In a depression among the sand dunes before El Agheila, on the western frontier of Cyrenaica, lay a British reconnaissance patrol:
Lieutenant Fred Miller dozed in the silent night near El Agheila. All he could hear was the snoring of his comrades. And at that moment the war began to “breathe” again.
The clank of tank tracks... Then silence and an oath. Fred Miller was on the alert, but there was no need for him to wake the others. Clark, too, was peering out from under the scout car. They lay on their bellies and stared ahead at the mighty shadows, which rattled as they moved. They heard shouts. “Tanks,” whispered Miller, “German tanks.” The monsters drove past 30 yards away in a southerly direction. “One, two, three, four, five...” Clark stopped counting. The sixth veered and made directly for them. The commander was standing in the turret. He had spotted them. “Move off,” yelled Clark. The driver and wireless operator were already in the car. The self-starter hesitated. “Get cracking, man!” At last. The rattling shadow was almost on them as they drove off. The desert suddenly sprang to life, the shadows coming from all directions.
FOXES OF THE DESERT; Paul Carell
Those allergic to nostalgia are urged to move down about ten paragraphs. To our remaining readers, it is hard to believe over a quarter-century has passed since the young boy this writer once was read the stirring account of a British patrol sitting in the dark night, on the edge of Cyrenaica. A lifelong interest in the war in North Africa during World War II was literally ignited by Paul Carell’s seminal book, Foxes of the Desert.
Carell’s book was not the first military history tome to tickle my fancy. That place will forever be held by Tregaskis’ Guadalcanal Diary, borrowed from the school library in a bright-green, reinforced-binding with penciled-in title elementary school edition. My interest in reading was a flame fanned by my beloved fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Melamed. It was a year for Babe Ruth and Abe Lincoln biographies, the Hardy Boys, and books about bugs. Then came the war. Or more accurately, the wars.
The ‘dots’ would later be connected between Tregaskis, Ernie Pyle, Paul Carell, and Hal Hock. All unseen, lying in wait in the future not unlike Clark and Miller waiting in the night on patrol...then watching something important thundering by. Not quite sure what the import of it would be. Incredibly fascinated by military history, something apparently lost on this generation’s young if recent reports of national testing are to be believed.
Long before discovering TOBRUK this writer was a ten-year old boy that was just sure there had to be something like wargames out there. The first hint came from the Woods Edge Game. Purchased from an advertisement in the back of a Metal Men comic book. Then that cardboard ‘footlocker’ with “over 100 men, tanks and ships”, that happened to also include a map printed on polypropylene (think plastic sacks at your local supermarket) and rudimentary rules. These were duly set up, after surviving the four month wait that followed posting off the requisite two bucks or so. Me, my cousin Vinny and my best pal across the street Brian bought every comic book ‘wargame’ there was, including the one with the rubber-banded two-piece plastic tanks that ‘exploded’ when you pressed in their middle with your finger.
We played these things. And played them. Our little group was so out of the loop that we knew Helen of Toy, yet never heard of Milton Bradley’s TANK BATTLE. I picked up the latter at an, er, ‘antique’ (read: junk) shop in rural Pennsylvania last summer while traveling with the wife and kids. For five bucks. And I had to finally hide it in the closet or my six-year old son would still be having me play it with him nightly. Suffice it to say we use house rules.
Fast-forward a couple of three years and we find this writer a thirteen-year old kid experiencing serendipity in the dusty corridors of the former Westchester Hobby Center of East Post Road in White Plains, New York. A small stock of wargames was tucked in among the myriad trains, Airfix soldiers and radio-control airplanes of the one-channel ‘pulse’ variety. My father was instantly made a prisoner as I pored over the best way to spend my office-vacuuming and cleaning ‘business’ money, suddenly burning a white-hot hole in my pocket.
TOBRUK was my first wargame. The back of the box sold me. I wanted to “recreate all of the furious action of tank-to-tank battles on the Western Desert during World War II”. I was a late-bloomer and hadn’t discovered girls yet. About twelve bucks in singles was peeled out of my wallet and plunked down for my very own tank battle in a cardboard box. This was going to be good.
The good times didn’t last long. When I got this puppy home it became pretty evident there was no way this thing was going to be played by me or my best comic book gaming buddies. ‘Programmed’ instruction notwithstanding. I carefully packed it all back in the box and begged a ride back to Westchester Hobby to return the thing. Actually, I swapped it for AH’s Stalingrad. Now that we managed to play.
Our readers are so devilishly smart I know you’ve already guessed the story doesn’t end here. Sure, Stalingrad was fun. And easy. But the unrequited love with actually riding in my very own tank courtesy of TOBRUK just would not go away. Quite the contrary. It grew. Until finally, newly-earned greenbacks in hand I found myself back on East Post Road, in a brisk gait passing the amazingly sun-faded plastic models languishing in the display window since before the first Walther was born. I had a date with TOBRUK. There would be another bite at the apple for this young man.
My very own TOBRUK. Well, not exactly. It wasn’t the same copy I had returned. But it would be mine. As I type these words my ‘Copyright 1975’ copy of the game is sitting on my desk, next to my dog-eared copy of Fire & Movement, issue Number One. Picked the latter up new at the hobby shop too. This time around I had set my teeth to getting this game. As in learning it and playing it. And my pals had been sold on the idea, albeit as long as my cash was put on the barrelhead. It wasn’t long before the second ‘bite at the apple’ paid off and we all became Tobruk fans. Plenty of face-to-face and play-by-mail followed. It was a keeper.
Moving forward twenty years found this writer at the National Archives buried in the still photo department when an acquaintance on hand asked if I’d like to meet Tom Jentz and Hal Hock. A brief introduction to Mister Jentz followed an interesting and cordial session with Hal that led to more conversation at dinner at Hal’s choice (he was buying), a Ruth Chris Steakhouse in Georgetown. On the way there Hal was putting his new Ford Taurus SHO (mutual car-guy thing going) through its paces when as an aside, he said, “you know I have the rights to Tobruk back.” Later a letter from Thomas Shaw legally returning all rights was duly produced and the rest is history. This Tobruk kid would have the chance to bring back his first boardgame love for one more ‘dance’.
Before the project could be completed, sadly, Hal suddenly passed away on December 7, 1999. The decision was made to go on but the deadline was blown right out the door when we lost Hal. His lifelong and intimate knowledge of the war in North Africa was a resource that could not be replaced. Nor could his kind and gentlemanly nature, interest in the Titanic and love of his dogs. As for our success in bringing back Hal’s labor of love in a new edition, we’ll let the reader decide.
The New Edition
My intent in the new Tobruk was to build an entirely new game system around some key precepts set down by Hal Hock and found in the previous edition. I feel a fairly successful job was done along these lines.
Infantry in the original Tobruk was all about casualties. You shot at someone and something happened. The original Casualty Table simply listed the number of men that went down with each shot—and there were few ‘0’ results on the table. And whenever casualties were absorbed, the personnel unit would have to ‘check morale’. This system is retained in the new game, albeit in a modified form. Instead of looking up the number of gunfire factors on the Gunfire Factor Table, these are provided right on the counters. We lose a little ‘grainy’ detail with our simple system of Gunfire on the counter—halved for ‘long range fire’ out to double the printed range. We pick up a LOT more convenience, and that results in faster play and far less tedium.
The original Tobruk used a system wherein casualties were marked off on a separate ‘roster pad’, man by man. The major downside to this was that all personnel counters on the map looked exactly as they started the game when they were ‘fresh’. The only way to discern the status in terms of casualties was to check your roster pad. This was a major hassle as one needed to know the exact number of men in each personnel unit whenever tallying up gunfire factors to make a shot. This was no minor disadvantage and is done away with entirely in the new system with little loss in detail. A squad now has five ‘steps’ instead of the original ten or so, each represented by a ‘man’ in the former edition. A squad can be in its ‘fresh’ state, marked with a casualty marker, flipped to its reduced side, flipped and marked with casualties, and eliminated. This comes down to accounting for every two men worth of casualties. Considering that over half the categories on the original Casualty Table resulted in 2-9 casualties, one can argue that we lose nothing in the new translation.
More written records were required when firing tanks at one another, the very heart of the game. Same for guns engaging tanks. Each target had to be listed on a target roster pad in order that the proper rate-of-fire, initial or acquired, could be used for subsequent shots. This slowed the game down quite a bit, as even a court reporter needs to commit something to the page to assist one’s memory. Even broken and surrendered units had to be memorialized to identify their status.
The entire load of note-taking has been lifted from the players shoulders by the new Advanced Tobruk System. Burst-On-Target markers are used to mark acquired targets. There are markers for casualties, broken, and surrendered status. And infantry can’t ‘run’ for two turns in a row, as in the original game. Now there is just a ‘winded’ counter to mark these tired men with. A plentiful supply of marker counters is provided, practically eliminating the need for record keeping, such that it is not an integral part of game play any longer. This serves to speed things up dramatically.
Another benefit is accrued from the extensive use of marker counters in Advanced Tobruk. Players can simply scan the ‘battlefield’ and instantly see just who is broken, winded, surrendered, and more importantly, gunfire can be tallied up easily without taking one’s eyes, or attention, off the map. This is no minor point. The ability to review the status of your units on the game map allows for an enhanced ability to play the game well. The combat potential of each unit, and more importantly the corporate potential of your on-map forces in keeping with their myriad capabilities simply cannot be understated. And my designer’s intent is for players to seek the rewards of playing the game as experts. That’s one reason for the inclusion of two dozen carefully picked and documented scenarios. That’s part of the ‘throwback’ approach. Instead of a mountain of unremarkable scenarios that may never get played, and certainly never get played more than once, the plan is to move the conversation to picking apart every nuance of a smaller, more compelling, batch of actions.
The shell vs. armor plate system is new and intuitive. Our collective hats are tipped to Lorrin Bird, co-author of World War II Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery (Overmatch Press; 2001). His tome combines original research with an extensive compilation of government ordnance and ballistics data. Our new system literally jumped from the pages of the book. The armor for each tank is rated using nine armor factors, cross-referencing front, side and rear with turret, upper hull (superstructure) and lower hull aspects. A track hit can also be obtained. Armor factors are the thickness at that aspect (adjusted to zero degrees using Hal Hocks’s favorite slope effects data) in millimeters divided by ten. Gun penetration is also in millimeters at specific ranges, also divided by ten. The K-KILL table brings it all together, and is based on the penetration probability data from U.S. tests presented in Bird’s book—modified for ‘real world’ effects at the advice of the author himself.
Bringing it all together results in a very different approach from the original edition. Appearances may be deceiving on that score, though. Upon closer review one will note the exact same results are available in terms of tank warfare outcomes. AFVs may be K-KILL, F-KILL or M-KILL victims. Tank crews may also bail out in certain situations. When combined with the feel of hitting tanks on specific facings and aspects, this all starts feeling a lot like Tobruk. Abeit without a thousand dice rolls.
The issue of game length has also been re-worked with the 90-second game turn. Simply put, scenarios are much shorter than before and game play takes a fraction of the time it used to. In the new game, a short platoon-level action can actually be played during lunch hour.
Advanced Tobruk is not just a tank game any longer. It is designed with the express intent to use the system to portray infantry warfare across the length and breadth of World War II and other eras. To that end while we’ve been working on Tobruk our eye has always been on the need for the system to have the flexibility to ‘move’ to other fronts. We’ll be putting that intent into action shortly with France 1940, ‘Finland at War’, Buna, and other interesting modules. Don’t worry, the desert war has lots of attention coming as our first three Advanced Tobruk modules are in hand. Wavell’s 30,000 brings alive Alan Moorehead’s The March to Tunis with the 1940 British campaign against Italian forces in Egypt and Libya, culminating at Beda Fomm. Carell’s The Foxes of the Desert comes alive in the ROMMEL RE-TAKES CYRENAICA module. And El Alamein literally jumps from the pages of C.E. Lucas Phillips, Alamein in our new DEVIL’S GARDEN module for Advanced Tobruk.
It is my hope that you pull on your suede boots or Rommel goggles and get down in the sandbox with us. If you haven’t noticed by now, Advanced Tobruk is a turn-key miniatures system. Simply convert the 50 yard hexes to your measurement of choice and use the marker counters alongside your favorite miniatures.
Ray Tapio
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