Learning Avalon Hill’s Squad Leader, Which I Put Off for 40 Years

This is adapted from the script of Episode 94: Avalon Hill Squad Leader - Shots Fired After Owning This for 40 Years.

It looks like the opening exchanges of building-to-building fire wobbled the German squads across the lane. Can I take these fuckers in a rush with the rugged elements of the 37th Guards?

Turns out I can, but they dart through an alert German MG team’s field of fire on the way. This was the cost of that little sprint:

First blood: I lost six squads in my first-ever charge. Gotta learn somehow.

Their sprint crossed the merest sliver of an alert German machine gun squads’ field of fire. An expensive jog, but what the Russians lack in command acumen and support weapons in Scenario 1: The Guards Counterattack, they make up for in numbers. The survivors enter the building and stomp out the remaining Germans there in both hand-to-hand fighting and a short, lethal exchange of fire down hallways and staircases.

This old hex map and its tiny counters now seem lit from within. Getting to finally play this game feels like finding an old roadster in a barn and getting it on the road — a model still driven today by a dedicated subset of wargame lovers because they love this legendary system and its successor — Advanced Squad Leader — so much. I’m starting to see why.

A Bit of Background for Our Readers Who Either Don’t Know Anything About Wargames or Who Think They Don’t Like Them, But Who Are Wrong

Squad Leader was released in the 1970s by Avalon Hill publishing, one of the two big strategy publishers of the time, the other being rival SPI.

A whole generation of military history nuts who wanted to fight the big battles out for themselves with historically accurate units and conditions were relitigating the Eastern Front, the great 19th Century wars of the Continent, the U.S. Civil War and more. There was a race to put out creative and rigorous designs that fed these subterranean armchair generals the right balance of scale, realism, and strategy vs. the chaotic fates of the battlefield.

Squad Leader entered as a full-on squad-level simulation exercise. The main categories of action are just firing and moving. But almost every real-world consideration of those fundamental activities are governed by formal metrics: Did you move before you fired? What’s your terrain in relation to your target’s? How much stuff are you hauling when you move, and across what? How’s your morale? What’s the skill level of your officers? When your rifle squad freaked out and ran — which happens in this game because sustained machine gun fire can riffle-shuffle anybody’s nervous system — do they have to hide in hex K5 or L4?  

Every consideration is codified in a rulebook and reference cards whose tables look like they might have been purloined from the working real-life command HQ: Infantry Fire Tables, Close Combat Tables, Support Weapons Charts, Movement, Terrain, and even a droll little chart for what happens if you try to sneak around in a sewer. Roll a die! 1-4, successful. 5-6, lost. Think of the granular combat considerations of, say, older versions of Dungeons and Dragons pointed at their operational essence, except you don’t have to think up what your characters say around the campfire. The action is the story. And it’s a vivid one.

Ain’t she purty

But I don’t have to think about sewers yet, thankfully. In addition to its dense but well-written rules and the cohesion of its modeling, Squad Leader’s designers also rolled out a tool they called Programmed Instruction: a series of 12 scenarios — six from the Eastern Front with Russians vs Germans, another six from Western Europe late in the war with Germans vs. the U.S. — that feed the complexity to you in chunks. 

Section 1 is a firefight in Stalingrad that only puts you in charge of men and machine guns. Scenario 2 lets you play around with flamethrowers for the first time, use demo charges, smoke cover, concealed units, and learn the quantitative joys of individual unit fanaticism. And so on, until you’re finally able to graduate yourself to even more complicated stuff like vehicles and artillery.

But even Scenario 1 is a beast if you come at it cold. A bigger beast if you have nobody who will attempt it with you.

While simultaneously exploring my seasonal affective disorder (amateur prognosis) and GMT’s Storm Above the Reich over the winter, I sang this jeremiad:

I was talking to dudes on BGG’s Squad Leader forum about the copy of the game that The Moms got me for Christmas in 1979. She knew I was into WWII history and war movies, because weren’t we all? 

I was 10. I opened it, gawped at each bit of it, and put it away. Some of the dudes on the BGG forum mentioned a common denominator: “My big brother and his friends…” They got to learn it under the wing of some adolescents.

And I realize it doesn’t matter how cool these games are unless somebody is there with you, moored at the point of fascination and raised on the broth of brotherhood. And I stopped shopping a bunch of wargames I liked that YouTubers were talking about when I realized I wasn’t shopping for a game. I was shopping for a big brother I never had, or friends I had and don’t have anymore.

As it turns out, I did have a big bro to teach me. When I repeated this complaint on Discord to longtime friend of the show Noisy Andrew, he made this thrilling claim: He knows all the rules for Scenario 1 (The Guards Counterattack) by heart, notching a 100% accuracy rate when his last opponent looked up his rule citations. Now this was a lantern I could follow into this impenetrable cardboard Shangri-La.

We downloaded the Vassal tabletop emulator. He even did the heavy lifting of figuring out the software and Squad Leader module. We are now in our third week of successfully straddling the Perth-Starkville time zones for one-turn sessions and I’m having the time of my life.

We are in Scenario 1 for a second time and now I’m learning to look for that one early exchange of fire that tells me I have to shore up a flank and keep my head down…or follow that wisp of blood in the water to a weak spot that’s ripe for the chomping. I go to bed with the footage drawing itself in my head; even misfortunes that happened on my side of the ledger are vivid and satisfying.

Now that Noisy has given me a working frame of the action sequence, I now have occasion to set up my physical copy so I can retrace the finer points of the rules. They’re a lot easier to read once you’ve seen some action. My general experience with crunchy games is that digesting the crunch is not only a minor thrill of achievement, it delivers a richer experience.

Which is why what’s happening here is way beyond a thumbs-up or thumbs-down proposition. Hex-and-counter wargames are a subset of a subset. On sight, these creations are either hilariously off-putting or they’re as irresistible as the deep-memory drumbeat of the sun that lures the characters of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World south to vanish into the book’s florid, mutated Triassic swamps.

The fellas are gonna laugh when they find out I didn’t use proper clippers.

While I cover newer games—the level of passion and creativity in tabletop design is boggling—I have been digging backwards more in all my media consumption, as things redolent with real human work are more and more appealing as the automated, the synthetic, the simulated engulfs everything. 

Why fret about whether the sludge I'm looking at everywhere is human or bot when I can pick up, say, the Joseph Conrad book on my furnace cabinet and know a human made it? No guessing. No looking down the mirror hall. Regular consciousness and representing it with language, as we'll find in the wrestling matches of the great artists, is complicated enough! Why the hell do I need profit-motivated Silicon Valley mutants posing profit-driven additional conversations on top? The inexhaustible riches of the near past are there for the taking.

Squad Leader is categorically beautiful for this reason: Looking at the hundreds of tiny cardboard counters, you can hear the chug of an offset press as the Avalon Hill team — probably wild with sleeplessness — watches the first proof run emerge.

Reading the steps for managing a unit that’s crumpled under fire, you can feel the long hours alone and the waypoints of fierce crosstalk as assumptions are playtested.

Right as I finish this section of the script, I see the mail gal put a white package at the door of my addition: That would be the specialized Squad Leader counter trays I ordered. That means I’ll be spending some time this weekend with a cold one on the table, happily clipping and sorting every single piece, fully immersed in the small and happy ministrations of one of the many small pockets of the world that VCs and private equity haven’t figured out how to ruin.

You’ll never find me today, you bastards.

Today I am unprofitable, and therefore, if just for a few hours, free.