Modern Spearhead: A Further Review
Sometime before Christmas 2000 I played a square Armoured Brigade c1986 dug-in against a Soviet Category-1 Tank Division commanded by Phil Shaw, the full description of which will have to wait a later issue. Suffice to say they pretty much destroyed each other although it was a major flank march, and air support, that swung it in the Soviets favour, that and the minefields I blocked all the bridges with which prevented me (the British) launching a counter-attack.
The game confirmed the weakness in the British air defence and artillery at the time, and shows how much we would have been reliant on American airpower to hold the line. Conversely the combination of Soviet layered air defence types made RAF support ineffective given the numbers I had available.
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Anyone attempting to design a companion set of rules to a game as popular and successful as Arty Conliffe’s SPEARHEAD rules is asking for trouble; every change of the rules is bound to upset someone somehow — perhaps even the original designer. Furthermore, SPEARHEAD gamers are certain to have predetermined expectations of how the game should be applied to the modern era.
Modern Spearhead is based on the highly successful Spearhead game system Arty Conliffe published for World War II. Like Spearhead, Modern Spearhead focuses on the higher level command and control issues rather than the minutiae of individual weapons and vehicles. The basic ‘element’ in Spearhead is a Platoon, not individual tanks or soldiers. Modern Spearhead is an operational level game that is designed to recreate the view and challenges from a Brigade, Divisional or even Army Corps level – The player’s major issues are when to attack or defend, when to issue order changes to formations, and when to commit reserves, rather than focussing on what individual elements (tanks and soldiers) are doing.
