Up Front is an amazing game. First published in 1983, in
many ways it was years ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it was never
updated as games it influenced were streamlined and smoothed.
It's due to be republished by Multi-Man Publishing, who
promise to do that exact thing. We'll see. I'm more than a little
worried about their talk of turning it into a collectible card game
(CCG), but if they can improve the game while making the collectible
aspect totally optional, I'm willing to give them a chance.
At any rate, Up Front is no longer in print, but can
still be found at many game stores and on the web. It's well worth
hunting up, as are its expansions, Desert War and
Banzai.
No Dice, No Board, No Cardboard Chit Units ...
When Up Front first came out, it was pretty
revolutionary. A wargame with no board, no dice, and no chits to
represent units? What were they thinking?!? They were thinking
innovatively, that's for sure - and brilliantly. Up
Front is a wargame, certainly: each unit in the game is
either an individual soldier, armored vehicle, or infantry gun. The
scale of the game is Squad-level: 10 to 15 men per side, possibly
with a vehicle or large gun. The setting is WWII: the basic game
includes German, US, and Russian soldiers with their equipment. The
supplements add Japanese, British, French, and Italian forces.
The Cards
The game comes with two different sets of cards: Action cards and
Personality cards. There actually are a fairly large number of chits
in the game, but they don't represent units. Instead they are used to
show range, condition, and status of various units. The Personality
cards are the units.
The Action deck has many types of cards: Movement, Terrain (including
Hills, Marshes, Woods, Buildings, etc.), Fire, Rally, Concealment, Smoke,
Hero, Radio, Snipers, etc. They are also used as action resolution
tools - more on that later.
The Personality cards include the forces listed above. A Personality
card will give the soldier's name and rank, what weapon he's carrying,
what his firepower with that weapon is at varying ranges, what his
morale, panic, and to-kill values are, and how many points he'd be
worth in a Build-Your-Own scenario. Vehicle and infantry gun cards
have all the necessary data to run such equipment.
Programmed Instruction
Twelve scenarios are included with the game, and you can find more on
the web or in old issues of Avalon Hill's now defunct game magazine,
The General. The rules are in the programmed
instruction format. That is, you learn a certain number of rules,
then play a scenario involving just those rules. When you've got them
down, read a few more rules, and play a scenario utilizing those, etc.
Once you've got the game down, you can then play the Build-Your-Own and
Campaign games.
The scenarios provided are, for the most part, entertaining and well
balanced. Some of them specify an aggressor; others give different
starting forces depending on if you've chosen offense or defense.
They range from a simple meeting of patrols to city action, to night
fighting, to elite forces on the attack, to an armored advance, etc.
In the basic game, one player chooses the German forces, and his opponent
plays either American or Russian forces. With the expansions, the Axis
player could also play Japanese or Italian, and the Allied player British
or French. (It's also possible to play Vichy French or Allied Italian,
of course ...) Each force has its own peculiarities.
The Basics
Pick a scenario, which details your starting forces and gives special
rules and goal. Split your squad into two to four groups, give them
some starting terrain, if you're dealt any, and you're ready to
play.
The hardest concept in the game to grasp is the way it handles range.
This is counterintuitive and frankly awkward. Opponents start at
Relative Range 0 to each other - and that's pretty far away. As they
move closer, Relative Range increases. Yes, you read that right:
as you move closer to the enemy the range number goes up. It's backwards,
but it works once you just accept it. Relative Range 5 is the closest
you can get to someone, by the way. If you advance any further, you
start to recede from them - you've basically passed them.
So you start at Relative Range 0 - give each Group a "0" range chit.
As they advance, by playing Movement cards, you increase their range
chit, usually one per Movement card played. To determine Relative
Range to a force directly opposite yours, or directly adjacent, add
their range chits. So if my leftmost group is at range 2, and your
rightmost group (directly opposite my leftmost group) is at range 2
also, we're at Relative Range 4 to each other. The Personality cards
show firepower at each range - the closer you are, the more firepower
your unit is worth.
You don't actually move your Personality cards - position is
abstracted. Your groups are labeled with a chit, A, B, C, D. If
Group A is on my left-hand side, your Group A must be on your right-hand
side - a group is always directly opposite the enemy group with the
same letter.
Movement and Terrain cards are played in front of a group to show where
they are and if they're moving or not. To change Terrain, you have
to play a Movement card - simple and logical. And also dangerous,
as moving makes you easier to be hit ... Any card can be placed
face down next to one of your groups to show they're on "Open Ground"
terrain, by the way - a nice pioneering use of the back of the cards.
In order to fire at an enemy group, you need a Fire card. Fire cards
have both a firepower number - the minimum firepower a group needs to
have in order to use the card - and a fire strength number - the value
of the actual attack against the enemy group.
If your men are suppressed, you need to Rally them. Those are the
three types of actions you take most frequently: movement (which
includes both playing a Movement card and playing a Terrain card to
show where you've moved to), firing, and rallying.
Random Numbers
The Action cards serve many purposes. Each card is very "busy" - there
are numbers and letters all over the face of the card, making the game
a little hard to get used to at first.
Every Action card has a random number in the upper right corner. This
is what you use instead of dice. This number ranges from -6 to +6 in a
bell curve distribution centered at 0. Negative numbers are shown in
red ink; positive numbers are in black ink. Any time you have to use a
random number to resolve an action, draw the top card from the draw
pile, use that number, then discard the Action card. Since most
scenarios last a given number of times you shuffle the deck, taking
actions which use the draw pile will shorten the game. This can work
in your favor or against you, depending on your situation in the current
scenario.
Every Action card also has a double row of numbers across the bottom.
The uppermost of these rows is simply numbered from 1 to 10 - they
represent position within a group. The number underneath usually
represents which soldier in a given group is affected by something, but
sometimes represent other things, such as Rout versus Killed in Action,
or an armored vehicle Bogging, or closing to Close Combat, etc.
Fire Example
At this point, you probably want a concrete example, if you're still
with me at all. Okay, say you have a group in a Woods terrain, and
they're not moving. My group opposite them is at Relative Range 3, so
I see how much firepower I can muster. Let's say I have 10 firepower.
If I have a Fire card with 10 or less firepower requirement, I can play
it as that group's action for the turn. Let's say it's a Fire 4 card -
this means it has a fire strength of 4. However, this is modified by
your Woods card of -2: you're protected somewhat by your terrain. So
the final adjusted fire strength is 2.
You have four men in this group, so I point to the first one, and draw
the top card of the draw deck. I look at the random number, and add it
to the fire strength of 2. (A red number is a negative number,
remember.) Let's say it's a black 1: the final fire strength versus
your first man is therefore 3. We check this number against his Morale
and To-Kill numbers to see if he's affected. He's not - his Morale is
4 and To-Kill is 8. This means had I gotten a fire strength result of
4 to 7 he would be pinned - flip the card over and he can't take
any action until he's Rallied. Had I gotten an 8 or higher result,
he'd have been killed outright.
I then draw a card for each of the other three men your group, one at a
time, adding the random number drawn to the basic fire strength of 2 I
currently have against the group. Pinning is a much more common result
than killing outright, of course, and "No result" is also fairly
common. If a man is already pinned, however, he has a "Panic" number
instead of a Morale number. If I can get higher than his Panic number,
he's either routed or dead, and I get 1 or 2 victory points for
that.
Why Wouldn't You Like This Game?
This has been a wordy review, and I haven't even covered one tenth of
the game. This is the first potential flaw: there's a lot of game
there. A lot more than most gamers want to learn, to be honest. This
isn't as bad as it might seem, though: due to the programmed
instruction format, you don't ever have to use most of the rules if you
don't want to. You can be perfectly happy playing the first scenario
over and over until you've got it down so pat you suddenly feel like
learning more rules. There's no hurry.
However, the major flaw of Up Front lies in those very
same rules: they're incredibly hard to learn by reading. The game is
actually not that complex, for a wargame, if you can get someone to
teach you. But the rules as written are not exactly user-friendly - in
fact, in many places they're downright user-hostile. The language is
"legalese" - tough to get the basic meaning of. Lots of cases, with
petty exceptions, seem to make it a tough game to actually remember the
rules for, but it's not that bad. Once you understand the rules, they
make a lot of sense. Getting to that point isn't easy if you don't
have someone to teach you, though.
And although I'm saying the game isn't really that complex
... there really are a lot of exceptions to rules. There are some
rules you will not be able to remember, and will always
have to look up. The use of a Hero card on a light-machine gun, for
example: different nationalities have different restrictions on its use,
and because it's something that doesn't happen every game, you'll never
remember them all. Or the modifiers for Close Combat against a tank.
Or, for the first dozen games or so, even something so common as how to
move off a stream. After a while that last one becomes second nature,
because it happens every game - but it takes some getting used to.
Which brings me to the next reason you might not like it: it takes a
lot of playing to "get" the game. You're still a novice after 25
games. This is actually a strong point to some gamers - it means the game
has a lot of depth and will provide years of enjoyment. And it's true.
But to casual gamers it's a put-off. They'd like to have the worst of
their mistakes over after just a couple of games. Well, that won't happen
with Up Front - you'll have to be patient with yourself
and your opponents as you all learn the game. There's a lot to learn.
There are a few typos here and there, but you can find errata on the
web, so that's not so bad. The worst typo is on one of the Terrain
types, a Marsh. But you quickly learn to live with it.
The concept of Relative Range is so blasted counter-intuitive I wish
they could have come up with a different mechanism. Eventually, you
get used to it, but even after a dozen years of playing this game, it
still bothers me somewhat. It may be the same for you.
Occasionally you get a silly result from a combination of rules (like
being able to pick up, in absolute safety, a demolition pack from a man
blown up in a minefield). But that's pretty rare - most of the time,
the game returns very realistic results - much more so, I feel, than
most hex-based wargames. But that's for the next section ...
Rationale and Fog of War
The Designer's Notes are really a joy to read. Mr. Allen puts forth
reasons for many of his choices in the game, and I must admit makes very
solid arguments for them all.
The main benefit of such card-based rules, with no set map, is Fog
of War. Mr. Allen read many, many interviews of actual WWII
front-line soldiers of many nationalities, and was struck by some common
themes that weren't represented in any of the wargames he was aware of.
For example, lack of information about the nature of the terrain over a
hill or around a corner or even beyond a hedge was very nerve-wracking
for soldiers. Even excellent maps just don't have the level of detail
a soldier would love to have: is there a ditch past that hedge, which
might be hiding an enemy machine gun? Just how many houses are down
that next side street? What's beyond that clump of woods? And so on.
In a traditional wargame, both players see the whole map of the terrain
laid out in advance, and plan their moves accordingly. In real life,
you couldn't do that. And you can't in Up Front.
So when you move out of a safe Terrain, you may or may not know what
lies ahead. You may have a Building card in your hand, so you think
your group is moving to that building they can see. But your opponent
might discard a Stream card onto your group - they couldn't see there
was a stream in the way!
Another thing Mr. Allen discovered about WWII: morale and firing. In
the movies - and most wargames - you have no trouble firing away at the
enemy. You point to your unit, say, "They're shooting at that unit,"
and roll the dice. However, Mr. Allen found that only about 20% of
soldiers actually fired their weapons in a squad-level encounter! The
Action deck has about 25% Fire cards to represent this. Sometimes you
just don't have a Fire card - this is one of those times you can't get
your squad to stick their heads up over the wall and actually shoot at
the enemy ...
Likewise, getting your troops to move forward into hostile fire wasn't
always easy. So those times you don't have a Movement card in your
hand reflect a lot of reality ... Of course, in most wargames, you can
move all your units each turn, blithely forward into slaughter, if you
want. Not in reality; not in Up Front.
Yet the game simulates the standard squad practice of "Bound and
Overwatch" much more realistically than any other game I know of.
Assuming you can get the cards (i.e., assuming you can get your
troops to behave the way they've been trained ...) one group lays down
suppressive fire while another advances. Then the roles are reversed.
Elegantly done!
A "pinned" result is the most common adverse Fire effect in Up
Front. This also models reality. When enemy bullets started
flying near the average soldier's head, he tended to hit the dirt,
probably with a few choice words. It'd have to be pretty quiet for a
while before he'd risk sticking his head up again, no matter what his
squad leader is yelling at him. Hence, those times when you just can't
get a Rally card to get your troop moving or firing again ...
In addition to the actual equipment on the Personality cards, the Action
card hand size and discard capabilities are the main distinctions between
the different nationalities, by the way. He gives reasons for all his
choices, and they all make sense. Truly a well-designed and thoroughly
thought-out game.
Summing Up
If you can get over the incredible legalese in the rules, and if
you like wargames of moderate complexity, this is a wonderful game.
The Fog of War makes it unlike any other game, and very entertaining.
The programmed instruction allows you to take your time getting to the
more difficult rules, such as armored vehicles. I haven't yet played
with every rule in the game in the dozen years I've had it, and I don't
feel constrained by that fact. I like the game a lot, and if I never
learn all the rules, it doesn't matter. I've already gotten more than
my money's worth out of this game.
Here's a great resource
for Up Front if you have any interest in pursuing this game.
Enjoy!
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