World War Two
	Photos & Reports	Crossfire Pages	Rules Used	Background

Action During Bagration August 1944, Somewhere near Lvov. Played at Tim's 31 March 2009. This was a repeat of the game run at the Veni, Vidi, Vici gaming show in Mount Pearl on 7 February 2009.

Pak Fronts at Kursk 6 July 1943, Somewhere between Ponyri & Maloarchangelsk, North Sector of Kursk Salient. Played at Tim's in June 2008.

A Green Hill Far Away Hypothetical German attack on US forces somewhere in Italy, 1943 or 44.

A Jagdpanther Hunting We Will Go... Hypothetical meeting engagement in Normandy

Crossfire Competition III & Replay A day long short series of games played Easter 2005 and replayed again in August of the same year.

Crossfire Competition II Originally meant to be a series of CF games, battling for the famous trophy, the competition was not finished, but visit the pages for pictures and information on scenario rules and set up.  Game 2 has an interesting twist which may be of interest to other scenario designers. 

Alpine Meeting Engagement between invading Italians and French troops in June 1940.

Crossfire Competition The first award of the famous Running Grenade trophy!  A generic attack/defence scenario with attackers choosing to be Soviet (2 different options), British, American, or Canadian.

Hobby Show 2003 Display WWII & ACW Naval (me), 25mm ancients (Stu & Keir) plus some fantasy stuff.

Operation Torch Played at my house on June 30 2002.  First game with new "expedient" desert terrain.  I simply used my existing terrain (which is no doubt getting tired looking if you've perused some of the previous games, below) and covered them with bird gravel paper.  Cutting and gluing (with backing strips) was necessary to make them fit over top.  Once completed, they were sprayed with light irregular and large blotches of combination of dark tan and

Hobby Show 2002 display Including Rob H's Napoleonics, ACW Naval (Mobile Bay), and yes, yet again, another Arras set-up - are you starting to get bored of my scratch built Matilda Is yet?

Arras 1940 Yes, another Arras game.  Thanks to the extra terrain I made for Cyber Sapper, we were able to play a very large game in a classroom at my office building where I work.  My scratch built Matilda Is were my focus here...since Matilda Is were not used in much else besides Arras, we're expecting numerous versions of Arras refights in the coming months....

Exercise Cyber Sapper A table top exercise run for the officers of 56 Field Engineer Squadron, 25, 26 January 2002, St. John's.

Nikopol Revisited During the Christmas 2001 season, the Nikopol scenario (see below) was replayed several times.

France 22 May 1940, The Day after Arras A "split game" Crossfire & house rules scenario played 9 April.  This account contains photos as well as an explanation of the "split game" concept.

Eastern Front, 1941 A Soviet counterattack played with Crossfire & house rules on 26 Nov 2000.  Represents the Battle of Berlin in the Diplomacy Campaign.

Italy 1943/44 A game played July 26 & 27 2000 at Tim's house.

Germany, 1945 Tim's house, modified Crossfire rules, played 14-18 May 2000.

Crossfire Demo at Model Show Modified Crossfire rules, 24 April 1999.  May be slow loading - I did not use thumbnail pictures for this page! 8)

Battle Report: Soviets Move on Nikopol, November 1943 This is a long "epic"!  Modified Crossfire rules, March 28-30 1999 (Pictures taken with Sony Digitial Mavica - pics may be pretty fuzzy 8) Some pics have considerable image processing, other than the usual gamma and contrast corrections.  This "other" processing was mostly to get rid of dice, measuring tapes and replacing the wonderful wall paper background with something that looked vaguely like sky!  Thanks to John Moher, New Zealand, for his information on use of Elefants at Nikopol.  We'd had many smaller (company size, max, on tables no bigger than 3' by 4' and smaller) games under our belts before this game but this was our first big one.  All agreed it was a great game.

Battle Report: US-German Meeting Engagement in Normandy (Pictures taken with Kodak DC-50 digital camera).  This battle report is on the MUN server, while the individual pictures, when enlarged, are on .

The following games are from the "Ottawa Period" from 1988 to 1991:

Japanese Attack on Australian Held River Positions February, 1989

The Ardennes Game Spring 1989

The Bocage Game - Tim regains his honour Spring or Fall 1989 Note - this has disappeared and requires reconstruction!

Sicily 1943 Some time in 1990

France 1940 1991(?)

World War Two, or some version thereof was what we started out with wargaming many years ago.  We began, as school kids, with plastic Airfix "little soldiers" and our first written rules were of the sort: "heavy tank versus light tank, 1 = miss, 2-5 = destroy, 6 = immobilize".  From there, things just more and more complicated as we read more about historical accounts of tactics and strengths and weaknesses of weapons.  When we realized there were commercially available rules, we tried out Zimmerman & Myers' Angriff and Charles Grant's Battle! but we always ended up writing our own versions of these.  However, our focus was always on 1:1 (ie, 1 model or figure represents 1 tank or 1 man).

The "Ottawa" Period - Forging the Myth (Back to World War Two Index)

The "Ottawa" Period, represents a time of about three years, beginning in the Fall of 1988 when I was living in Ottawa.  We had not really wargamed since the time before we all went off to university (about 1980).  D&D campaigns were played but our Airfix and plastic armies were essentially in mothballs.

In July or August of 1988, my kids and I drove home to Newfoundland.  Dave and I, for "old time's sake" decided to set up a little battle which we played on the floor of my old bedroom at my parents' house.  We had actually tried to do the same thing two years earlier, but Dave had a football accident which caved in his head and the game we had designed at the time was abandoned.  Anyway, we set up a German attack on a small French town occupied by British, circa May 1940.  It was great fun and has been dubbed The Battle for Rolandsberg (don't ask me what this town name means).

This game captured our imaginations and on the return trip home, I was writing a new set of rules, using Trickett's copy of Charles Grant's Battle!  Practical Wargaming and Zimmerman and Myers' Angriff! as a foundation.  Some of my armour troop leading experience in both tactics and gunnery also found its way into "the rules".  This was the beginning of my homegrown rules set.  It was quite simple at first, but, unfortunately, because SOMEBODY took every opportunity to misinterpret and exploit loopholes, it grew to a whopping great 160 pages before it was abandoned for Crossfire.

Anyway, during my three years in Ottawa, Dave, who works for Air Canada, was able to fly up frequently from Newfoundland and play war games.  About once every three or four months I think we averaged a game.  We'd pick a WWII campaign and buy vehicles and paint troops and design a scenario.  The games would be played on the basement floor of my townhouse in Orleans.  Peter even came up once for an interesting Kursk game.  We took pictures of that one and somebody has the little book we made describing the battle.  If I can ever find it I'll scan the pics and include them here.  These games were a step up from the games we used to play outdoors in our backyards although the scenery and accessories were not as nice as they are now.  We were learning to paint and model again after a hiatus of 7-8 years.

The first game we played, an Australian/Japanese affair was a big disappointment, because we started the forces awfully far apart.  The second game () was a very exciting game played over two days.  I lost much to Dave's delight although it was due to an unfortunate change in visibility caused by weather changes.  The following game, an Ardennes scenario was a colossal defeat for me.  After that, many of our games were either draws or did not get finished.  However, Dave made much of the Ardennes game.  Back home, describing our battles to our friends without my input to temper his claims, the myth of Dave's invincibility grew.  In fact, one game we played, a German counterattack in the Bocage, Dave was soundly trounced, despite technically superior forces.  But of course, herr Dave vehemently denies this game ever took place.

In 1991, I moved to Deep River, Ontario and out of the Air Canada route, so our games were much fewer.  I did run a couple of games at the Ottawa games convention, CANGAMES in 1991 and 1993 (Peter came to visit and helped me out with the latter).  In 1994, I moved back to Newfoundland.

Current Phase of WWII Wargames

We began the current "phase" of wargaming when I came home to work in 1994 after being away from Newfoundland for 13 years.  There have been quite a few good games, some very heavily researched, but, because of server space, only pictures of the ones above are available here, unfortunately.  This is probably good, because since we use the same scenery for most stuff, things would start looking pretty much the same, all the time!!!


 
 

See the first paragraph of this page's Background for rules we used in our early years of wargaming.

Here are the current rule sets we use and rules that have been used as written or as the basis for countless revisions of home brew rules:

The official Crossfire site has instructions for subscribing to the Spearhead/Crossfire mailing list.

Lloyd Nikolas has a really excellent description of Crossfire that is well worth reading.  I always point people who have played any kind of wargame to this link to find out about Crossfire and get an overview of its mechanics.

Crossfire is an innovative set of rules very unlike most other systems out there.  "Turns" (having the "initiative" is the term in Crossfire which loosely matches the concept of a "turn") are not sequential (as in "step 1 movement, step 2 artillery fire, step 3 melee, etc, etc") and distances and moves are not measured (we do some measurement in our house rules).  This different approach makes for a breathlessly exciting game system where critical situations are developed realistically and resolved quickly.  See Rob Wolsky's comments (this is found in the Crossfire FAQ) site under  on the difference in Crossfire's mechanics versus traditional games.  The mechanics also make for amazingly quick games.  Scenarios that have previously taken more than a day to complete are finished within a few hours.  Once you try this game, you won't want to go back to others, believe me!

Crossfire focuses on infantry action at the company level with squads as the smallest element.  We play with a set of house rules which add a lot more detail to the armour rules so that we can play the large tank games we have always enjoyed.

Crossfire was actually a step up from our 1:1 preferences when we started playing it in 1999, with figures mounted on stands of 2-3 figures representing a squad.  This was a bit of a nervous jump from 1:1 for me, but the result has been very rewarding.  I think one of the reasons I like it so much is that the idea of squads moving about is a bit like Avalon Hill's Squad Leader which we played years and years ago.  That was a great game.

Angriff is indeed very much a 70s era set of rules (see my comments on Rally Round the Flag in the rules part of my ACW section).  Although basing of troops or placing them on "movement trays" (something we could never figure out, being so used to moving individual figures around) is a recommended approach, the rules keep track of casualties by individual figure removal.  Set up to play at a representative scale of 1:1, it has guidelines, in the form of organization charts (with mixed ratios - 1-10 for vehicles, 1-100 for infantry, and other ratios for other types of weapons) , for much bigger battles, resolution of such battles was still with the 1:1 type rules...  Just because a tank might represent 5-10 actual vehicles, the model still "behaved" or played as an individual vehicle, not as a platoon or company.

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