTR-ish" vs "Great Game". And with everybody rattling on, I decided to give it a shot. At our weekly meeting of the Macho Gamers and the Women Who Ignore Them get-together, we broke it out and got set for a 3-player run-through. The Fox took the Brits, Dr. John got the Japanese and I, bowing to my pretty much useless degree in Asian History, got handed The Phantom Counters: the Chinese army.

XTR has added a new layer to their base system - Unknown Counters, a mechanic which we all remember - and loved - back from Panzergruppe Guderian. (One of the interesting sidebars of Ty's oeuvre is how much XTR borrows from Jim Dunnigan at the same time Ty publicly denigrates him, as he does with remarkably little class in Command #27.) This mechanic, of course, is a great provider of play tension, if done in manageable form, which it is here. It gives Tigers much of its positive drive, and it certainly keeps both the Japanese Player and the Chinese Punching Bag in the game right to the end.

Which is more than you can say for Burma … although Burma is the main area on which most of that aforementioned conversation centered. We felt it was pretty much a stagnant pool in which the Japanese must surely drown. Dr. John got nowhere, although his offense was pretty much unimaginative. He was far more aggressive in China, where every attack is a cardboard version of "The Lady and the Tiger". It doesn't hurt for the Chinese Player to get some good dierolls in bringing back all those dead bodies for another shot at being cannon fodder, but it all evened out so that, by the last turn, Dr. John still felt he had a chance to snatch victory for the jaws of ineptitude. Fat Chance, as we unloaded our B-29s on China like some atomic bomb, one of those "why is this happening", dei ex machina that abound in XTR games.

Pretty much the same can be said for the far-too-generic supply rules, rules not only simplistic but, given the terrain, pretty much defiant of natural logic. One of the problems in simulating the Burma Campaign is that it WAS a logistical affair. No one wants to do that for more than a turn or two - as GDW found out about 10 years ago - so XTR sweeps it under the jungle's lumpy rug.

OK, So a lot of Tigers is jury-rigged to keep the game alive, and the gamers lively. But it wasn't all that bad. There's sort of a demented glee in resuscitating 1,000,000 Chinese a turn and dropping them in on the Japanese like unwanted relatives. And there are enough "strategic decisions" to keep even the dimmest of players - which pretty much describes our group - at at least second gear, mentally.

Ultimately, When Tigers Fight is nothing more than what XTR wants it to be: a game with a historical background that is well balanced, well produced, well written (we didn't have one question about how to play it) and, well, fun. For many, that's enough. And while it's not why I play games, that does not make it A Bad Thing.