Squad Leader
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Squad Leader is a wargame designed and developed by The Avalon Hill Game Company, published in 1977. Squad Leader spawned three successful sequels, called "gamettes", as well as the follow up series Advanced Squad Leader which consists of 24 separate games, with 7,394 printed scenario cards and approximately 25 million cardboard pieces, called "counters."
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[edit] Early History
The Maryland Area Virgin's Club successfully merged with Avalon Hill in 1975, and members with too much time on their hands banded together to answer the question: "how can we indulge our martial yearnings without actually doing anything that requires physical exercise, regular bathing, or leaving mom's basement?" The answer, of course, was a detailed game system that depicted not just specific company and battalion level infantry engagements from the Second World War, but had the flexibility to simulate just about any land battle by using generic forces, mapboards, and the over-active imaginations of dozens of young males in their sexual prime who unfortunately couldn't get dates. Many were shy, mentally disturbed, or simply lacked the social skills to interact with others.
[edit] Early Successes
The early success of Squad Leader at a wargaming convention in New York City led to follow up titles, or gamettes, titled Cross of Iron, Crescent of Doom, and GI: Axis of Evil. The first sequel focused on re-enactments of Russian Front movies, and included rules for "cute Russian boys taken prisoner", "hot Russian babes taken prisoner", and included counters for famous leaders like Leutnant von Witzland (9-2) and Feldwebel Johann Coburn (10-2). The second sequel included detailed rules for French combat kitchens and 500 counters depicting different types of pastries. The final sequel released in 1983 was an unlikely fictional depiction of a US invasion of Iraq twenty years later in the year 2003. Sales for the final gamette were poor, given the obvious fantasy-element.
[edit] Game Play
Contrary to many claims, little satisfaction is derived by Squad Leader players by actually playing the game. Many have found the game a good testing ground for suitability for law school, given the chaotic set of rules spread through four separate rulebooks, coupled with the poor writing and incomprehensible use of abbreviations throughout. Aside from rules-lawyering, many Squad Leader fanatics also spend inordinate amounts of time in creating new organizational schemes for the millions of cardboard playing pieces. The latest trend among Squad Leader fanatics (in common slang, referred to variously as "losers", "nancy boys", or "Plano children" (after the storage compartments they keep the 25 million counters in)) is to argue the relative statistical adherence of regular dice, "precision dice", and Popamatic Trouble. Among Squad Leader players, precision dice are shown to return an average of seven (the likeliest result of rolling two six-sided dice and adding the numbers together) 0.014 times more often per 1000 rolls than regular dice. Among Squad Leader players, the ultimate insult is to be told "That's it, I'm taking my dice and going home." (An obvious play on the phrase used in professional football, "I'm taking my ball, my 30 million dollar contract, and my steroid habit, and I'm going home!") A single scenario of Squad Leader is said to take longer than the 6 years it took to fight the real war on which this game was based.
[edit] Game Components
Squad Leader game components are varied and complex. The counters can be divided into combatant units, and game markers.
Some examples of combatant units are as follows:
[edit] Tanks
The symbols on the M4A3 76(W) counter seem complicated, but can be broken down succinctly as follows:
- M4 stands for Mortality, expressed in minutes. In this example, a Sherman tank can expect to live about 4 minutes on the battlefield before a vastly superior German tank wipes it out.
- A3 is indicative of the fact that in American nomenclature, improvements or changes to a base production model are designated by additional letters. In this case, under real battle conditions, the Sherman was found to Actually survive for 3 minutes on average, rather than the 4 minutes the prototype lasted in simulated combat at Fort Knox.
- 76W refers to the estimated chance of going WHOOSH (when the poorly stored ammunition and vulnerable gasoline lines simultaneously and spontaneously combust upon being penetrated by a German tank shell of greater than 20mm). In this case, a Sherman will go Whoosh an estimated 76 percent of the time.
Many thanks to the Battlefront Forum (http://www.battlefront.com) for researching this little known historical fact.
The other numbers are mainly gobbledegook for the players to fight about. The "15" symbol is the amount of time in minutes anyone under the age in the lower left, in this case 76 years of age, would reasonably be expected to sit at a table pushing pieces of cardboard around before finding something even moderately more fun to do. The "1" in the box refers to the number of execrable computer adaptations of this game (see Microprose's Avalon Hill's Squad Leader), with 2/4/6 in the lower right hand corner representing the approximate amounts of juice/soda/beer one will consume during play of a scenario with one of these counters (and accompanying rules) in it. The symbols below the 15 indicate number of donuts (O - the white background indicates the donuts are glazed) and boxes of potato chips (□) one should have on hand to tide over the "typical" Squad Leader player. See photo above.
The German Tiger at right also has some interesting symbology.
PzKpfw VIE is broken down as follows;
- Pz is Praise Zion; the original designers of Squad Leader feared that accurately modeling the historical superiority of German weapons might be seen as anti-Semetic, so they included "Praise Zion" on every halfway decent piece of German kit.
- Kpfw is the abbreviation for KradenscharfPanzerEnslanegenEbenchnittslingenFunkenerKerabschlagNebelwagenborgenKanonennahverteidigunswaffenKette, a shortened version of the German word meaning "tank". (Scholars of Nazi Germany will note that this is not the correct German abbreviation, which of course would actually be KraPeeFuKeNTanK.)
- VIE is Very Imminent Erection, what the average Nazi-worshipper gets when commanding this particular piece of equipment, which has captured the fancy of greatcoat wearing fascist teenagers from Minsk to Montana.
