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CROSSFIRE: Scenarios

Here are presented some of Lloyd's scenarios for Crossfire.

I am very keen to hear from people who have tried these scenarios. Any feedback will allow me to refine and clarify them. Click on the "E-mail" icon on the home page to mail me.

Bridging Scenario

This scenario demands some fairly specialist figures. It involves an advance by British forces, equipped with vehicles for bridging rivers, and dealing with fixed defences. The defender has resources for dealing with both tanks and infantry, but few armoured resources of his own.

The table has on it two streams, one about a fifth of the way in from one end, and the other about two fifths in from the other end. The first has a bridge on it, capable of taking the weight of tanks. The second has a ruined bridge, or no bridge at all. The attacker must advance from one end of the table to the other. To do so, he will have to bridge the second river.

Brown areas: lots of fields, woods, hills (sight-blocking terrain), as well as the usual mix of rough ground and other types.
White area: mainly open terrain, though perhaps with some rough ground patches, and a depression or two (big enough for a tank or three). Note that these terrain types do not block sight. Should be of a width such that one or two smoke missions will not block sight across the whole open area. There must be a clear path somewhere for the bridging tank to get from the bridge to the second river, though this needn't be straight.
Blue lines: rivers, impassable to vehicles, three move actions to cross for infantry. Right hand one has central bridge strong enough for tanks.
Dark green blob: sight block, perhaps a forest section, placed so that the defender cannot easily block the bridge by knocking out a tank as it crosses the bridge.
Red octagons: pillboxes, with all-round field of fire, and entrances on defender's side, positioned on hills. Must be out of range of petard mortars fired from right of the right hand river.
Red oblong: main central well-defended anti-tank gun emplacement, with good view over open area and bridge. Room for at least three AT guns. Perhaps includes trenches for defending infantry.
Black dots: line of telegraph poles, which hampers the bridge-layer's progress.

The Forces

These are the forces I used, but of course you will probably have to fudge them a bit according to the figures you have.

British (attacker)

• One Churchill Crocodile flame-thrower tank
• One Churchill minesweeper tank
• One Churchill fascine carrier tank with petard mortar
• One Churchill small box girder bridge layer tank with petard mortar
• One Churchill VIII 95mm howitzer tank (may fire smoke from main gun)
• Six Churchill tanks (mainly VIIs) in two troops of three (with 2" smoke mortars)
• One FOO team with 2x 3" mortars on land line
• Two stands of assault engineers
• Four Vickers MMG teams (an MG platoon with command)
• Two platoons (companies at the published scale) infantry, each with one 2" mortar and one PIAT

Just to makes things a bit more awkward, I played this scenario with Sikhs as the British infantry, and ruled that only the pale-skinned officers spoke good enough English to co-ordinate with the tanks, and so only they could attach infantry to tanks.

German (defender)

• Three PaK 40 75mm (pretty good) anti-tank guns
• One 37mm (less good, but with HEAT shells good PEN) anti-tank gun
• Two pillboxes
• Three minefields to be placed hidden or not (defender's option)
• Six sections of barbed wire
• Emplacements for the AT guns
• Two platoons infantry (companies at published scale)
• One FOO with radio link to 81mm mortar
• Three tripod-mounted MMGs

Plus potential re-enforcements:

• One StuG III self propelled gun
• Another StuG III SPG
• One Marder III SPG
• Infantry section (platoon at published scale)
• Infantry section
• Infantry section
• Infantry platoon command (Coy. command)
  
  

Deployment

The locations of the main ATG emplacement, and of the pillboxes are shown on the map. The defender chooses where to put his ATGs, with little emplacements for those not in the main emplacement, his minefields, wire, and all his infantry. These, he can deploy anywhere to the left of the bridged river.

The attacker starts off table, and comes on from the right hand table edge (see map).

Re-enforcement

After six defender's initiatives, the defender rolls 1d6 at the start of his initiative. On a result of six, he rolls a further 1d6-2 and gets that many rolls on the re-enforcement table (above). If he rolls for some unit that has already arrived, he rolls again. If he rolls 4-6 and thus gets an infantry unit (section the way I play, but platoon at the published scale), and he then rolls again, and gets the platoon's command section (company's command at published scale) on a result of 5 or 6 as well as the infantry unit.

Re-enforcements arrive at a randomly determined point anywhere along the defender's end of the table and both long sides. The defender may not choose where or when the re-enforcements arrive. They represent forces from neighbouring areas rushing in response to the rumour of an attack. Since the attack is a penetrating one, it is even possible that the re-enforcements will arrive on the attacker's side of the bridged stream.

Terrain rules

The pillboxes have all-round fields of fire, and can be assaulted from any side, but only entered or exited from the defender's side. The pillboxes are on hills, and can see over neighbouring fields.

The streams are fordable to infantry, taking three move actions as normal. They are impassable to tanks.

The emplacements for the guns confer a penalty die's protection to the occupants (if you don't like penalty dice, try counting 6s only as hits, but not dropping a die as well, so they are better than ordinary cover, but not as good as bunkers)

The Funnies

The Churchill fascine can drop its fascine in a trench to make it passable to tanks. It can also drop its fascine in a river, to make the river easier to bridge. It may not fire forwards, or reload, until the fascine is dropped.

The Churchill bridge-layer's bridge will support the weight of any tank, if it has a fascine under it. On its own, with no supporting fascine, it will bear the weight of a tank on a roll of anything but a 1 on 1d6, for every tank that crosses it. On a roll of 1, it buckles, and the tank on it is immobilised. It may not carry its bridge through buildings or woods, or under telegraph wires (telegraph poles may be rammed down by other Churchills, or blown up by infantry in contact with them undisturbed for a whole initiative). If it moves through rough ground, roll 3+ per move action or else the bridge sways too much and falls off. Moves one move action per initiative. Roll 2d6 to drop bridge. 10+ position good, bridge in place; 6-9 position close - manoeuvre on the spot for one initiative and then drop bridge; 4-5 position bad, move at least 3d6" and try again; 3 bridge dropped in poor position, troops and light vehicles only may cross; 2 disaster - bridge falls in gap - useless. In this scenario, it is vital that the river be bridged, so one could forego the die roll, or rule rolls of 2 and 3 to give the result of 4 and 5 instead. If the bridge is used to allow tanks up a steep rise, such as a coastal wall or ridge, roll 2d6: 8+ position good, bridge in place; 5-7 position close - manoeuvre for 1 initiative then drop bridge; 3-4 position unsuitable - move 3d6" along and try again; 2 rise cannot be bridged for some reason (ground too soft, ground angle wrong, mechanical trouble). There are no steep rises in this scenario, but I thought I'd put in the full rules while I was at it. The bridge-layer may not fire its petard mortar in the front ninety-degree arc, until it has dropped its bridge.

The Churchill Crocodile is a Churchill VII with a flame-thrower instead of a hull machine gun. The flame thrower has a range of the length of the vehicle, has a forty-five degree arc of fire, does 6d6 to troops in the open or in fields and rough ground, 5d6 to troops in woods and trenches, and 4d6 to troops in pillboxes (5s needed, not 6s). Troops in pillboxes or trenches or other enclosed spaces who are suppressed flee the space, and are placed immediately behind the space at a place chosen by the infantry's player. The flame gun may not be used if friendly forces are within two base distances of the target. Wooden buildings and corn fields and similarly flammable terrain catch fire on 4+ on 1d6, the fire spreading by a base distance per initiative on a roll of 3+, forcing all troops there to move away at the same speed, regardless of pins and suppressions. If the fire roll comes up 1, or the fire runs out of flammable terrain feature, the fire burns out. Against vehicles in range, 3+ to destroy.

The Churchill mine-sweeper will detect a minefield when it drives into it on a 3+ on 1d6. To keep the attacker guessing, the defender could ask him to roll for the mine-sweeper every time he moved it. If it drives all the way through a minefield (by choice or in ignorance), roll 1d6: 1 = tank immobilised, 2 = tank made it though, 3 = tank made it through and mine field partially cleared (drop a die versus infantry and -1 to die roll to destroy a vehicle), 4+ tank made it through and a lane cleared. These tanks were used mainly for detecting minefields, and were imperfect clearers of them. The usual drill was to send one ahead, and if it detected a minefield, then either another route could be tried, or else infantry or a plough would do the clearing. The good thing about them was that the turret could be used to engage the enemy as the tank went forward, unlike the crab flail tanks which were better at clearing mines.

The Churchill "Flying Dustbins" petard mortars have a range of the two vehicle lengths. They may not fire the petard if there are friendly troops within two base distances of the target. They do 4d6 against infantry, and as AT guns have the stats ACC -2 PEN +2. Against a pillbox they roll 1d6 twice: First roll for effect on st.ructure 1-2 no effect, 3-4 pillbox damaged (counts as normal cover from fire from ninety degree arc centred on tank, and +1 (cumulative) to subsequent petard attacks), 5-6 = pillbox destroyed (counts as normal cover from all sides). Second roll for effect on occupants 1 = no effect, 2 = no effect, 3 = all troops in pillbox pinned, 4 = all troops in pillbox suppressed, 5 = all troops in pillbox flee to immediately outside pillbox, where they end up in previous state (pinned if previously pinned etc.) 6. All troops in pillbox killed. To reload gun counts as an action, which can be reacted to. During reloading, loader is partially exposed, and counts as a target in bunker (-1 die, -1 pip per die). The mortar was loaded by breaking the barrel upwards, to point at the sky, and by pushing the forty-pound bomb up through a special hatch in the top on the hull, into the barrel, and then pulling the barrel back down to its firing position, with the aid of a powerful spring. A Pin result is ignored; a suppression forces the tank to retreat to out of sight of the enemy to reload. A kill means that the bomb was hit and set off by enemy fire, and the tank is destroyed. The petard can also clear mine-fields, by airbursting in front of the tank. Once a minefield has been detected by any means, the petard can fire into it (speculative fire on undetected suspected minefields is forbidden). Roll 1d6-2 and subtract that from the effectiveness of the minefield, so on a roll of 4-2=2, the minefield would do 2d6 not 4d6 to troops, and would subtract 2 from its roll to disable a tank.

You may like to have a look at some of my models of Churchills, including the funnies, which appear in the modelling section.

Tactics

The attacker has a problem, in that he has vehicles that are great at taking on pillboxes, but vulnerable to the AT guns with their good field of fire. His best strategy is probably to use smoke from tanks and mortars to cover an infantry attack down one side of the table. This might be able to by-pass the defending pillboxes. If the infantry can take out a couple of the enemy AT guns, then the Churchill funnies can make short work of the pillboxes afterwards. Ideally, the infantry should get across the second river, then use the depth of the table to get round behind the main AT gun emplacement, and attack it from the rear.

It would be a mistake to attack with the tanks alone. A PaK 40 has a PEN of +1 and a Churchill VII has front armour of 6, and so the ATG needs a 5 to destroy a Churchill from the front. If you use different tanks and AT guns, try and keep this figure about the same (e.g. tanks with armour of 3, and AT guns with PEN of -2). Similarly, it would be a foolish move not to use the tanks to help, since the attacking infantry might become out-numbered if enough re-enforcements arrive. It is also a good idea to get ordinary Churchills in position to head off the possible threat of a German SPG's suddenly turning up and threatening the bridge-layer, or perhaps appearing to the rear.

The defender would probably be wise not to put all his AT guns in the main emplacement, where they might all get smoked off at once. When playing the defender, I put two good AT guns in the emplacement, and the other two dug in behind the hills where the pillboxes were, facing inwards, also threatening the central area, but not visible from the bridge. Worked a treat. The defender would probably be unwise not to have infantry in front of the two pillboxes, either side of the clear area, but there are more ways than one to skin a llama.

Victory

Victory goes to the attacker if he can destroy all the enemy AT guns and pillboxes and get at least five tanks off the far end of the table. Later following units can mop up any further resistance. Victory goes to the defender if the attacker loses too many tanks, or if the bridging tank is destroyed, or if the bridge is destroyed before enough tanks have got across. To destroy the bridge, the defenders can try bringing a box of explosives from the main gun emplacement, and placing it on the bridge. It takes a full initiative undisturbed to place the charge, and this will blow up the bridge in the next defender's initiative, at a time either of his choosing or at the end of it if the initiative ends before he's ready, on a 4+ on 1d6. There is no limit to the number of attempts, but if the men placing the charges are next to the bridge when it blows, they suffer a 6d6 attack.

Crossroads Scenario

This one looks simple, but it is quite a challenge to play.

The board is much wider than it is deep. In the centre is a crossroads, from here, the two crossing roads form an X in the middle of the board. Each long edge therefore has two roads going off it, with some distance between these points and the corners of the board. The roads are clear apart from one burned-out armoured vehicle smack bang on the crossroads, which blocks LOS along both roads. Around the crossroads is a dense village. The rest of the board has a LOT of cover on it - there is not much open ground at all.

A couple of major buildings in the village are half-way between hardpoints and ordinary buildings (the models I used were of large stone buildings). Firing at these involves throwing one extra die and ignoring the highest result of all the dice. For example, rifles firing at a building would normally roll 2 dice. Instead, when firing at these buildings, they roll three dice, and get 5, 5, 3. One five, being one of the highest numbers, is ignored, so a pin, not a suppress, is the result. The probability of a  suppress by this method is about half-way between the stats. for a hardpoint (6s needed), and a normal building. This gives the scenario some strategic positions which are not so strong as to threaten to dominate the scenario, but strong enough to be of interest.

The objective is either to defeat the enemy, or to take and hold the majority of the buildings in the village for a certain length of time, perhaps five initiatives. To win, a player must occupy buildings of at least three of the four sections of village. One could use the clock system in Hit the Dirt, and say that the side in control of the village when darkness falls, wins. Each time one side ends its initiative, a die is rolled to see how much time has passed, and the clock is advanced some amount (like half an hour) if the die roll comes up greater than a certain number. For example, the game could start at noon, and darkness could fall at 2200 hours, and the clock could advance half an hour each time one player rolls 3+. Obviously, if one side gets annihilated, the game ends in a victory to the annihilators.

One side has two companies of veterans, and one stand in three of infantry has HEAT weapons. The other side has three companies of infantry regulars, and all the infantry stands have HEAT weapons. This side also has more machine guns, and some MG-armed light vehicles (I used motorcycles with sidecars and the like). Each company has one 3" or 81mm mortar.

The side with fewer infantry has MANY more tanks, I used Churchills, Stuarts and Daimler ACs, also a 6-pounder, a 17-pounder plus towing vehicles. The other side has far less armour (I used one Panther, one 222, and one StuG III).

In playtest, it worked well. No one wanted to go all-out to take the village, fearing losing the flanks. At the start of the game we deployed one vehicle/platoon at a time along the broad edges, and where along the breadth of the table to put these was a  major decision, given the central objective, and the proportions and dense terrain of the board. The tanks did not dominate - they were too scared to go on the roads, and too scared to advance without confident infantry support, which was unlikely to exist given the board. The anti-tank guns couldn't come forward without risking being seen by opposing FOs and mortared to oblivion. Infantry did most of the work, with the tanks standing by most of the time as an atmospheric menace threatening total destruction to the loser - they wouldn't be the beginning of the end, but they would be the end of the loser's force.

It is difficult to suggest tactics. Watch where you opponent masses his forces. He might mass on either flank or in the middle. If he masses in the middle and you don't, then he will probably take the village before you can stop him. If he masses on one flank, then you might mass to prevent his sweeping around, or perhaps you might put a small holding force on that flank, while hoping to surround the village from the other flank.

Another Crossfire enthusiast has tried this scenario, and written up his experiences with it on his website: Ian Hayward's version.

Objective

This is a simple idea, which can be re-used in a hundred variations.

The attacker is told to go in and destroy target A. The defender is not told what target A is, but the defender does know everything which is on the board. The defender has orders to defend A,B,C,D,E,F and G, and may think that he has far too few forces to manage this. As the attacker moves around the board, he discovers B-G, and these are placed on the board.

The attacker only wins if he has destroyed four of the targets.

My thinking is:

1. This makes the game far more interesting.

2. Were I a senior officer deciding which commander to promote, I would favour the one who, when sent to destroy a fuel dump, returned saying that he discovered a telegraph line, railway line, V1 launch ramp, small tank hospital, radar site, AA emplacement, and accordion factory, and had destroyed them all as well as the fuel dump. The officer who just mentioned that he had seen them on his outing would be passed over for having such little initiative. Similarly, I would promote the defending officer who managed to hold six out of seven vital objectives, against a foe who might well have blown up the lot.

Operation Beverage

WARNING: This scenario works only with one player kept in the dark. The map appears at the bottom of this page. Once you have read the text and seen the map, then you can play the rôle of defender only.

This is a scenario where one player knows more than the other, or else an umpire is used. At least one player should not be told the full scenario, and he should play the attacker. I played this scenario with British as the attackers and Germans as the defenders, and will use these terms from now on, but of course it could be altered for different nationalities.

The British player comes on from one end of the board with his British paras. Off board, the other end of the table, is a column of advancing British armour. The Germans are deployed as if expecting an attack from the armour-end of the table. The orders for the British player are to do what he can to aid the advance of the tanks.

The British player is handed statistics for the vehicles he will be using, and a box containing these, including a decent number of Churchills or the like is placed within his sight near the table.

The terrain should be, as ever, fairly dense and varied. The Germans will have a front-line, which might include the likes of anti-tank obstacles, barbed wire, trenches, and places for AT guns. There should be at least two places for AT guns to be, where they can see the armour-end of the table. One of these should be a sizeable emplacement with about three decent guns. I used Pak 40s. This emplacement should be well-defended with infantry. In front of it should be a fairly large open area. Either side of the open area should be discouraging to vehicles, and should include the sort of cover infantry likes when attacking vehicles in close combat. The terrain can be placed at the start of the game, but might better be added as it comes into line-of-sight of the attacking British, to conform to a pre-drawn map.

The Germans do not deploy "hidden" as per the rules, but what I called "unknown", which means that they are not deployed on the table, but are placed down only when the British attacking forces come in normal line-of-sight of them. This simulates the surprise of being attacked from an unexpected direction, by a force which is moving hastily, unsure of where exactly it is. They should deploy in depth, not just along the front line. I suggest that the area on the left half of the map should contain at least half the German forces, and a few points of distracting interest, such as a communications HQ, bridge, bunker. If the attacking player encounters very few enemies in the left half of the map, he will be suspicious that there is a surprise waiting for him. If he feels that he has already achieved something by the time he has gained line of sight to the far end of the table, and has suffered some casualties, then he is far more likely to make the mistake of calling on the armour before he has discovered all the anti-tank guns.

The Brits must push forward, to clear the way for the armoured column. With good play, the British player may encounter the Germans and defeat them piecemeal. The British para commander is in radio contact with the armoured column. When the paras come within sight of the far end of the table, then the column's commander, perhaps played by the umpire, or the player playing the Germans, reports that he can see the paras' smoke and mortar blasts, and asks if it is a good time to approach. If the answer is "yes", then the British player is handed not the many Churchills he is expecting, but three Honeys and two Daimler ACs - the recon unit heading the column. He can bring these on anywhere along the end of the table.

If the British player has not discovered and destroyed the anti-tank guns of the defenders, then the light AFVs of the column will be in great trouble.

If the answer is "no", then the British AFVs stay off table. The British player, though, may yield to the temptation to bring on the tanks, especially if things are not going well for him. This is his chance to reinforce himself, and why should he delay? Every British initiative, the commander of the column should ask again whether the paratrooper commander wants him to advance.

I used a vacuum-formed piece of terrain which I had been keeping in an opaque bag, to represent a Pak 40 emplacement. This had a narrow strip of woods hiding it from the back (i.e. from the attacking British paras), and it gets placed it down replacing some more woods terrain which first mark its place, only when the paras get within line-of-sight of the guns themselves at the front. Until this point, it looks like a bumpy-floored section of woodland, and is treated as two sections of terrain: front and back, the front having the guns in it, and the back blocking line-of-sight to the front, from behind.

In playtest, at the end of the game, the Germans (many were green troops) were in no position to hold against an armoured column, but I ruled that although the British would win, the player playing the para commander had not won, as he had not secured the area in time for the arrival of the column, and four out of the five lead vehicles had been destroyed. He would be unlikely to be promoted, having told a superior that it was safe to advance.

This type of scenario involves one player's trusting another, but can work really well.

Notice that line of sight to the main group of AT guns is difficult to achieve until one is almost on top of them. If you are using the terrain type "crest", as described in the supplement Hit the Dirt, then you might want to add one between point C and the bottom end of the main AT emplacement, running across the rough ground. Remember that rough ground does not block sight, and so those reddish blobs of bushes and rubble do not stop the paras from being seen by the armoured column's commander, but they do offer good places for armour-hunting Germans with panzerfausts and the like. This map shows the blue area on the left side taking up about half of the table's area. I would recommend your making this blue area longer, so that the British player has to fight for a bit further before sighting the end of the table.

You might like to hand the British player a print-out of the following brief:

You are to play a key role in Operation Beverage. You have landed behind enemy lines with your force of veteran paratroopers. A large column of heavy armour is to advance into enemy territory later today, and you are to do everything you can to aid it on its way, attacking from the enemy's rear. The good news is that you are in radio contact with the commander of the column, Brigadier Stansbrook MC. The bad news is that after a forced march at night, you are not certain of where you are, and your maps have proven useless. You do know the direction in which the enemy's front line lies, however, and so you know the direction you must go. Do not contact Stansbrook by radio, unless it is a dire emergency, since a broadcast will give away your position to the enemy. An enemy communications HQ is believed to be in the area. Instead, stay tuned to the correct frequency, and he will contact you. Make your way from one end of the gaming table to the other, stripping the reserves away from the enemy's front line, and occupy any positions you consider may be of use to the enemy. Jolly good luck. I bet you wouldn't want to miss this show for the world, eh?

Operation Glimmer

WARNING: This scenario works only with one player kept in the dark. The map appears at the bottom of this page. Once you have read the text and seen the map, then you can play the role of defender only.

This is a scenario where one player knows more than the other, or else an umpire is used. At least one player should not be told the full scenario, and he should play the attacker. I played this scenario with Germans as the attackers and British as the defenders, and will use these terms from now on, but of course it could be altered for different nationalities.

The table is rectangular, and divides roughly into three parts: attacker's home side, centre, defender's home side. The centre of the table is made up of many sections of woods, and either end of the table has other sorts of terrain (hills, walls, fields etc.).

The defender deploys half his forces hidden, and half not hidden. He may deploy anywhere on the table except in terrain features touching the German end of the table. The attacker starts off table, and comes on anywhere along his table end.

German Brief

You receive the following written orders:

Tomorrow at 0800 our army will launch an attack at several points along the enemy front. While the main effort of the enemy will be in defending against attacks elsewhere, you must break through a weak point which intelligence tells us exists in the enemy's front. Once through, you will turn, after receiving new orders by radio, to link up with other spearheads, and will attack to the enemy's rear. Punching through the enemy's front should prove easy, as the terrain is well suited to your unit.

You send out scouts, and go to reconnoitre the area, with inadequate maps. The reports from the scouts say that the area is defended by enemy infantry, some of whom are dug in. The terrain is not good, and you have no choice but to pick a route forward which takes you through a fairly extensive area of woodland. The table represents your route through the enemy lines. Once off the far end of the table, you will be in a position to receive your new orders.

British Brief

[First radio message]
"Great Scott, Titchmarsh! What the Devil are you doing there? Don't you know you're out of position? Pull back for mercy's sake! At noon today the whole of the AGRA's going to be blasting that area to blazes! You're far too far forward to support where you are, and besides, that's not the point of today's attack. Get your men to fall back, but... ah! Hang on for now, I'll get back to you. In the meantime, get your men to start packing."

[Second message]
"Titchmarsh? Ah, good man, now listen: had a word with the Big Sunray, and he says that you might be able to do us a little favour as you pull back. Try and suck in Jerry and draw forces away from the main attack. Make a couple of feints, and then pull back. If you get it right, your local nasties will get a right stonking, what? Just make damn sure your men are not in Pixieland at noon. Out."

(AGRA = Army Group Royal Artillery = huge artillery unit, Big Sunray = chief commander, Pixieland = area to be subjected to barrage at noon (wooded centre of table))

At noon today, an outrageously large number of big artillery shells are due to rain down on the forest in the centre of the table. Your objective is to fix things such that as many Germans are in those woods at the time as possible.

The German attacker is told nothing more of the scenario. He should for instance not know that half the enemy forces are hidden. He should have no more clues as to how many enemies he is facing. Similarly, the defender is not told the best way to play the game, but the best thing to do would probably be to fight a steady retreat vacating the centre of the board and holding steadfastly to the home end of the board. The trick will be to make the withdrawal appear forced and reluctant, rather than deliberate and willing. To make this more difficult, part of the terrain includes a large woods terrain feature in the centre of the table, in which is a trench. Troops firing at the trench roll a penalty die, rather than just dropping one die for cover as usual (penalty die = roll an extra die, but discount the highest result of all dice, so rifles (3 dice) firing at entrenched enemy roll four dice, and get 3,5,6,6, but this is a suppression, not a kill result, since one of the sixes is discarded). This is a problem for the defender, since the trench is in an excellent position, with a good field of fire, and protects his troops well, so it may look suspicious if he doesn't deploy any troops in it, or if he abandons it when things are still going well.

The Moving Clock is used, and the game ends at noon, at which point any units in the centre of the table come under massive bombardment. Starting at 0800, at the end of each German initiative, a roll of 4+ on 1d6 means that the clock is moved on by quarter of an hour.

At noon, 1d6 is rolled for every infantry stand and vehicle in the central area of woodland (including units in the open, between woods features). Infantry stands and soft skinned vehicles die on 4+ (5+ if in the trench), armoured vehicles 5+. Also, stands in terrain features touching the central area die on 5+ (armoured vehicles 6+), and stands either in the open between the central area and the next nearest terrain piece in the end sections, or in terrain features which, though not touching the central area, have no intervening terrain features between them and the central area, die on a roll of six. When the dust settles after this, the points are awarded.

The British player gets a point for every German infantry stand and vehicle dead, and loses a point for every German stand or vehicle off his end of the board. He gains a point for every stand/gun he has surviving, and loses a point for every one he has lost. To win, he must score more points than his starting number of stands and guns.

The Forces

The attacker should have a very significant advantage in numbers and equipment, but he shouldn't know this. These are the forces I used, but you will probably have to come up with some substitutes. I play Crossfire at the scale 1 figure = 1 man. A "platoon" of men in the game as I play it, is roughly equivalent to a "company" at the published scale.

British

Two platoons of regulars, two Vickers MGs, two 3" mortars with FOOs, one or two 6pdr AT guns.

Germans

A full panzergrenadier company, with three platoons of infantry, with every section having two LMGs; three tripod-mounted MGs; enough half-tracks to transport the whole company (with 251/10 command vehicles for every platoon); a support platoon of two stump guns (75mm-armed 251s), two 81mm mortar carriers, two radio carriers, and four 20mm flak AA gun carriers (total of 23 half-tracks - see panzergrenadier section). I didn't find it necessary to make them veterans, but you could also make the attacking troops veterans. If you don't have many half-tracks, then give the attacker armoured vehicles of some sort, but not ones with very heavy armour. The attacker should have over double the strength of the defender.

(Note that the way I play the game, armoured half-tracks are not invulnerable to small arms' fire. I play that they afford protection like pillboxes - drop one die and one pip per die, and that they ignore pins.)

With this overwhelming force, the German player should be able to obey his orders fairly easily. As soon as he punches a gap in the enemy line, he can mount up in his half-tracks, and zoom through it. In playtest, however, the German player has always become fascinated by the enemy troops, and has spent an age trying to finish them all off instead of by-passing them at the first opportunity. I would recommend that players allow German attacking vehicles more than one move action per initiative. Four or five actions is better.

A       - Area at defender's home end of the table.
Ai     - Example of terrain feature where a 6 would destroy a stand in the great AGRA cataclysm.
Aii   - Example of a terrain feature where a 5 or 6 would destroy an infantry stand.
Aiii  - Example of an area of open terrain where a 6 would doom a stand.
B       - Area of woodland densely dotted with patches of wood terrain features, and perhaps a few bushy bits of rough ground. 4, 5, or 6 will kill infantry here at noon.
Bi     - Central terrain feature of woodland, containing a trench.
C       - Attacker's end of the table, attacker enters from right hand edge.

Operation Ptarmigan

WARNING: This scenario works best when the players know only what is in their written briefs. If you have no umpire, then the player who knows what is going on should play the commander of the British forces, and the German player should not be shown anything more than his own brief before the game starts.

This is a scenario that asks for a fair amount of nice scenery and figures. I used British paratroopers for one side and a mix of ordinary German infantry and armoured panzergrenadiers for the other. This is a fairly historical set of forces for northern France in June 1944. There were many British paratroop drops which had artillery and coastal batteries as their targets, and which were successful. Of course you could substitute simply field artillery batteries for the coastal naval gun batteries, and you could use other forces. The use of American paratroopers would be less historical, since the American parachute drop in Normandy went very wrong, and took none of its objectives.

If you are going to use different forces, perhaps because you are setting the game in a different time and place, the essential relationships are these: the defender of the objectives must be green troops, and significantly out-numbered by their veteran attackers, perhaps by three to one. The force arriving from off table should be regular, and significantly stronger than the force attacking the objectives, and ideally supported by some armoured vehicles. Bear in mind that I play Crossfire at a figure scale where sections are split into teams, so one of my "platoons" is roughly equivalent in terms of number of figures and stands to a "company" at the published scale, so you may want to convert my platoons to companies.

A:   Trench protecting flank of gun emplacement M.
B:   Trench protecting A and enfilading beach.
C:   Trench protecting coastal battery N.
D:   Trench protecting barracks.
E, F and G:   Barracks for gun battery garrisons.
H:   Terrain feature offering good cover (in my case, my water treatment works, counted as better than normal cover, but less good than hardpoint). This gives the British player a handy position from which to make things difficult for the attacking Germans coming from the south.
I:   Road.
J:   Fast flowing river, which is crossed a bit like barbed wire, except that the roll is as if to rally from suppression (5 for regulars), not from pin (4). Where is enters the sea, it is deep, making it impossible for troops to avoid the die rolls by splashing round the end of the river on the beach.
K:   Bay.
L:   Beach, with line of barbed wire (swirly lines) and anti-tank obstacles (Xs).
M:   Objective for attacker. I used the old Airfix "Gun Emplacement", which has a pillbox, radio room, communication trenches, and a large turret with a big naval gun in it, of dubious authenticity. Wise German engineers have placed solid stoppers on the gun's turntable making it impossible to point the gun towards N.
N:   Objective for attacker. I used the old Airfix "Coastal Battery", which has a double naval gun turret mounted in a roofed concrete emplacement, together with radar, AA guns, and firing slits. Whereas this is more authentic than the "gun emplacement", I doubt that the grey rectangular area on the map, which represents the open back of the building, is authentic. I think that this is a compromise made for the sake of the younger children who would regard the model as a toy, and who might want to play with the spring-loaded guns more easily. Perhaps I should extend the roof to cover the whole of the guns, but nostalgia and laziness may prevent me.
O:   Bridge, capable of carrying armoured vehicles.
Pale Green Area:   This area to be covered in a dense scattering of hills/dunes, woods, rough ground, depressions, hedges, walls, etc.

German Commander's Brief

You are the commander of a company of armoured panzergrenadiers in northern France, not very far from the coast.

0200 - Receive word by courier that the allies have launched an attack to the North. The Pas de Calais is the suspected target, although there are reports that parachute drops have been made to the south west. You order your men to stand to, in anticipation of orders to rush to the defence of some trouble spot.

0215 - Still not managed to contact Div HQ. The telephone network seem to be damaged. You decide to send off an MC courier to find out what is going on.

0300 - The sound of gunfire is audible from the roof of your HQ. Still no word from HQ. You send out a scouting party to investigate the telephone lines.

0330 - The scouting party reports that the lines have been cut by resistance workers. By this time you have managed to contact Div HQ by radio, but the line is faulty from enemy jamming, and is not secure. The only orders you are given are to round up any resistance suspects.

0430 - The first reliable report comes in from a supply unit. It had encountered paratroopers in an area to the south of you. It was impossible to ascertain which way they were going. You study your maps and see that the area is suitable for a parachute drop, with flat open areas of dry land, but has no obvious enemy objectives in it. Since you are in command of the nearest fully motorised unit, you consider that you are the perfect man to deal with this drop. The paratroopers will mainly be on foot and time is of the essence. You radio Div. HQ and using code words, ask for orders to engage the paratroopers. No go ahead is given. HQ is waiting for a Luftwaffe reconnaissance report.

0440 - You telephone the coastal observation points and batteries to the north-west. They report that the guns are about to engage, but then the line is cut mid-conversation. You consider that this might mean that the batteries are a target. If they are engaging, then there must be targets off the coast in that direction, and not just at the Pas de Calais.

0445 - You contact Div. HQ but again are given the orders to wait. All attacks are suspected of being decoys. Enemy agents have spread rumours, many of which have been shown to be false.

0455 - First action in your area. An intense gunfight breaks out almost on top of your position. A large parachute drop lands in the nearby fields and your men engage immediately. You leave your deputy CO to man the communications, and take the command of the action in person.

0535 - You realise that this "attack" is an enemy ruse, and that your men have wasted thousands of rounds firing at two-foot tall dummies dropped in with strings of firecrackers on them. You post a heavy guard and regroup your forces.

0600- A Div HQ MC courier rides up with authenticated orders. There is no news of your own courier, and he is presumed killed. Reports are now confirmed that there has been a parachute drop in your area, and that a substantial force of it is heading towards the coastal batteries. HQ orders you to intercept this force and prevent it from attacking the batteries from the landward side. Your men are ready to go. You set off to the sound of resistance suspects being shot.

0640 - Your fears are confirmed. You have wasted hours and the enemy has had time to get between you and the coastal batteries. You catch sight of the enemy force in the dawn light. Already they are poised for the attack, so you may just be in time. The batteries are now within radio contact range, and report the correct code words indicating that they are in operation. The garrisons there are low-grade troops, however, and you do not fancy their chances against determined British veteran paratroopers acting on a definite plan, attacking defences pointing the wrong way.

0650- You are just about to give the orders for the attack when an enigma decode is handed to you from the dept. CO's radio vehicle. "Panzer Battalion B is heading to your aid. E.T.A. 1100 hours. The Pz. Batt. will mop up remaining resistance and secure the area. Prevent if possible the capture of the gun batteries, then contain the enemy until the arrival of the panzers."

Your force:

A full armoured panzergrenadier company (see here for full details). Morale/quality = regulars.

Company HQ:

Company C.O., plus his aides, riding in 251/3
Dept. Coy. C.O. plus his aides, in another 251/3. Will only dismount in the event of the death of the C.O.
One AA vehicle (Sd 251/17 or 251/21).

Three armoured panzergrenadier platoons, each with:

One Sd. 251/10 half track with 37mm AT gun, carrying platoon commander, one base of aides, one panzerschreck team. Three sections each with two LMG teams, one NCO, riding in one Sd. 251/1.

One support platoon:

Platoon's 251/1 command vehicle; three AA vehicles (251/17 or 251/21); one Kettenkrad half-track motorcycle; two 251/9 75mm stump guns; two 251/2 81mm mortar carriers plus forward observation team with radio.
Riding in the command vehicle and the AA vehicles is the company's integral machine gun platoon, with three tripod SFMGs ("HMGs" in Crossfire), plus rifle-armed ammunition carriers and platoon commander.

Gun Battery Garrison

A ramshackle collection of what German figures I could find. Quality = green. About a platoon and a half.

The forces you are up against seem formidable, but certainly no match for a panzer battalion. When the reinforcements arrive, the game will end. How well you do until that point will determine victory. If you can prevent the loss of both gun positions, you will have won. If you can prevent the loss of one, then this is a partial victory. If you can contain the enemy forces on the table until the arrival of the panzers, this will make it possible to force a win, depending on the number of enemy killed and your own losses.

Terrain rules

The river is deep and fast. The bridge is the only place where vehicles can cross on table, and troops will have to roll as if crossing barbed wire at -1 when crossing elsewhere. The trenches are designed for defending against attack from the sea, and count as ordinary cover from the landward side. Both batteries have hardpoints with 360 degree fire arcs. The back of the double gun battery is not open as per the model, but is closed over with a concrete roof.

Deployment

You deploy first. Your garrison troops can deploy in the batteries, and in the defences around them, in their barracks and the barracks' defences, and anywhere in the northern half of the table. The rest of your forces start off table and must come on the southern edge. You have control of another bridge much further upstream, where you can cross with your motorised forces. You must decide at the game's start how many forces to deploy on each side of the river. The British start with the initiative.

British Commander's brief.

You are the commander of a parachute company. You are supported by an MG platoon, and have some demolition experts with you, and a few assault engineers. The drop as usual lost you most of your heavy equipment, including three of your four six-pounder AT guns. All the carriers have been lost too, and you have just four working jeeps. Two of the four 3" mortars never made it to the RDV point either. Otherwise, you are fairly complete.

Your force:

Company HQ:

Coy. C.O., plus his SMG-armed aides.
Dept. Coy. C.O. with rifle-armed aides and radio operator.

Three infantry platoons, each with:

Platoon C.O., his SMG-armed aides, one 2" mortar, one PIAT team, three sections each with: section commander, one base rifles, one bren LMG team.

Machine gun platoon:

Platoon C.O., rifle armed ammunition carriers, two sections each with two Vickers .303" MMGs.

One section SMG-armed demolition experts

Two bases plus section commander.

One assault engineer base

Flame thrower and satchel charge, plus section commander.

Two 3" mortar teams, plus one FOO for each.

Four jeeps

Two recce versions armed with Vickers K gun MG, one towing the 6-pdr, one with trailer laden with high explosives.

One 6 pdr AT gun

(I think two might be fairer to the Brits).

Two LCMs.

Note that this is not enough to take off your entire force at once, so they will have to make more than one trip.

Objectives

Your objectives are the two coastal batteries on the table. Intelligence suggests that they are manned by dispirited low grade troops. They will not be easy targets, however, and they are surrounded by wire, trenches, and each have hard-points built in to them. Once inside them, blowing them up is not an easy matter. Orders require them to be completely irreparable, and to this end, you will need to use a lot of explosives in the right places. When the charges go off, you must have no one in the buildings with them, or these will be killed in the confined blast. The demolition section is best at the job, but all your men are capable of doing it. A section doing nothing other than demolition can carry enough explosives for one battery. One jeep has enough stowed on it for any number of attempts.

Once the targets have been destroyed, you can signal for evacuation. The area is likely to be swarming with enemy as soon as Jerry twigs what you're up to. The Very Light sequence is green green red. This must be fired by the most senior officer on his side of the river, while he is in line of sight of the sea. On seeing this, LCMs (landing craft, medium) will be despatched to the beach to pick you up. Each can carry a full platoon. Scuttle any vehicles you leave behind.

Deployment

Deploy your troops out of sight of any Germans on the table, and not further north than the line of trenches defending the batteries. You start with the initiative.

Terrain rules

The river is deep and fast. The bridge is the only place where vehicles can cross on table, and troops will have to roll as if crossing barbed wire at -1 when crossing elsewhere. The trenches are designed for defending against attack from the sea, and count as ordinary cover from the landward side. Both batteries have hardpoints with 360 degree fire arcs. The back of the double gun battery is not open as per the model, but is closed over with a concrete roof.

LCMs

After the flares are fired, the LCMs will arrive at the start of the third friendly initiative following. They can be seen approaching from anywhere along the coast or on a hill with line of sight to the coast. The LCMs can be boarded as a move action. They can carry fifteen bases of troops each. They can not group move. Setting off is an action, and they take one move action to arrive, and one to depart from the table. Troops in them count as in cover to direct fire and in hardpoint to indirect fire, but kill potential is kills, not suppressions, plus a suppression earns a second roll. Guns must roll to set up in order to depress enough from the land to hit the LCMs (unless actually on the beach). Treat hits on the LCMs as APC hits. LCM armour 2/2.

Demolitions

Every 15 minutes spent in the battery qualifies the Brits for a demolition roll, per battery. 4+ indicates that the charges are in place, 3+ if using demolition experts. Charges will go off during the friendly initiative after the British player has declared that he is setting them off. If the initiative passes before he has got all his men out, all men inside die unless roll 5+ per stand. This includes incapacitated, buried etc. Charges destroy batteries successfully on 3+ or 2+ if using experts. If for some reason the men trying to blow up the battery have no access to the specialist explosives, perhaps because the jeep carrying them was destroyed and over-run by the enemy, or is the other side of the river with no way to get the explosives across safely, then -2 to this roll. No rolls are needed to scuttle a jeep.

Photograph taken during playtest. British paras rush aboard the LCMs, but Jerry guns are hampering the evacuation. In the foreground can be see the twin gun barrels of the Airfix coastal gun battery. Along the beach are AT obstacles and barbed wire. The Airfix gun emplacement, in mottled camouflage, is in the background, the far side of the bay. A few paras can be seen just to the right of the patch of white phosphorous 2" mortar smoke. They are hung up on the wire.

The following information should be known only to the umpire if there is one, or else only to the British player.

GAME CLOCK

Game starts at 0700. At end of each British initiative, 4+ advances clock 15 minutes. German reinforcements arrive at the end of any German initiative on 5+ from 1100 hours onwards. This means that when they do arrive, the British will have at least one more initiative in which to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

VICTORY POINTS

German gets 2 per enemy stand destroyed, 1 per enemy vehicle captured, 1 per stand on table with no clear path to the table edge when the panzer battalion turns up, -1 per other ranks stand lost, -2 for platoon officers lost, -3 for company officers lost, -1 per enemy stand escaped, -2 per vehicle lost. Victory if result is positive. Decisive victory if result 14+.

DISCUSSION

Both sides have problems, and both are not in full possession of the facts, but both have good resources, and both know most of what is going on. The British have good troops, but are out-numbered, out-gunned, have no armour, and start the game surrounded. The German player may get suspicious when he sees the British scuttling their own jeeps, which are surely good get-away vehicles. In playtest, the German player was expecting an attack on the beach once the batteries were destroyed, not an evacuation. Nowhere in the briefs does it say that the beach is one of the Normandy invasion beaches. I imagine it to be a beach between Normandy and the Pas de Calais, and that this attack is designed to make moving ships along the coast easier, and to distract German forces away from the real landing area. The British will find withdrawing difficult, and will probably have to leave some men behind to cover the retreat.

The Germans know that reinforcements are on the way, and that containing the paratroopers is almost as good as killing them. However, they don't know that the paras are going to be evacuated from the beach, and so might be content to trap the paras against the coast and wait. The Germans have forces far stronger than the British, but must fight their way on to the table, and have an enemy force between their main force and the enemy objectives. If the British concentrate on attacking the batteries, then when eventually they do lose the initiative, the German main force may have an easy time punching through.

Forces at published scale

German: One company green troops garrison, plus three companies regulars, supported by a fair amount of light armour.
British: Three veteran companies, plus a six-pounder or two, some demolition experts, a few HMGs, two FOOs with on-table 3" mortars, some jeeps.

OPERATION SCAFFOLDING

The map is at the bottom of this page.

WARNING: This scenario works best with an umpire. If you plan to use an umpire, then only the umpire himself should read the full scenario details. Each player reads his own brief. The umpire needs to read both briefs and the scenario notes.

German brief

You have the following forces:

Reasonable lot of decent infantry, with a fair few AT HEAT weapons. A few light vehicles and decent AA guns (with some AT capability), one AT gun.

You deploy in area 1, from the left of the table, as far as the dotted line. Half of your infantry must be deployed in the buildings. All of your forces may be deployed hidden.

Your troops are tired, after much contact with the enemy, and are now resting in accommodation in this area. Enemy aircraft have been a threat, and so you have wisely camouflaged your camp, and do not move around much by day, and you have AA guns which you should position to protect the buildings. Enemy paratroopers are an expected threat, and two behind-the-lines drops have been reported recently. You are not now on the front line, and your priority is the resting of your men, but you must take precautions against enemy infiltration and air attack. You have a  fuel dump and a radar station to guard. This area has been fought across several times, and an old defensive line exists which has been mined. Engineers will turn up next week to remove the mines, until then, better order your men to avoid that area, since the maps of the minefields are unreliable, and the ground is very open there, so troops in the area might be seen from the air.

Allied side brief

You have the following forces:

• Good off-table artillery.
• Some good engineers.
• Some infantry.
• A couple of light scouting AFVs.
• A VERY strong tank force.

You are part of the first wave of Operation Scaffolding. Much is being done to confuse the enemy, and surprise and speed are important. You travel through the night, as part of the rapidly-advancing column, and then go ahead at dawn to remove the anti-tank obstacles which Intelligence says exist in the area of your part in the operation. You come on the board anywhere along side 2. You are to clear a path through the obstacles, for the armoured column to follow. The column itself will wait off-table until you personally radio back that the path is clear. Expect some resistance, as troops are stationed in this area. You have artillery priority for the opening stage (the clearing of the path), after which artillery units will be assigned other priorities. Once the column is through the obstacles, escort it across the board and mop up any resistance.

Umpire Notes

The German commander must realise what is going on, and the size of the threat. The fall of the attacker's artillery may tell him what's going on. He may have the "game mentality" which tells him that the attacker will have a force which "balances" his, for a "fair" fight. This mentality is not historical and will not help him. The tank column is very strong and once all through the gap will be devastating. The defender must prevent the engineers from doing their work.

I suggest that engineers, advancing and equipped with this particular task in mind, should be able to remove a stand's width per engineering stand of dragons' teeth on a roll of a 6 at the start of the phasing initiative following a previous initiative entirely spent next to the obstacles, then 5,6 for the next, then 4,5,6 for subsequent (for "Spanish riders" (girder jacks/caltrops), +1 to the roll - so you could have weaker points in the line with Spanish riders, but these might be more exposed to fire). If ever a 1 is rolled, that particular stand's width of AT obstacle proves too well-made to be bothered with - move on to another section.

Whether you have mines and wire as well in the line is up to you. I read recently that mines and wire were often very difficult to clear using artillery, and that often the cratering just made things worse. If you are very mean, you may say that there are only AT mines there, which the engineers will not set off, but tanks will (if you go for this option, then the engineers could still spot the mines if their player specifically states that he will look for them).

The defender must realise that the thing to do is ignore most of his brief, and get as many troops down to defend the line as possible, and he may choose to get his AA gun and AT guns into position to face whatever is going to come through that gap. He may of course decide to use the advantage of hidden defence, and defend in depth. This would be disastrous. He'd be much more likely to win this one if he revealed his troops (by moving them) into position to do something to prevent a gap forming in the line. A good tactic might be to position AT/AA guns to fire at a likely gap-to-be, then wait for a tank to occupy the gap and blow it up there, blocking the gap again.

The attacker would do well to work very quickly with his engineers, and try to get infantry through the line ahead of them, to obscure what they're up to, and confuse the enemy by threatening false objectives. If he radios to the column to come on too early, then he may only have one gap for the tanks to move through, which may become blocked by a  knocked-out tank. He must radio himself, and to do this, he must (a) be alive, and (b) be able to see the gap in the line himself.

So as not to spoil the surprise. The allied player should not at first stand at the end of the table where his forces will later come on, nor should his figures be placed in a convenient place for getting them onto the table there. The German player should be led to fear attacks from any direction.

The allied side has perhaps half to 2/3 as much infantry as the Germans. Some of the men were delayed, and they weren't expecting so many enemy troops to be stationed here. Their commander must use them wisely, and may sacrifice any number of them for the sake of getting the column through. Allied victory does not depend on the amount of surviving infantry.

If the German commander hot-foots it to the radar station, he will have all the equipment he needs there to call in an air strike. He must, however, report a large amount of armour in order to get his strike. If he reports attacking infantry forces, which will be smaller than his own forces, and perhaps scattered in the woods, he will get no air-strike. If he reports a major column of armour, his superiors will send in the ground-attack planes. These will arrive three initiatives later. If he doesn't report the armour he'll get no air-strike, nor does he deserve one - after all, if you were the superior of a commander who was stationed right next to a radar site, and who didn't report an attacking column of armour to the Luftwaffe, would you promote the idiot? Any fool knows a  radar site has a radio link to the air-force. You don't need to tell an officer that.

This means that the allied commander has three initiatives to get his tanks through the gap. Any tanks not through the gap, including tanks not yet on table, will be hit by strong air-attacks. You could either play this out, using die rolls to see how many tanks blow up, or else just say that all tanks still in the open, to the right of the dotted line, retreat off board, and the operation is a failure for the allies. Tanks in forest cannot be attacked from the air, and those left of the dotted line need a  roll of 5+ to be seen and attacked, so some tanks might just get away with it, but remember that they are now in dense terrain against out-numbering infantry with lots of HEAT weapons.

For extra confusion, you might introduce one Allied officer and one stand of allied paratroopers, part-way into the game, arriving on the edge of area 1. These are lost and don't know what's going on. They are too few to do much damage by shooting, but might just accidentally draw off a significant number of Germans.

Excessive use of smoke by the allies might spoil the scenario. In Crossfire, smoke is very predictable, and very good. The allies should not have vast amounts of smoke available. You could rule that it is windy over the open ground , and that accordingly smoke sometimes blows off course in that part of the table. After a player rolls succesfully (3-6) for a smoke mission in his phasing initiative to land in the open swathe, roll again. On a 1-3, place the smoke 2d6" further towards the bottom of the map than intended. When the initiative ends, roll again for wind effects, and apply the result immediately.

If there is no umpire, then the guy who knows the scenario should be the allied attacker. He will have rehearsed his attack, and have foreseen the dangers. In this case, one might add a load of dug-in MMG nests around the radar station, for game balance, and perhaps some camouflaged FO station which can see the line of AT obstacles (which Jerry may deploy hidden), with land line to a couple of 81mm mortars.

A swathe of mostly open ground crosses the board where the AT obstacles are. There may be some undulation in the ground, but no cover for attacking troops. There is cover at the end edge of the board, where the attackers arrive(2). The area of the board left of the dotted line includes quite a lot of woods and similar cover which would make spotting from the air very difficult.

Fighting Withdrawal

Withdrawal scenarios don't tend to work very well in Crossfire because of the nature of the rules. Units deployed in sight-blocking terrain such as woods can use retreat moves to slip out of sight of the enemy, and then can in one initiative withdraw as far as they want, so long as enemy fire doesn't stop them. Chases are similarly tricky to design scenarios for, for the same reasons. This scenario requires one side to withdraw, but there is a twist that makes the game a tough fight for both sides. It should also give you a decisive result without too long a game.

The table has a river about 1/4 of the way in from one end, crossing the table, with a bridge in the middle. Near the river, a couple of hills offer good hull-down positions to tanks. There might also be another hill somewhere around the one shown (A). The rest of the table should have a fairly dense scattering of the usual mix of woods, patches of rough ground, hedges, fields, depressions, walls, etc. There should not be clear lines of sight down any of the edges of the table, and there should be sufficient cover for the attacking forces to enter from the yellow table edge without being shot to pieces (ideally perhaps about three terrain features on the table edge itself, which are out of line of sight from the defenders), and the attackers coming on should be required to move a fair way across the table before establishing a line of sight to the bridge. Before the game starts, both players agree on what exactly can be seen from the tops of the hills, which might overlook certain pieces of terrain.

The situation:

One army ("attackers") has rushed forwards, throwing its opposition ("defenders") into chaos. The broad strategic situation in the campaign is that the defenders are withdrawing, and the defending troops on the table have been given orders to withdraw. The attackers are intent on destroying as much of the defending army as possible before it escapes.

Forces:

Both sides have two companies of troops, one FOO for medium mortars, and a couple of MMGs. The attackers have three or possibly four light tanks/armoured cars, which represent the first AFVs on the scene, being the lighter, faster armoured parts of their army's spearhead. The attackers may also be given a light anti-tank gun, and a soft-skin vehicle to tow it. The defending army gets two heavy tanks, with armour almost impervious to the attackers' guns.

This scenario could be set in many times and places. In France 1940, the attackers would be Germans, with perhaps Panzer IIs and 38ts, and a 37mm ATG, while the French would have Char B's, or perhaps the defenders would be British with Matilda IIs. In 1944, the British might be defending with Churchill VIIs against German Panzer IIIs or the like. The Germans might defend with Tigers, while the allies attack with Stuarts. Ideally, only one of the attacking tanks should be able to pierce the defending tanks' front armour, and even then need a 6 on the PEN die, while the other attacking tanks should need to get flank/rear shots to stand a decent chance of a kill. An early war setting is good, because the heavy tanks of that period often had light guns, so that they are capable of dealing with light tanks, but a hit on one does not mean an automatic kill.

Deployment:

The defender deploys first. The defending tanks deploy from the hills to the river (red area); the defending infantry from the river to about 3/4 across the table (blue area). Hidden deployment is not used. The attacking player may deploy up to half his infantry in the features that touch his entry edge. The rest of his forces enter during the game from the end of the table furthest from river (yellow edge). The attacker takes the first initiative.

Victory conditions:

The defender gets 1 point per infantry base that withdraws off the bright green edge of the table or moves off the table at the yellow edge, plus 10 points for each tank that exits along the yellow edge. To win, the defender needs to score 75% of his starting points, so for example, if the defender has 30 infantry bases (rifle stands, FOOs, officers etc.) and two tanks, that would be 50 points-worth at the start of the game, so to win he would need to withdraw 38 points-worth of forces. This means that if one tank is lost, it is still possible for the defender to win, but only if he suffers very low losses amongst his infantry. Losing both tanks will lose the defender the game.

The big catch:

The bridge isn't strong enough for the defender's heavy tanks, and the river cannot be forded! To make this extra clear, you could use a model of a wooden footbridge, clearly useless for a heavy tank. So, the defending player has a tough decision. He could withdraw all his troops across the river and off the table fairly easily, but this would leave his two tanks unescorted, to make it across the table against everything the attackers have. Since the bridge is a bottle-neck for the retreating infantry, he has to decide how few troops he can get away with defending this bottleneck. He could leave the heavy tanks back on the hills, where they could slug it out with the enemy at range, but this would stop him from getting them off the table, which is his objective.

One must assume that elsewhere, off-table, is a place where heavy tanks can cross the river. The retreating tanks, once through the advance force of the enemy's light scouts, can then make for that on their own. Getting the tanks off the table, and giving them their chance to make for safety, is the responsibility of the local infantry commander, played by the defending/retreating player. Once he has seen the heavy tanks off the table, his job has been done, and the retreating player gets his victory points.

Meanwhile, the attacking player has a strong motive for not hanging about. He must get forward, and try to pin down as many enemy troops as possible, and stop the heavy tanks.

Withdrawing infantry rules:

The defending player is allowed to move one stand of soldiers off-table every initiative for free, or a full platoon with its officer at the cost of the initiative. This turns the retreating defenders into an effective counter of initiatives for the attacking player, telling him how long he has to get forward and get stuck in. Once off table, no forces may return.

Rules considerations:

The attacking infantry should be fairly useful in a close-range scrap against the tanks, but not so deadly at range. Anti-tank rifles will generally ping harmlessly off a heavy tank, but late-war Panzerfausts are a different matter. If you have late-war troops with good anti-tank weapons, these should be of limited use. Limiting their range to something very short is a good idea. The defender's troops needn't be good against tanks, and might even be ruled to be especially poor against them. For instance, a maximum of a single section/stand of rifles plus officer might be the maximum allowed against a tank in close combat, and the defender's troops might be -1 in close combat versus tanks, to represent a degree of tank-terror experienced by a losing army.

If players usually use rules that require rolls to be made to see if an AFV bogs down when it moves, these should either not be used, or should be very forgiving. It could spoil the scenario if the defender played very well, but ended up losing just because of an unlucky die roll for bogging.

Many players allow more than one move action per initiative for tanks, and some even allow them unlimited movement, much like infantry. For this scenario, tanks should not have unlimited movement, but rules allowing a small (perhaps one or two pivots maximum) number of move actions per initiative shouldn't spoil things. You don't want the defender to be able to rush both his tanks off in one initiative. In one initiative, the attacker would probably be able to get only one or two armour-piercing rounds off in reaction, and these would have a low chance of knocking anything out.

Counterattack

This scenario was originally written as Game#1 of World Crossfire Day. In that event, each game had knock-on consequences for games that came later, and the scoring system was designed to reflect the game's effect on the overall campaign. The victory conditions that appear here are an attempt to translate the scenario into a one-off game.

Situation

This scenario could of course be adapted for different fronts of the war, different year, and different nations involved, but as it appears here, the British are defending their new line against a German counter-attack. The British have had to fight hard to gain this ground and don't want to lose it. After their rush forward, they are spread a little thin.

Table set up

6' by 5' countryside. Usual mix of hills, depressions, woods, fields, fences, walls, crests, hedges etc. One depression to be situated roughly in the centre of the table. A Tiger tank is to be placed with its rear end sticking up out of the depression, and its front end down in the depression. The rear end should be closer to the German entry side. The two entry-ends of the table are 5' long. From the edge of its deployment area, the British side should have at least a couple of features from which it can see the depression with the Tiger in it, but there should be terrain making it impossible to deploy all along the front with LOS to the Tiger. Elsewhere on the table, are a few more wrecks (these are to make it less obvious to the British player that the Tiger is the objective). From the German entry end of the table to about two-fifths of the way across, the terrain should be such that any path from the Tiger to the edge must pass through terrain features or have at least three pivots in it. The most open area of the table should be a swathe containing the depression. This should not be completely open, of course.

Here is what the table looked like when the game was set up by John Moher in New Zealand:

On the right, in the corner just out of shot, there were some ruined buildings.

Game clock

At the end of every British initiative, roll 1d6. On a roll of 5+ the clock advances from 0600 by 10 minutes. This is only important if you are going to be very precise about deciding who won the game (see victory conditions, below).

British (defender) brief

Troops from another battalion of your regiment have taken your current position from the enemy in a surprise dawn attack. They suffered some casualties in the action, and have missed a night's sleep so have been withdrawn and your men have come forward to replace them and set up for the inevitable German counter-attack. You have not had time to dig in. Annoyingly, all the battalion's Vickers MMGs have been assigned to a different area, but you do have some carriers for MG support.

You may deploy hidden anywhere from your base line to one-third of the way into the table from there (a 5' x 2' area). Hold the line.

Starting forces:

All regular [victory point values in square brackets]:

• 2x 6pdr AT guns [VP 5 each] (with the German player's agreement, the stats of these could be altered from the official ones, perhaps to as much as +2 ACC +1 PEN, but a compromise is reasonable. The official -1/-1 is difficult to justify, so perhaps 0/0 is about right. 6 pdrs were very good AT guns, especially when they had the best ammunition, and compared well with Panther guns) The 6pdrs can be manhandled by a crew one base depth per initiative but may not be moved and fired this way in one initiative
• Two Lloyd carriers [VP 4 each], which can tow the 6pdrs.
• One company leg infantry, with CC (+2 for rallying, +1 close combat, all other officers +1 for everything). [CC 11; PC 4, rifle stand 4, 2"mortar 2]
• One sniper [3]
• Two universal carriers with MG [6 each].
• One mortar carrier [4]with 3" mortar and crew, with FOO [5] and 16FMs.

Reinforcements

In addition to these forces, you have a field telephone fixed at your Coy CO's deployment position and a runner with a jeep who can be sent off table to summon reinforcements. If you cannot use the 'phone or the jeep for some reason, your Coy CO can run off table himself. The 1d6 roll to summon reinforcements is 3+ on radio, 4+ with runner, 5+ in person (you are on foot and take longer). You cannot summon reinforcements until you have personally (the Coy CO's figure) sighted the enemy. The roll does risk the initiative.

N.B. summoning these reinforcements may mean that they will not be available for use elsewhere on the front, especially if you summon them and lose them! You do not have to summon all of them at once, but if you later require more, you must make the 1d6 roll again.

These enter from your end edge of the table, and since they must move to do so, cannot of course be hidden.

• One leg rifle company [VPs as above]
• One engineer section [VP 5]
• One 3" mortar carrier with crew and FOO [VPs as above].
• Two 6pdrs with Lloyd carriers [VPs as above]
• Two Sherman 75mm tanks [VP 12 each]
• One Daimler armoured car [VP5]

German (attacker) brief

You start with the initiative.

Your main objective is the recovery of the Tiger. Unfortunately for you, Tiger engines are very noisy, especially when starting up, and there is no chance that you will be able to recover the Tiger without all troops on the table's being able to hear the engine noises. Whether they put two and two together is another matter.

To recover the Tiger, you need to get your ARV next to it, and hook up and tow it out of the depression. If both vehicles are out of LOS to the enemy, then you need only roll 4+ on 1d6 (one roll per initiative max., failure does not lose the initiative – these conditions apply to all towing and repair rolls), but if there are British forces with small arms in LOS of either vehicle, then you will need to roll a 6 to hook up.

Once hooked up, you can in the following friendly initiative start to tow. A roll of 5+ on 1d6 means that the Tiger is towed out of the depression. Once on the flat, a roll of 3+ moves the Tiger one move action, or if in terrain, a roll of 5+ to move through terrain by the length of the Tiger and ARV models combined.

You have a crew for the Tiger in a lorry, with some fuel cans too. If you can get them to the Tiger, they can climb in and try to operate it. It is possible to climb in to the Tiger through front hatches that are in the depression such that only fire from the lip of the depression or a hill can be effective in stopping the crew from climbing in. Once in, on the following friendly initiative they can try to start the engine OR repair the turret traverse. The turret traverse motor can be fuelled and repaired on a 5+. If repaired, the turret turns as normal. If not, it turns a maximum 45 degrees per initiative, and has a reactive fire arc of 45 degrees in total, and suffers -1ACC to the first shot fired at any target. The Tiger has 3 AP shot and 8 HE shots left. The HE shots have a PEN of -1 in this scenario (a crew hit by a Tiger shell may bail out in panic before it realises that the shot didn't penetrate). The crew can instead try to repair the main engine by rolling 5+. If the main engine starts up, this is VERY noisy and the sound must be reported to the British. If the engine is repaired, all towing rolls gain +1 (it is impossible to get the gearbox working properly, and so the engine only gives a bonus to towing, and does not enable the Tiger to move independently).

The ARV Tiger also moves noisily and all moves by it (even those screened by smoke) must be reported to the British.

If you can get the Tiger off your base line, then you are free to withdraw your forces. If you can inflict casualties on the enemy, this is a bonus, but the mission should not be put in jeopardy by risky attempts to inflict casualties.

Forces

[Victory point values in square brackets - these are how much the enemy scores when you lose these forces]

• 1 Tiger ARV (armoured recovery vehicle, with no gun) [VP 20].
• 1 lorry with driver [2] and tank crew [6], plus fuel cans.
• 1 BC +2 [20].
• Two regular leg infantry companies [PC+2 8VP, PC+1 5, rifle stand 4] with no heavy weapons. Two bases armed with Panzerschreck [+2] (if you use separate bases for these, two bases [2 each]).
• 1 FOO for 81mm off-table mortar with 18 FMs [5](must specify before game start what proportion is smoke, and what is HE. If this FOO is killed, the BC can order a replacement be sent. To do this, he rolls 1d6 and on 5+ gets his replacement the following friendly initiative, and this roll DOES risk the initiative. If the BC is dead, tough).
• 1 MG Platoon with 1 +1PC [4], 2 MMG Squads (bases) [5 each].
• 2x Lorraine Schlepper SP PaK40 [10 each] (these are tracked turretless vehicles with decent 75mm guns, but light armour. You may of course use some rough equivalent.)

Tactical note

This scenario hinges on how quickly the defender realises that he has to advance from his cosy hidden positions. If he just sits tight, the Germans will have little trouble getting the Tiger off. But to advance against superior numbers, the British will almost certainly need reinforcements, but how many?

Victory conditions

The game ends when either the Tiger is destroyed or it exits the German edge of the table.

If the British can stop the Germans from recovering the Tiger without using any reinforcements, they score a decisive victory. If the Germans can recover the Tiger with little loss, they win. You could just discuss amongst yourselves who won and by how much at the game's end, but if you want an official-seeming way of calculating victory, then here goes, but don't say I didn't warn you:

Calculate the points for the prime-objective-winning side only. If the Tiger is recovered, the Germans are the winning side, if not: the British. The result of this calculation can be a negative score, in which case losses sustained and time taken etc. can turn the victory into a defeat.

• Tiger destroyed: 30 points to the British.
• Tiger recovered: 50 points to the Germans minus 3 per time increment that passed on the game clock.
• Add up all losses sustained and subtract from total, add up all losses inflicted, and add to total.
• British player adds up points value of all potential reinforcements that were never summoned, and scores one third of their VP value (if Germans won, subtract this from German score).

If the score of the objective-achieving side is positive, it has won the game. Degrees of victory are:

• > 100 points = crushing victory
• > 50 < 100 points = decisive victory
• > 25 < 50 points = victory
• > 0 < 25 points = Pyrrhic victory

RAID

In the centre of the board is a village. A road leads to the centre of the village. Either side of the road, at the table edge, is some good cover. As always, there's lots of terrain/cover all around. The objective is towards the edge of the village, so reasonably near the centre of the board, but on the far side of the village from the road. For me, the objective was a V2 rocket on its launch pad. I also had a couple of large ponds, which were impassable areas which didn't block line of sight, forcing a certain amount of circling movements which worked quite well.

The defender has one company of green troops, which he may place on the board anywhere he likes. There is an on-table mortar or two, and machine-gun positions. The attacker has two companies of veterans (perhaps paras), with off-table mortar support, and some infantry anti-tank weapons. He must get on the table and get some specialist troops next to the objective and leave them there for five of his phasing initiatives. He may come on the board from one or two positions of his choice (aerial photography has pin-pointed the position of the objective).

After an agreed number of initiatives, reinforcements arrive for the defender, coming along the road (vehicles) and alongside the road (infantry), having received an urgent request from the defenders. Die rolls should be involved for this, and the reinforcements should not all arrive at once. For instance, one might count a vehicle as one point and a platoon as one point. After, say, eight defender's initiatives, a die can be rolled, to see if any reinforcements arrive next initiative, with a five or six indicating a yes. Every defender's initiative thereafter, a die roll determines how many points arrive. I would suggest something like 1d6 - (1d6+1), so a third of the time, no reinforcements show up, and possibly anbsp;lot show up. We diced randomly for what kind of reinforcement turned up: infantry or vehicles, or infantry in vehicles. You may allow the defender to choose. You may set a limit on the number of reinforcements, but we found this to be unnecessary. Reinforcements may be regular, but not veteran.

In the five initiatives that the attacker spends next to the objective, his specialist troops may photograph the technological marvel, or find the blueprints in the office, or find all the bits to the enigma machine, or destroy the mechanism which works the cable car, or plant the dead body with the fake plans on it, or set the charges on the pipeline junction, or break open the safe with the prototype device in it, or brief the double agent, or bury the homing beacon, or paint "Hitler has only got one ball" all over the staff HQ or do whatever it was which they had come to do. Once done, they get a major victory if they can get off table with most of their force.

Other things to spice up this scenario are: all units next to the objective are killed after a certain time (the charges go off, the rocket launches); (some of) the specialist unit(s) must get away after spending five initiatives next to the objective. I played the scenario with several units having been trained to do the main task. If only one squad could carry out the objective, this would make the scenario very brittle for the attacking player.

Perhaps the main choice for the attacker is whether to come on near the road or not. In playtest, attackers who came on the far side from the road, to concentrate on getting to the objective quickly with as many troops as possible, then found that they had no way of stopping the reinforcements from getting on the table, whereas the advantages of defence (not having to move, getting reactive fire; protected machine guns) were such that it could take even veterans a lot of time time to get on to the table and to the objective, if not substantially out-numbering the defenders.

River Crossing

This a sort of mini Market Garden-type scenario.

The board is rectangular. Across the centre width-ways, is a canal or straight section of river, dividing the table into two squarish halves. In the centre of the board is a bridge crossing the water.

As with near enough any Crossfire game, there should be plenty of cover. I had lots of buildings on both sides of the river, pillboxes protecting the bridge, and a fair amount of wire and anti-tank obstacles, as well as the usual scattering of woods, fields, walls, hills, and rough ground. The wire and obstacles should be mainly on the attacker's home side of the table. The bridge and road are assumed to be used by the defending side, so may not be blocked solid with obstacles or mines.

The defender has regular troops. He has two or three companies of these, depending on the strength of his vehicles. He may deploy BOTH sides of the water, and half his forces may be hidden. He has some decent anti-tank guns, which may be deployed hidden. He also has a number of other vehicles (SPGs, armoured cars, prime movers etc.) which are on the home side of the river. Ideally, these vehicles should not be turreted tanks. On the home side of the river, are the defender's mortars, on table. FOs may all be hidden.

Since the defending forces are not expecting the attack, they have not got front-line vehicles such as heavy tanks, but do have defensive tank-killing equipment. Also, the bridge has not been prepared for demolition.

The attacker has two companies of veteran troops (paras would be especially suitable), with no vehicles and few support weapons (one mortar per company max., one HEAT weapon per platoon max.) which may come on from one or two (no more) places (perhaps one-foot sections, or defined by one or two terrain features) on the edge of the defender's home side of the water. The attacker may find that simply getting all his forces on the board at this end of the table proves difficult (remember: the defender may have placed units (perhaps hidden) within sight of the edge of the board where the attackers are trying to come on). At first it may seem impossible, but I find that eventually a breakthrough is made and the troops rush on, though early casualties may be high.

The attacker also has a company of regulars and a few light vehicles (scout cars, light tanks), and a significant number of decently heavy tanks (I was using Churchills). These may come on to the board from the end edge of the attacker's home side. This edge should have a road leading from it to the bridge, preferably not straight, and perhaps with walls lining some of it. The heavy tanks arrive on the road, but may leave it once on the board. If there are many sections of wire and the like (you could add mines, but I did without them), then the attacker should also have some engineers with his regulars.

The attacker must get as many of his heavy tanks across the board as he can. The more of his tanks he gets across, the greater his victory. However, if he uses his tanks to smash through to the bridge, then he risks losing some of them, and thus risks failure or a lesser victory. If he keeps his tanks back too long, then the unsupported paras the far end of the table may start to take too much of a beating, especially as the defender can reinforce that end of the table from the other. The one company of regulars must locate all the threats as far as the bridge as quickly as possible, but if all the initiative is used up in this endeavour, then the paras may take a beating.

It is assumed that the commander of the paras has a flare pistol with a couple of different flare colours as ammo. With this he can signal "Far end of bridge secure - advance tanks now" and one other pre-arranged message, which his player must decide on before the game start.

Here we see a table set up for the playing of this game. For a lark, on this occasion I used a very long narrow table. In this play-through, the paras at the near end of the table got a thorough beating, and the advancing column of tanks (Shermans this time) had a tough time advancing against the panzerfausts of the defenders. We played that the field either side of the roads were boggy and liable to cause tanks to get stuck. We used my house rules in which tanks get more than one move action, and panzerfausts have very short range, and this gave what I considered to be very realistic results. The Germans couldn't stop a whole column of armour, but they made the tanks and their escorting infantry fight for every yard.

For the Novice Player

I have tried this very simple scenario with two novice players. I acted as umpire, though two novice players could try this on their own without one.

The board has outrageously large amounts of terrain on it: more fields and woods than you could shake a stick at, a village, and a factory complex (the objective) about a third of the way into the board from the defender's end.

The defender has one company of regulars to be deployed on the table, plus one on-table mortar, one burned out wreck of a Elephant (but attacker shouldn't be told that it is burned out, and so may treat it with unwarranted respect), and one dug in anti-tank gun. None of these may be deployed within line-of-sight of the attacker's end of the table, nor even within line-of-sight of a terrain piece from which that end of the table may be seen. In other words, the attacker has at least two layers of terrain to act as cover for his entry.

After four of his initiatives, the defender rolls at the start of every initiative for his reinforcements, which arrive on a roll of 6. These are a second company of regulars, perhaps in half-tracks, and another gun (towed).

The attacker has two companies of veterans, with two mortars for indirect support, and two armoured cars. He can bring these on all at once, along one table end. The entry-end of the table for the attackers, is entirely out of line-of-sight of the defenders, and has enough cover for a regiment.

My thinking is this: attacking in Crossfire is difficult for a beginner (I know, I was rubbish at it when I  started). In this scenario, the attacker has at first over twice as many troops as his enemy, and these can all come on at once safely, and he has four initiatives to use them at the very least, before the reinforcements turn up. He has two bullet-proof vehicles to help him, and all his troops are veteran, so shouldn't mind being pinned much, and should win close combats.

For extra simplicity of rules understanding, you could leave out the vehicles entirely. The novice player who understands the rules, but hasn't developed good tactics yet, may like to have a couple of vehicles to help him along. If you have armoured vehicles, give the defending troops some portable anti-tank weapons, such as panzerfausts.

You may be interested to know that some players get so good at attacking, that they find themselves having to make things easier for the defender.

Small Scenario: StuG Smuggling

I played this scenario four times in one evening, and not in any particular rush. The rules were not far from as published.

Situation

The Germans have sent some men behind enemy lines at night to recover an immobilised StuG III. They have repaired the tracks of the vehicle, and poured enough fuel into it to get it back to friendly lines. The idea was to achieve this by night, but the plan has gone wrong. The Germans took too long to find the StuG in the darkness, and the delay has meant that now dawn has come, and it will be impossible to get back by stealth or speed alone.

The German player has to get his vehicle from one end of the table to the other. The forces I used were German and British, but you could change this to any nationality mix.

Terrain

You could play this scenario on pretty much any terrain, so long as it were fairly dense, as needed in all Crossfire games. I shall say what I used.

The table is rectangular. In the green areas of the map, it has a dense mix of fields, hills, rough ground, quite a lot of hedges, walls etc. A road cuts the table in two widthways, but has a few barricades for cover along it. Area A is suggested as a place for a village - a few buildings either side of the road. The barricades are substantial piles of rubble and timber, and have been placed deliberately to defend this village. They also prevent a continuous belt without cover across the table. Another road runs down one long edge. On this, at B is a 6 pdr AT gun behind a barricade, looking down the road. As shown, this assumes that the Germans are coming on from table end C. To reset the game to play the other way around, all you have to do is move the 6 pdr to point the other way. The road down which the AT gun looks is lined for most of its length with hedges.

Defending force:

Deploys first, anywhere on table except in features within LOS of one specified end of the table, where the enemy will enter. No hidden deployment.

One CC (+1), Three platoons (regulars) each 1 PC (+1) and three rifle stands, one 2" mortar (fires direct), 1 6pdr (stats +1 ACC +1 PEN, unlike published rules) which is always deployed behind a barricade looking down the long road from the T-junction. The first two times we played, the defenders (Brits) had a PIAT as well, but we felt this unbalanced the game and removed it.

Attacking force:

Has just sneaked into enemy-held territory and recovered a StuG III, and now has to get this valuable vehicle off the far table end. Starts with initiative, enter from one table end.

1 CC (+2), Two platoons (veterans) each 3 rifle stands and 1 PC(+1), one StuG III.

Rules

Rules as published except StuG III moves and pivots as one action, and has two actions per initiative (may move then move, fire then move, or move then fire). Does 4d6 vs. troops regardless of ordinary cover. Nearest suppressed enemy troops not compulsory target priority. Fire arc 45 degrees total. Troops within base distance of it count as "escorting" and may participate in close combats.

Rules for moving through obstacles on board:

First, roll 1d6 to see if the vehicle makes it through the obstacle. Succeed on 4+ for major obstacle (hedge, barricade etc.), 3+ for lesser obstacle (walls etc.), and 2+ for minor (fences etc.).

If the first roll fails, roll again at the same chance as above. If the second roll succeeds, then it is established as possible to cross the obstacle at that point, but that for some reason the StuG didn't manage it this initiative. You may try again next initiative. If the second roll fails, then it is established that the crew has spotted that for some reason the way immediately ahead of the vehicle is blocked there. The German player may try again to pass the same terrain feature, but not where he tried before.

If the second roll fails, then there is a third roll to see if the vehicle gets stuck while trying to crash through the impassable obstacle. If the roll succeeds, then the vehicle is not stuck. If it fails, it gets stuck and the initiative is lost (=1/8 chance of a bog in a hedge). In a later initiative, the German player may try to get the vehicle going again. He must then roll 5+ to succeed, risking the initiative.

The three categorisations of obstacle leave the players free to agree on what counts as a difficult obstacle. In the four games I played, the Stug never ventured into areas of terrain feature such as fields and the like, because that was just asking to be close-assaulted and blown up, but there were plenty of linear obstacles that were near-impossible to avoid. If you have set the same scenario in the snows of Finland or the deserts of Tunisia, then you will have to agree on what is a major, lesser, or minor obstacle. I don't want to write scenarios that are very specific about terrain, because that makes them far more difficult for other people to stage, and very often the details of terrain are not what make a scenario work. I rely on the common sense of those playing.

Victory

The game ends immediately if the StuG is destroyed or if it leaves the table.

If the StuG III makes it off the far end of the table, it is a German victory. All German infantry are expendable.

If the StuG is destroyed, count the British surviving rifle stands and add the ATG if it too has survived. If the total is five or more, the British have won, otherwise it is a draw.

That's it - a very small simple scenario, but one that remained interesting for four quick games. I played Brits first and then my opponent played Brits, then we swapped table ends and each played each role again.

Results of playtests

1. Victory for Brits. Deployed two platoons forward and one back. Managed to outflank one German platoon and beat it in close combat, then close assaulted the tank with reserve platoon.
2. Victory for Brits. Germans punched a hole in the British line, and for a moment looked as though they would rush through, close combat the 6pdr crew, and then speed through with the StuG. However, the 2-action limit meant that the StuG couldn't keep up. A sneaky Brit PIAT team popped up behind a hedge and rolled a six to hit twice on the trot (first phasing, second reactive) - bang!
3. Victory for Brits. Coming on from the opposite end of the table, the German player chose to be bold and sent the StuG ahead to blast through the defenders. It blasted one stand, then got bogged on a hedge. A well-placed smoke mission isolated its escort, and the StuG was close assaulted from one flank. Bang.
4. German victory. One platoon deployed covering a central open area, which then became a problem for the defender wanting to counter-attack. The StuG and close escort went up the right hand (non road) edge, and with main gunblasts and use of vehicle for cover managed to defeat the defenders opposite, and then the German escort platoon went on a wild round-table whizz, attacking isolated British units, seeing to the 6pdr and Coy HQ. A gallant but desperate counterattack was seen off, and the StuG sped to safety.

Needless to say, both times the StuG first tried to crash through a hedge (games 3 and 4), it got bogged.

We played in 25mm scale, which perhaps suits small scenarios particularly well.

It was always tempting to throw caution to the wind and just charge the 6pdr, but this would have been a very short game, and at +1/+1 for the 6pdr, the odds weren't good. Once the PIAT was removed, the only option for the defender was close assault. A StuG III was picked because the problems of a turretless vehicle are far greater in this situation than a turreted one. Possibly it should have been allowed more actions per initiative.

Update, May 2016:
Steven Thomas put an account of two play-throughs of this scenario on his site Steven's Balagan. He reported that it was possible for the defender to counter-attack early in the game, and confine the Germans to a small area of the table, using superior numbers, and suggested hidden defenders and fewer defenders. I would counsel against this change, because a nice thing about this scenario is that it is simple and quick, and hidden defence makes a game much slower and longer. Also, I should add that if you do add hidden defence, then you must also impose a definite time-limit for the German player. The hidden deployment rules for Crossfire work only in the context of the attacker's being in a hurry. The 'moving clock' rule from Hit the Dirt serves this need well. I would also counsel against the defender's being very aggressive early on. Of course, this could work, especially if the German player deploys badly, but assuming he does not, then having to attack against a StuG and two platoons makes it quite likely that an attack will falter and give the Germans an opportunity to get away. Giving the StuG more than two actions per initiative will make this approach by the defenders particularly risky. Of the nine playtests reported in detail on-line, eight have been won by the defending British. In view of this, I have changed the quality of the Germans from regular to veteran. I have also changed the British victory conditions. Originally, all infantry on both sides were expendable, and the only thing that mattered was the StuG.

The woods are full of them

This is a scenario with surprises in it for both players. Do not use this scenario if your players do not like nasty surprises, or if they get a bit discouraged when things look desperate.

One side attacks, the other defends. I used British paratroopers as attackers, and German leg infantry as defenders. The British had one battalion, with three companies of veterans, and the Germans defended with one battalion of leg infantry: two companies of regulars and one of green troops. Each British platoon had a PIAT, and the German infantry all had panzerfausts, and a few panzerschrecks, not that they had much to shoot these at. I gave the paratroopers one Tetrarch glider tank.

The table is square, and has a lot of woods, densely packed in the centre, and an even scatter of rural scenery all around. One nice idea which seems to work, but is far from necessary, is to count the entire edge of the table as a crest line, so all troops coming onto the board do so by coming over a crest, which gives some rationale for why the edge of the table is the edge of the world.

If you are using an umpire, brief both players separately. Otherwise, just tell your opponent his brief, and keep yours a secret. If this seems unfair to him, tell him that life is unfair.

The German player may be happy to learn that in addition to his three companies on the board, he has LOTS of AFVs. I used 3 Jagdpanthers, a Panther, a Tiger, a Marder III, a Hetzer, two Pz IVs, a PZIII, an Elephant, two StuG IIIs and a JagdPzIV. Note that the majority of these is turretless. You need a fair number of biggish vehicles. Use whatever you have the models for. These, he deploys on a map of the table, direction of facing to be decided by the umpire or randomly. He is the infantry commander. The panzer commander is up the road, off table. His orders are to guard the wood. The AFVs have been parked there as a precaution against air-attacks, and everyone is feeling fairly low-spirited, as it has been raining all night. This is a vehicle "harbour", and the panzer troops have already decided on an alternative harbour, which acts as a rendezvous point, off table, should this harbour be overrun. Victory will go to the defender if he can get his AFVs off table, in any direction. To lose the AFVs is to lose the game. The infantry are expendable.

The defending Germans will probably deploy around the wood, and should be told to expect attack from any direction.

The Brit attack comes on the board from a side determined by a die roll. When the attacking troops enter a section of woodland, they will see all the AFVs within it. They will also get to see any vehicles in a section of woodland, if they are in LOS of it, and the defending player tries to start the engine up. The likelihood is that the defender will try to start as many of the AFVs as he can, all at once. It is therefore likely that the attacker will get something of a shock when he discovers so many AFVs in the woods. If he contacts his commander, he will be given orders to enter the woods and overrun the vehicle harbour. All going well, the attacker will rise to the challenge, and his men will win many medals. The attacker wins if the majority of the tanks is destroyed.

So much for the big shock for the attacker. The defender has a big shock and a lesser shock coming.

When the German player tries to start up an AFV and move it, he must make a roll. World War Two tanks, which have seen a lot of action, don't start as easily as modern cars, especially when they've been badly parked in the dark, in woods, which have since turned into a quagmire of mud.

To get a vehicle unbogged, two hits on two dice are needed (55,56,65,or 66 on 2d6 = 4/36 or 1/9 chance). The first time the defender tries to start up a vehicle and move it, he does not lose the initiative if he fails. Once it has been established that a vehicle is bogged (first roll failed), this changes. If the battalion commander or company commander co-ordinates things, a group of tanks in LOS of him can roll to unbog as a single action. If no AFV is unbogged, initiative is lost. If one AFV is used to tow another, 3d6 is rolled, and 4d6 is rolled if two vehicles are towing. Panzer crewmen need not be represented on table. One has to imagine that these are running around and trying their best. A roll of double-one bogs a vehicle permanently. If a vehicle that has escaped the wood goes back into a wood for some reason, it gets bogged down on a roll of 1 or 2 per move action.

In playtest, the German player did not think of using tanks to tow out other tanks. He should have, especially since he used to be a tank crewman himself, in Challengers and Chieftains*.

Now for the second shock for the defender (and a pleasant surprise for the attacker). When the game is set up, give an alarm clock to someone else, and tell him to set it to any time between an hour after the start of the game, and two hours after that (naturally, you be the judge of how long you think the game will last - you don't want the alarm going off before the game has really got going, nor after the game has come to a conclusion), and not to tell you what time they chose. When it goes off, this is when two Typhoon ground attack 'planes whiz overhead, to let lose at any tanks they can see. All forces in woods are hidden from the air. Any tank visible from the air will get eight rockets fired at it by the first Typhoon, and, if it is solitary and survives, eight from the next. These rockets were 4" things, and the whole lot being fired was equivalent to a broadside from a cruiser. Against soft vehicles they were devastating. Against AFVs they had little effect unless they scored a direct hit, in which case the vehicle generally bought it. Roll a die, on a 5 or 6, the vehicle is destroyed. If no tanks are visible, roll to see if any troops can be spotted and identified. On a 4+, some Germans visible from the air will be strafed with gunfire: roll four dice, regardless of cover. Repeat for the second aircraft. If a 1 is rolled for the observation, an attacking stand of friendly troops is misidentified and strafed.

I ruled that a PIAT got +1 ACC if in the same section of woods as the target, that bogged vehicles were -2 in close combat, and that PIATs hit on 2+ at close combat range. Really, the bogged vehicles were just objectives, not designed to be part of the fight.

This scenario was designed as an excuse to put lots of pretty models on the table, as a way of giving the players some amusing shocks, and as a challenge, especially for the German player: should he try to unbog tanks now, or concentrate on pinning those paras? Should he use his tanks to fight, risking them in action, in woods against veterans with gammon bombs, or just get them off the table double-quick? Will he think to use officers to organise the unbogging, and free vehicles to tow?

*He told me an interesting thing about Challenger IIs: that the turret shape is unknown to him. What you see when you look at the turret of the tank is thin metal sheeting which bends when you stand on it. He and his crew were not allow to drill holes in it, for the attachment of bins and kit, and if any hole or crack appeared, they had to summon a special team of people who would come and seal the gaps up. Very few people know what is under there.

Chess Clock Scenarios

Crossfire suits the use of chess clocks pretty well, and here are two scenario suggestions that use chess clocks. For the unfamiliar, a chess clock is used in serious chess competitions. Each player is given an amount of thinking time, and this is set onto his clock. When the game starts, the clock of the player whose turn it is, is started. When he makes his move, he presses a button on the top of his clock, and this stops his clock and starts his opponent's clock. If one player can check-mate his opponent before he runs out of time, he wins. Otherwise, the first player to run out of time loses. A typical chess clock has two clocks mounted in a single unit with a rocker-switch on the top. Some modern ones are digital, but most are clockwork analogue. I bought mine on E-bay.

In Crossfire, a player has the initiative, and he may stand and stare at the table for some while before deciding what to do, and there's nothing his opponent can do to hurry him up. All the opponent can do is react. However, in the reality of a battle, if the side with the initiative has commanders that dither, then it will lose the initiative. To put pressure on commanders with the initiative to act quickly, and to make the game a bit more tense, a chess clock can be used. It ticks away during your initiative, and when you lose the initiative, you press your button and your opponent's time starts ebbing away.

One potential snag with this is that an opponent might deliberately take an age over rolling dice for reactive fire ("Oh sorry, I appear to have rolled them off the table edge again " etc.) in order to eat up his opponent's valuable time. In the games I have played so far, I have been lucky never to come across someone so unsporting and haven't had to do anything about it. If you find that the people you play against are capable of sinking this low, then you will have to insist that to qualify for a reactive fire action, a player has to declare it and press the button, so that he does it in his own time.

I had thought, before trying the clock, that a good way to balance the game would be to give the less able player more time on the clock. However, good players tend to keep the initiative better, and so have longer initiatives, and I found that this proved to be self-balancing, so an equal amount of time on the clock is about right regardless of relative abilities.

Scenario One — WILL THE CAVALRY BE IN TIME?

One side (X) has regulars, and the other (Y) has green troops, with veteran reinforcements. The exact forces are up to you. The forces should be such that the greens and veterans combined are definitely more than a match for the regulars, but the regulars should have something like numerical parity with the greens. The veteran force should be the smallest of the three. I suggest 45 minutes for X and 90 minutes for Y to be set on the clock.

This can be run as a meeting engagement, or as an attacker/defender, with either side being the attacker. The front should be fairly central on the table. An attacker will start with the initiative, otherwise you could just pick the first player with a die roll. Troops should NOT be deployed hidden.

When X's flag falls for the first time, X immediately gets another 45 minutes, for no penalty. However, from this point onwards in the game, at the start of every initiative for Y, Y rolls a die, and gets some sub-part of his reinforcements arriving if he rolls a 5+. The reinforcements arrive in dribs and drabs, perhaps one platoon at a time, or one tank troop, or one support weapon.

This means that X has 45 minutes to get as much done as possible, making the entry for reinforcements difficult, and to destroy as many green troops as he can.

After this point, every time a flag falls, for either player, all his troops drop one morale rating. Veterans become regulars, regulars become green, and green run away. As time drags on in a battle, a feeling of hopelessness and loss of faith in officers sets in among the men, and troops become less and less keen to carry on.

Each time a flag falls, a player gets another 20 minutes added to his clock (I used 20, you might prefer 30). This means that the regulars will fight on for a bit more, and the veterans for a bit longer still.

So, will Y's veterans arrive to find the situation already hopeless, or will his greens put up a good enough fight so that when the vets arrive the two forces combined can roll over X's crumbling force?

Scenario Two — THREE WAVE ATTACK

One side defends with hidden troops, the other attacks with three waves.

The defender has two under-strength (two sections per platoon) companies hidden, one FOO with medium mortar (and if you want, an anti-tank gun and a few not very powerful tanks), and 100 minutes on the clock. The attacker has three full-strength companies of troops, each with a FOO with medium mortars, and a MMG/HMG stand (and if you want some tanks, superior in number and in some cases quality to the defender's tanks, but in one or two units, therefore not enough for every attacking wave to have tank support), and 40 minutes on the clock. All troops on both sides are regular.

The table should be large (perhaps six by eight) so that the defenders have to spread thinly. In one corner of the table, there should be some objective, like a village. In the opposite corner, the attacker enters (draw a line between the centre of one end to the centre of one side, and the attacker must deploy behind that). The defender deploys anywhere outside the attacker's deployment zone.

The attacker starts with the initiative. He brings on his first wave. He advances with this, and tries to take the objective. When his 40 minutes are up, his first wave runs out of steam and digs in. The troops are all marked with little markers denoting that they can not advance. They can, however, still shoot. When the first wave has dug in, the second wave comes on and gets another 40 minutes, then the third wave another 40.

When the defender runs out of time, his troops change from regular to green. This happens to the attacker when his flag falls (clock runs out of time) for the third wave. If the game has not concluded by this point, more time can be given to the players, but the next time they run out of time, their troops give up and withdraw.

In this scenario, the attacker has forces which, if he could use them all at once, would easily overwhelm the opposition, but this is balanced by the fact that he doesn't get to use them all to their full ability for the whole game. He is up against hidden defenders, which will make him cautious, but he is also up against the clock. He might sacrifice a lot of his first wave in trying to find the opposition.

Scenario Three – BREAK THROUGH THE FRONT

This scenario has an easy-to-define line across the middle of the table, such as a fordable river. The defender deploys hidden. It is imagined that he is defending a long front, which is being attacked for some distance, only part of which is seen on the table. The high commands of both sides will send reinforcements to the table if the front is penetrated there. I played this scenario with two companies with mortar and MMG support defending, with three dug-in anti-tank guns, and one Stug III self-propelled gun. The attacker had two companies plus MMG and mortar support, and three Churchill infantry tanks. You can of course make up your own forces, but the attacker should have enough to break through, but not so much that he can ever afford to be reckless.

The clock is set for about 40 minutes a side, although you may choose to favour the attacker, who has the more difficult and time-consuming task (such as 45 minutes for the attacker and 30 to the defender). The first clock to run out grants a boon to the opposite side. The boon I used was the arrival of a bonus FOO who could call down several powerful stonks of heavy artillery. The rationale for this could be that whichever side dithers more may give the other time to set up and zero in his big guns.

The clock could at this point simply stop, but an alternative is that it is reset for perhaps around twenty minutes each, and some other boon is granted to the winner of this time race, unless the front line is penetrated by the required force. If a player runs out of time before the front is breached, again his foe gets a boon, which could be that some or all of his remaining troops gain confidence and are upgraded by one morale class.

If the front is breached, the clock is reset. In my game, the conditions for defining a breach were simply getting a tank across the river. In the game I played it would have been easy to get a tank across the river, but not with enough infantry escort to keep it reasonably safe. If and when this time comes, the clock is set for each side to have the same amount of time, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. If either player runs out of time, his opponent gets his reinforcements. In my game, the British got a troop of Shermans (cavalry breakthrough tanks) and the German defender got a troop of Panzer IVs. The rationale for this was that British high command was waiting for a unit to punch through the front line somewhere along the front, and it would send tanks to wherever a breakthrough was reported. Similarly German high command was holding back a "fire brigade" reserve to be rushed to any part of the line where the enemy broke through with tanks. If both players play with the same skill and speed, then the likelihood is that whichever player gets his reinforcements first, he is unlikely to get to make use of them for long before his opposition gets his reinforcements. To make this important and exciting, the reinforcements should be something like a troop of decent tanks – a force which, if unchecked, is capable of wreaking havoc.

Three bunkers on a road

This scenario was written for World Crossfire Day and at the time of writing this page has been played twice. In World Crossfire Day victory was very decisive and was achieved by the defenders, with all the tanks in the column making it across the table, and the second game was a decisive victory to the attackers, with none of the tanks making it across.

Overall situation:

It is 1944 and the Germans are on the retreat. Allied forces are pressing forwards and hoping to encircle pockets of the enemy and force surrenders on a large scale. The Germans, though being forced back, are still resisting well, and have not collapsed. The allies must advance quickly if they are to catch large numbers of Germans before they can retreat and regroup. Time is pressing for both sides.

Table set up:

The usual mix of terrain for the countryside: fields, hills, woods, fences, walls, hedges etc. A road runs lengthways down the middle of the table (but not in a straight line, there must be at least three swerves in the road) from the allied (west) end to the German (east) end. In positions covering the road are three fortifications suitable for emplacing AT guns (with space in each for one stand of infantry if desired). The German defender player places these wherever he wants, covering the road. Their function is to deny the road to the enemy. He must place at least one in his home third of the board, and at least one in the centre third of the board. The road is placed first, then the fortifications, then the rest of the terrain (terrain such as hills and rough ground may be placed under the fortifications), with enough to cover about a third of the table. Players place these alternating, starting with the attacker, but neither player may place sight-blocking terrain features between the road and a fortification such that the AT gun in it can no longer see the road.

After all other terrain features have been placed, a terrain feature (perhaps a building) is designated in secret by the German player as a mine store. This goes where he chooses in the central half of the table (i.e. not in the western or eastern quarters of the table). The mines will only be discovered by British troops if they are in the feature when there are no Germans there. There is no need to tell the British player that mines can be laid during the game. He'll have to think of that himself.

British brief:

You have advanced at great speed as part of the operation to encircle the Germans. Your objective is to clear and hold the road ahead. Intelligence reports say that there are fortified points along this road, and these could be a menace to any columns we try to send forward in this area. We don't know exactly where they are on the map, but freed slave labourers have told of working on them. Proceed east along the road until you come to a fortification. As soon as you take a fortification, radio in and report its location so we can add it to our maps.

You have in your command:

• 1 x BC (+1) with radio team (regular)
• 2 x HMG (regular)
• 2 x FO for off table 81mm Mortar (12 FM each)
• 1 x Assault Engineer Platoon (veteran)
• +1 PC, 3 x Assault Engineer Rifle Squads, one with PIAT.

Note: These chaps get a +2 in Close Combat: +1 for being assault engineers and +1 for being veteran. They can remove minefields.

• 2 x Rifle Companies (regular)
• 1 x CC (+1) with radio operator.
• 1 x on-table 50mm Mortar (8 FM)
• 3 x Rifle Platoons: PC (+1), 3 x Rifle

Your forces enter the table from the western edge. You start with the initiative.

German brief:

Hold the road. German forces west of you are in retreat and need this road to be clear of enemy. Do not block the road until you sight allied armoured vehicles, at which point feel free to destroy any that you can see. You have no BC - he's away at a staff training day. You may deploy hidden.

Forces:

• 1 SMG Squad
• 3 x HMG
• 2 x FO for off-table 81 mm Mortar (24 FM total - from common pool of ammo)
• 1 Infantry Company
• 1 x CC (+2)
• 2 x HMG
• 1 x Rifle Platoon: PC (+2); 3 x Rifle, all with early panzerfaust
• 3 x Rifle Platoons: PC (+1); 3 x Rifle, all with early panzerfaust
• 3x Pak 40 AT guns, in the three bunkers. These are equipped with a plentiful supply of AP shells, but only enough HE shells each for two shots in the game.

Mine laying:

One German rifle stand can carry enough mines for one field. The Germans can lay mines across the road or anywhere else they want, by carrying them there and rolling 1d6 once per initiative. They have been trained for this. On a 5+ the job is done. The roll does not risk the initiative. The British player needn't be told why the German player is making a roll, but seeing that the German player keeps making rolls, he will guess that something is afoot. The British, being less familiar with the mines and not ready for the task, need to roll a 6, except the engineers who also need a 5+. There German player may lay a maximum of three minefields. These mines will be easy to see and clear, because they will not be well concealed or dug in properly (only attack engineers on a 1, other troops 4+), but they would be as effective as usual against fast-moving vehicles trying to escape.

Clock:

The game starts at 1215, at the end of every allied initiative, 1d6 is rolled and the clock advances five minutes on a result of 4+.

At 1315 the allied player receives this radio message (unless he has lost all his radio operators):

"German armoured column spotted heading east along the road towards you. Must be some stragglers that we didn't know about. Can you do anything to stop it? Have you captured any anti-tank weapons? ETA 10-20 minutes."

At 1330 the situation suddenly changes.

1330: Convoy

At 1330 a great rumbling of tracks and engines is heard, and a German armoured column enters from the west end of the table on the road. In the column there are: 2x Pz III, 3x Pz IV, 2x Stug IIIs, 1x Tiger (or some rough equivalent of this, depending on the figures you have).

The German player controls these vehicles, but he is very limited in what he can do with them. The road is good going, but off-road the ground is treacherous. Every linear move action (not pivots) taken off road requires a 1d6 roll and if the result is a 1 the vehicle is bogged, and there are no ARVs to recover them.

The top priority for the vehicles is to escape. Victory in the game is measured by how many of these AFVs can exit the east edge of the table.

The main reaction to an encounter with the enemy is to put the foot down and race away. The vehicles enter the table unaware of the presence of British troops in the area, and moving at top speed. They will stay on the road until encountering a very good reason not to. A vehicle may only shoot at enemy forces who are blocking its way or who have fired at it. Unless German troops move to contact with a vehicle to tell the crew about a mine field, the tanks will never see a mine field until they drive into it.

Using captured weapons

There is no need to tell the attacker that he can crew ATGs - better to wait for him to ask. If the British player specifies that he is destroying the AT guns, let him! Normally an ATG is taken out of a game by combat with its crew. An ATG can be destroyed by troops in base-to-base contact with it, if they wish. However, do NOT entrap the British player, however, by asking him if he is destroying the guns. It is for him to come up with this mistake on his own.

For every German infantry rifle stand killed, the British can get ONE shot with a panzerfaust. This simulates the chance that someone picked some up and knew enough about how to use them to give it a go. The normal stats for a Pak 40 are +1 +1 4d6/2SQ HE, but with allied replacement crews the stats reduce to +0 +0 3d6/1SQ HE to simulate the crews unfamiliarity with the weapons and the art of placing a shot for maximum effect.

Victory

The game ends when the fate of the German armoured column has been decided. Each will either exit the eastern edge of the table or be destroyed/bogged. Count up the AFVs that exit the eastern edge of the table and give these points to the German player. The points for the rest of the AFVs go to the British player.

• Tiger (or equivalent heavy tank): 2 victory points.
• Other tank/AFV: 1 victory point.

More points can be scored by either side by being in control of the following assets:

• Mine store: 1 victory point (if the British player never found the mines, the point goes to the Germans).
• ATG fort: 2 victory points.

British casualties are not totally irrelevant. Some troops are rare and vital for tomorrow's action.

• Veteran assault engineer rifle stand: 1 victory point (if killed, point goes to the Germans, if living, to the British).

Map

Above is an example map, as used in the second playing of this game. The road swerves three times as you see, and in this example the defending player has placed all three ATG bunkers where they can look down the length of a section of road from one curve. The attacker has placed quite a bit of terrain to enable him to get on from his entry edge without being shot to bits, and he added the three woods in the insides of all three road curves. The defender put his rearmost ATG on top of a hill, where it can see over the field in front of it to the road. The mine store was the ruin (rough ground) towards the bottom of the map. Ploughed fields (out of season fields - do not block sight) and fences (a move action to cross, otherwise have no effect) have little effect and were added partly for decoration, but also to deny areas of the board to the other terrain-placing player. Only after I drew this graphic did I notice that I should have drawn it the other way up, because the attacker should enter from the west.

The Scenario Designs of World Crossfire Day

This page is about the scenario designs for World Crossfire Day, but the ideas in it might be applied to all manner of wargame scenario designs, especially those set in conflicts like World War Two.

I have played in role play games since I was eleven years old, and have a bit of a role player mentality when creating scenarios, and I also design games as a hobby, and so like to come up with scenarios that present new problems to the players. However, when you present a puzzle to a wargamer, he may not recognise it for what it is, especially if it is presented to him in a role-player sort of a way. Some players may have found my skulduggery annoying and unfair, and to them I apologise. I know that not everyone shares my way of thinking.

Game #1 (Counterattack): The defender got to deploy hidden. Hidden deployment is a great advantage in CF. However, there was a stranded Tiger in front of, not behind, his lines. At the game's start he had no reason to believe that the Tiger was his enemy's objective. It was just one of a few wrecks on the table. The thing he had to realise was that to win the game he would have to give up his hidden positions and advance. He was given insufficient forces that started on-table to advance against the Germans, but he was told that he could call on off-table reinforcements, but his brief reminded him that these reinforcements, if not used by him, could fight in other games (they did). The British player chose not to bring on his reinforcements. Perhaps he was role-playing an officer who had his mind on the big picture, and judged that it was not worth risking many resources to stop the Germans getting one half worn-out Tiger. Perhaps he was right. The Tiger later appeared in a later game, and was probably responsible for the high Allied tank losses in that game, but the Allies still won it.

Game #2: The defender was given some resources to defend, which were on one side of the table. His opponent was given a scouting mission to carry out on the other side of the table. Possibly the defender would sit tight in his good defensive positions and do little to hinder the scouting mission. Possibly the attacker would fail to realise the importance of other things on the table and miss the opportunity to take them. As it happened, he did attack and took most of the objectives anyway. Game 12 was a very similar scenario, only exaggerated by a massive linear sight block (railway embankment) running down the length of the table, separating the table into two distinct halves, and making it all the more likely that the Allied scouting mission could advance and complete its mission without ever disturbing the Germans defending their objectives. However, wargamers are wargamers and want to shoot at each other, so the attacker advanced down both halves of the table at the same time.

So in games #1, 2, and 12, the objectives of the two sides were not contrary. The defending side was told "defend X" and the attacker was told "attack Y", so in fact it was possible for both sides to follow their orders without bothering the other. Also, in all three games, the defender had to decide whether or not to become an attacker. Only by becoming an attacker could the defender win the game decisively.

Many people dislike the standard meeting engagement scenario, because so few happened in reality. The snag with attacker versus defender games, though, is that everyone knows where they stand all the way through, and standard patterns of behaviour emerge (because they work) and these can become dull.

One repeated theme in my scenarios was the awkward allocation of resources. In Game #3, the Germans could very easily retreat with all their infantry, but to do so would mean that their Tigers would be unsupported when they retreated. How many infantry should be risked to escort the tanks? In Game #13, the German commander had to decide how many men to use to repair the railway lines, and with how many to defend the town. In Game #10B it was how many to dig out the tanks, and how many to keep the enemy at bay while this went on. Of course, the problem has to be presented such that the player has some idea of how many men might be needed for the task, but a very imperfect idea. Indeed, abandoning the task had to be an option.

I had to think of different ways that scenarios could affect one another. Simply using casualties suffered or inflicted I didn't think was good for several reasons (one being that it was a bit dull). The main reason was that if one side did well overall in the campaign (as happened), then later games would be hopelessly one-sided and short, because losses carried over from earlier in the campaign would mean that the smaller side would be tiny. Going the other way (adding extra forces to the winning side) was not a solution either, because it would require players to have access to potentially enormous numbers of figures.

So, I went for things like the following:

Artillery support (sometimes potentially lost, sometimes potentially gained).

Minefields, and knowledge of enemy minefields (captured maps).

Flank attacks – success in one game (seizing a bridge, or finding a ford, perhaps) might enable forces in a later game to be brought on from one side of the table as well, instead of just one end.

Small amounts of extra tank support.

Pill boxes and wire. The rationale here was that with more time, the Germans could have fallen back to their ideal chosen defensive positions, and these could have had pillboxes already built there. More time also might enable troops to lay out wire.

Hidden deployment. I used this a LOT. The rationale was pretty much the same - the faster the Allies advanced, the less time the Germans would have to dig in or camouflage positions. Hidden deployment is the best way to slow down an attacker, and speed of advance was the thing that gave the Allies most of their advantage on this campaign.

Game #5 (Operation Glimmer) was just a nasty trap for the attackers. In WW2 a favourite tactic by the Germans was to draw the Allies forward to zeroed-in positions and stonk them. If the Allies advanced quickly, as was their brief, they would have been through the danger area by the time the artillery landed, and they were given the men and half-tracks to help them, but wargamers are wargamers, and they like to attack things... Withdrawing in CF can be done very easily (retreat moves and unlimited move distances), so withdrawal scenarios don't really work (nor chases) if you do them straight. The German defender in this game had the problem of pretending to be forced back, and withdrawing at a controlled speed. To make it harder for him, I gave him a really good defensive position right in the danger-area of the board. Withdrawing from that would look very suspicious.
[Note that I wrote this scenario many years ago, and adapted it for WCFD, and one change was that I swapped the roles and made the Germans the defenders.]

Game #6 was written for someone who seemed to have quite a liking for the dramatic. His figure painting style is flamboyant and he has figures for zombies and alien worlds. He had figures for the French resistance, two downed airmen, commandos, and terrain for a really nice aerodrome. I was itching to use these. I came up with loads of fiendish ideas. One was that a double agent working for the British was going to be flown out of the aerodrome, and that the scenario would involve the British apparently trying to stop the man 'escape' in an aircraft while actually being desperate that he DID escape, and then the French resistance, who could not be trusted enough to be let in on the secret, potentially ruining the plan by actually trying to stop the agent. This, though, required three players. I had many other ideas, but these required an umpire, and there were only two people involved in the game. It looked as though it would be a dull (well, dull for the scenario writer - I suppose 'conventional' is a fairer word) attacker versus defender raid on an airbase.

Luckily, the host of this game found another player, and so he could umpire it. One thing I put in role-play scenarios all the time is an opportunity for players to make a big mistake. Avoiding the mistake is very easy. I added a load of tanks turning up on the base. All the commandos had to do was keep quiet and wait for the tanks to drive off again. BUT wargamers are wargamers! If there are tanks on the table then I'm meant to destroy them, right? In this case, the commandos not only attacked but destroyed two Panthers! Had they not done this, they would have observed a senior SS officer climb out of one tank, with a dossier of important information on him, and enter the camp, hoping to be flown out. If captured, he was worth lots of points, the dossier's information was useful too, and he would not have been present as a BC+2 in the climactic Game #16. As it was, he and the dossier burned in the tank.

The umpires of the games were told only what they needed to know about their own games. In this scenario, the French resistance turned up, controlled by the umpire who gleefully got them to mistake commandos for Germans, and when the commando officer (is there ANY photograph of real commandos wearing woolly hats in battle?) talked to them, they told him of two targets. The commandos had orders to hold the airfield until relieved, but the resistance had enough time and resources to attack ONE of the two. One was a train being loaded up with parts for a new secret German super-weapon. Another was a radar station that was still operational, and that the Allies knew nothing about (never spotted from the air). The umpire presented the choice to the Allied player, and the player picked the train. The umpire didn't know which was the better option, and so was in no position to give hints. I was glad that the train was picked for three reasons (1) it made Game #13 more interesting, and harder for the Germans to win (they were expected by its umpire to have an easy time of it), (2) it balanced the campaign, because the Allies were winning, and (3) it was the WRONG choice! The Germans had another train with which they could still win Game #13 (and they would have lost either way as it turned out, because they never repaired the line on which both trains had to run), but this was the only opportunity in the campaign that I wrote in for the Allies to get rid of the radar station and it had a much further reaching influence on the game-affecting Allied air cover in a few different scenarios, making it harder for Allied air liaison officers to call in air-strikes, and crucially affecting the die roll for bombing the German forces in Game# 16.

Game #7A was about two main things: disrupting enemy communications and taking a bridge. Enemy communications might give warnings to troops to get to a certain place quickly and prepare for an attack (hidden deployment), tell troops already in a place that they were about to be attacked (Game #10B had troops blithely unaware that they were about to be attacked, caught busy digging out stranded tanks), and told troops counter-attacking of the presence of hidden German mines. I had a few HQs, radio rooms, and telegraph lines, and so there were a few opportunities for the Germans to communicate, but alas for them, every single HQ was either captured or burned by the retreating Germans, and most telegraph lines were cut. The Allied players in #7A were VERY keen wire cutters, and even though there was nothing in their brief about cutting wires, they cut the lines every five inches!

The big idea with the bridge was this: BOTH sides were trying to preserve the bridge. I love writing for umpired games! The Allies were advancing as fast as they could to capture the bridge intact, and they could see the German engineers working at the bridge - to blow it up, surely? No - they were REMOVING the unstable explosives on the bridge that might be set off by the vibration of their tank column which was due any minute. Only once the tanks were across were the Germans going to blow the bridge.

Balancing scenarios is of course difficult when they are as extreme as some of these were. The Allies won an amazing victory in this game. They did this largely because they destroyed so many tanks. They destroyed them largely with Typhoons. They only had four Typhoon strikes, and I thought that these would have been used up long before the German armoured column arrived. I was wrong. Now, the German players in the campaign might complain that the scenario was unfair because, since there were so many German tanks in it, there was a great opportunity for the Allies to earn lots of points. This was true, but the column of tanks I put into this game was so very strong that I was confident that it could cross the bridge and charge off-table again soon afterwards. The tanks had one motivation: escape. To hang around was to risk being destroyed. By putting so many tanks in the column, I was ensuring that they would be on-table for not long enough to do the poor Allies harm, nor to be destroyed. How was I to know that a Cromwell would position itself astride the road and knock out half the convoy?

In Game #8 (Three bunkers on a road) the Allies suffered a major reverse. It is possible that this was in part because I did not make some things about the terrain set-up clear enough, but it seems likely that it was as least as much due to fear on the part of the attackers, who, having been hit with HE shells fired by AT guns in the three forts that were their objectives, concluded that any movement for the rest of the game in LOS of these guns was too great a risk. The attacking player didn't know that I had limited every AT gun to two HE shells. I did that to balance the scenario, also because it was fairly realistic (an HE attack in CF does not have to represent literally one shot - it could be several shots), and because I thought that the scenario was more interesting if it was about infantry manoeuvring around the place with the forts as objectives, rather than if the objectives themselves were the main playing pieces for the defenders.

Game #9 was the first of three chess clock scenarios. I get the impression from reports that players new to chess clocks appreciated how well they work in making a scenario more tense and pacey. I may be wrong but I think I was the first person to try CF with a chess clock. I particularly wanted to use chess clocks in this campaign because one of the purposes of this event was to publicise CF, and CF is one of the few wargames that works well with a chess clock, and I see that as one of its strengths that I would like people out there to know about.

Game #10 was mostly fairly conventional attacker versus defender. The German forces were deployed outside a town, populated by many Vichy collaborators and Third Reich administrators and other civilians who might not be keen on being 'liberated'. The attacker and defender both were given an opportunity to make a mistake. A friendly company of British appeared during the game, bound for a different action elsewhere (Game #17). The attacking Allied commander could have taken these forces and used them up in his game. In the event, he took one platoon of them and let the rest march across and off the table. I was thinking of using this idea a few times but didn't, largely because of issues of fairness. One variation was fuel lorries driving by that could be used to refuel on-table vehicles, but if so used, would mean that in other games, tanks would start running out of fuel. The defending German commander was (shortly AFTER the extra Allied company turned up - I can be cruel) given a message from an off-table non-player commander in the town, asking him for a decision: (a) decide that the current situation is fine, and that everyone should hold where they are, (b) decide that the situation is not fine, but not hopeless and summon the last members of the town's garrison and with the aid of these hold off the attackers (a drawback being that there would be no one left to police the town), or (c) decide that thing are hopeless, and leave the town entirely. The player chose (c). The umpire who asked him for this decision did not know its consequences either, so could not have led him towards a 'correct' answer. The consequences were that the roads east of the town became choked with fleeing civilians, severely hampering the German withdrawal. In overall campaign terms, it was probably the worst of the three options.

Games #1 and 15 also used the chess clock. One advantage of chess clock scenarios for me running the event, was that I could be pretty confident of how long they would take, and so when I could expect a report. If one side has one hour on the clock, and the other has forty minutes, then the game cannot last more than 1 hour and forty minutes, right? I had not factored in beer and loo breaks! Chess clocks can be used to bring a game to a conclusion in several ways. One is to lower morale of troops. CF has no morale system, and troops can normally be suppressed and rally and infinite number of times and still be as fresh as warm milk. When a flag falls in a chess clock game, troops can degrade one class. Green troops run away or freeze after one flag fall, while veterans will last two falls of flag (but not as veterans) before running.

Game #18 was of a type that works best in this sort of campaign: the British had an infinite number of troops to call on, and the German defenders had a fixed number. The question was how long the Germans could hold out for. I think now that I should have had a couple of these early on in the campaign, for giving a measure of the speed of the Allied advance. A German victory is possible if the Allied time penalty and losses are high enough.

Game #16 was the climactic game of the campaign: the retreating Germans caught in a bottle-neck. Games #17 and 18 were always going to finish too late to affect it. It was a major design challenge. I felt the need for an epic show-down at the end of the campaign, but I had to make the game playable in a few hours. Each of the other games was typically two companies a side with a bit of support, which in the scale of a major WW2 operation makes them quite small actions. I wanted people to feel part of a major operation. If the campaign operation were large, then the number of Germans caught in the Allied net would be great - certainly well into the thousands even if this was not meant to be the Falaise Gap itself. This meant that the climactic game would at CF scale be gargantuan and unplayable in a reasonable time. If the forces involved depended on early successes in the campaign, then the fact that by this point as it turned out the Allies were well ahead meant that the German player would be hopelessly out-numbered - but the salient at the point of German exit would have been packed with Germans forces. Indeed, the better the Allies did in trapping the Germans, the more Germans there would be there.

I wanted the actual neck of the salient to be in the climactic game, so that the numbers of escaped and trapped Germans could be quantified. It would also look good in the photo's. I also did not want the complication of having to design several possible ending scenarios, only one of which would be used, to take into account all possible results of earlier games.

So, I needed a design in which both sides had reasonably compatible-sized forces varying no more than other forces had in previous scenarios. I also wanted the overall success of the operation to influence this one, though. This was the last scenario I wrote, because I wanted to have written all the others first. I must thank this game's local organiser for his patience. He got the main bulk of the scenario only some 48 hours prior to the game, and then a few more e-mails with additions, alterations, clarifications and the like, so he had a lot to take in at short notice.

I decided that the total forces that the players got to play with would not alter with the overall Allied success. Instead, the general success of the campaign up to this point would influence other things, like time, and die roll numbers.

I also decided that I wanted LOTS of stuff on the table. This had to look like a massive operation. I chose Game #16 for the climactic game largely because it was to be played with 10mm figures, which I thought would look good, and the list of available figures listed a shed-load of stuff. Even so, I then came up with a design that worked better with more, and the folks in Edmonton were able to borrow more figures.

I came up with the notion of "inactive" units. These would be just sluggishly mobile victory point counters in the form of figures. The Allied brief would be to take as many of these prisoner as possible. I came up with rules for taking prisoners that involved surrounding them and rolling a die to see if they surrendered. The "surrender number" was going to depend on how well the Allies had done to this point. The base number was 4+ (50/50) and this got modified to 3+ because of Allied success. So, a group of surrounded inactive units would surrender on a roll of 3+.

One way to avoid getting surrounded, however, was to deploy so bunched up at the point of exit that getting surrounded would be impossible. I needed to have the inactive units dispersed for the game to work. So, I introduced the constant threat of Allied bombers. Every Allied initiative, there was a risk (umpire rolls 1d6, on a certain result (6) a hit would be scored) that some Allied bomber spotted and destroyed a unit of inactive Germans. If this happened, nearby units would be very likely to be destroyed too (I think I wrote 3+ = destroyed). I did some calculations, drew a map with a zone of deployment for the Germans that cut down the table area a bit, and managed to contrive matters to make the magic blast radius to be a convenient one base depth. So, bunching up would be deadly. The numbers to be rolled for bombing depended on earlier game results. The Germans still had a working radar station in the area, and had conserved four out of five of their AA guns (hence 6 was a bomber hit).

Exactly how many troops/vehicles these inactive bases represented was never nailed down. I had in mind that a different scale could be represented, with each base of infantry being perhaps a platoon - like Spearhead scale. At Dunkirk there were small units of British troops holding the perimeter, while tens of thousands of men waited around on the beach contributing nothing to fending off the Germans. Since these inactive units were not intended to fight, they could represent large bodies of men (and points!).

Another number to work out was the roll to cross the bridge. My fist draft of the scenario had this at 4+. When we added in loads more figures, I then judged that this meant that the Germans had a very poor chance of getting their troops off-table fast enough. The chance to cross the bridge had to be far better than the chance in a given initiative of being bombed. I changed it to 3+ with a reroll after every success until a failed roll was the result. This gives an average of about 1.75 units leaving the table every German initiative, which would be more than enough to get all 46 inactive units off-table in 30 initiatives. 30 initiatives is, in my experience, the typical number of initiatives it takes for a game of Crossfire to have reached the decisive point when one side's victory seems assured.

So that was the basic set-up: a bottle neck (e.g. bridge over river), with a LOT (46 in the end) of bases of vehicles and troops dotted about the place, representing men who are hiding from the RAF and USAAF, and just wanted to get away. I described these as men sitting about, eating, chatting, sleeping in the sun, cooking, smoking etc., to contrast them with the active units. Each German initiative, inactive units got 1d6 move actions to move towards the bridge. How many men would be taken prisoner and how many would escape? The active Germans units would have to make sure that the British didn't swoop in and net prisoners. I had given the British some carriers, and I feared that this would make things too easy for them. In the event, the Germans seem to have put up a stout defence.

The Allied player made the mistake of firing on some inactive Germans units. This had the effect of converting them into active ones (I had the idea of making an inactive stand spawn into a full platoon on being shot at – to give the Allied commander a swift lesson in the value of mercy).

Other consequences from earlier games included: thanks to Game #12 the Allies could enter from two, not one, table edge. The Germans had one minefield (the mine store in Game #8 was not captured), and this was one minefield that the Allies didn't know about (the map got burned to ashes in Game #6). The German BC+2 who could have been there to help organise the defence of the retreat was killed in Game #6. Since all the bridges in earlier games were in Allied hands, not many German active units could deploy hidden.

In the event, the German defence was very effective, and the Allies were unable to capitalise fully on their advantages. So many German units made it across the river to safety that this became a German victory. However, so great had been the Allied successes up to this point that the overall campaign still went to the Allies.