12.2023 Hazardous Movement Scenario Pack 4: Making the Grade

Publisher/Date:
Hazardous Movement (2023)

Product Type:
Scenario/Map Pack

Country of Origin:
United States

Contents:
10 scenarios on glossy color cardstock, 2 8" x 22" unmounted geoboards on thin cardstock (HZ-1, HZ-2), 12 pages of players' notes on loose sheets of paper.

Commentary:

Hazardous Movement Scenario Pack 4: Making the Grade, published in late 2023, is the most recent product from the designing duo of Chad Cummins and Chuck Hammond, aka Hazardous Movement.

The first three Hazardous Movement packs were scenario packs, each featuring 10 scenarios (one “mixed-bag” pack and two themed packs).  Making the Grade (MTG), however, is a bit more ambitious: it is a scenario/map pack (i.e., a scenario pack that also includes one or more original geoboards).  It’s always interesting when a third party publisher makes a leap from only producing scenarios to making other physical components such as boards, maps, or counters.  It means mastering additional skillsets (or finding and working with people who have those skills) such as graphic design, as well as engaging in the often-difficult process of working with professional printers to produce geoboards or countersheets.  It can often be difficult, and mistakes or problems can arise.  Countersheets can end up being too thin, or poorly die-cut, while maps might end up being too dark, or geoboards being poorly cut or misaligned. Even third party publishers with a long history of printing, such as Critical Hit, have had problems producing problem-less geoboards (which probably helped lead eventually to their abandoning “regulation-size” geoboards).

In this case, the Hazardous Movement geoboards illustrate both the promise and perils of making third party geoboards.   MTG includes two 8″ x 22″ geoboards (HZ-1 and HZ-2).  HZ-1 is primarily a woods board, with the “top” half of the geoboard full of woods, only occasionally interspersed with an orchard hex.  The woods tail off in the “bottom” half of the board, with the terrain opening up to fields of grain and a couple of buildings.  HZ-2 presents a small rural hamlet surrounded by fields and orchards enclosed by hedges (which also allows them to be bocage).

So, how do the boards measure up in 1) physical quality, 2) design and artwork, and 3) print quality?

As far as physical quality is concerned, the boards mostly pass.  They are printed on cardstock, not paper, though the stock seems to be slightly thinner than the cardstock used by MMP, making the boards somewhat less rigid.  It’s possible they may be a bit less durable than MMP boards, but generally speaking they seem to be of acceptable physical quality.

With regard to design and artwork, the work here is good.  Both boards make useful contributions to the world of ASL geoboards and can easily be used for a number of scenarios. According to the credits page, the boards were created by “PETROS, Donald” and “REPETTI, Thomas,” both of whom (when their names are in proper order) are well-known as ASL map- and board-makers. The quality of the artwork is high, with only minimal differences from “official” artwork (primarily the woods being darker and the grains depicted more like real fields (including a subtle texture).  The HZ-2 board does have a somewhat odd look at first, as all the hedges merge with woods hexes, making it look a little like the woods have green tentacles extruding from them. But one gets used to it. Overall, and especially for a first effort, the quality of the artwork is quite good.

The print quality, unfortunately, leaves something to be desired, because the board artwork and the board cutting are not perfectly aligned.  In other words, the artwork is slightly “tilted” in relation to the rectangular shape of the board (when they need to be perfectly aligned with each other). The tilting of HZ-2 is minimal, so small that one really has to look for it, and it affects neither play nor aesthetics.  However, the tilting of HZ-1 (at least on the copy used for this write-up) is unfortunately more significant.  The result is that the half-hexes along the A0-GG0 hexes, especially A0-P0, are cut off, while on the other board edge, the hexgrid is “floating,” i.e., the board continues past the end of the printed hexgrid.  This makes it difficult to align this board with other boards, and also has very bad aesthetics.  This is a problem that plagued Critical Hit geoboards and was also a problem with the first LFT geoboards (though they later fixed the problem).

Hazardous Movement presumably worked with a printer to produce these boards. Generally, it is possible to work with printers to help insure that this poor cutting/alignment does not happy again. If Hazardous Movement decides to make more geoboards in the future, one hopes that they will take the necessary steps to produce perfectly-printed boards (even if it means using a different printer).

Overall, Hazardous Movement should get praise for the boards, though there is room for needed improvement. It’s worth noting, however, that the success of a third party board, even one perfectly printed, depends on its being used by scenario designers.  After all, what good is a board if there are no scenarios for it?  The problem is that MMP will never publish a scenario that utilizes third party boards. Moreover, the more prominent third party publishers, like Critical Hit and Bounding Fire Productions, also do not publish scenarios that use third party geoboards other than their own.  So it’s an open question as to whether or not any other publishers besides Hazardous Movement will release scenarios using either of these boards. Five scenarios in this pack use HZ-1 or HZ-2, but to what extent will future Hazardous Movement products make use of them?  In other words, just by the nature of the ASL product-making world, it’s quite possible (though not fore-ordained) that the two geoboards in this pack will not get on the gaming table very often.

The Making the Grade pack is a “mixed-bag” format pack, with its 10 scenarios portraying a range of actions from World War II, including China 1938 (Nationalist Chinese vs. Japanese), Thailand 1941 (French vs. Thais), Philippines 1941 (U.S./Filipino vs. Japanese), Finland 1939 (Soviets vs. Finns), Guadalcanal 1942 (U.S. vs. Japanese), Yugoslavia 1943 (Communist Partisans vs. Croatians), France 1944 (Canadians vs. Germans, Americans vs. Germans [2 scenarios]), and Germany 1945 (Soviets vs. Germans).

The scenarios are printed on glossy color cardstock, which is a welcome sight indeed, as Hazardous Movement’s previous pack contained scenarios printed on thin paper rather than cardstock.  The return to normal scenario cards is much welcome.  The look and layout is much the same as in previous packs, including the use of VASL artwork for the counters.  Unfortunately, coloring of the counters is simply too dark.  This has actually always been the case with Hazardous Movement products using VASL artwork, but in previous packs it had little real impact except for making fortification counters (pillboxes, trenches, etc.) hard to read.  In this pack, however, not only are fortification counters really hard to read but the French OB in one scenario is also so dark that the counters are extremely difficult to read.  There needs to be much more care taken in the future to make sure that all the counters on the scenario cards are easy to read without straining.

To play all the scenarios in the pack, players need geoboards 56, 70, 86, and 15a, as well as HZ-1 and HZ-2 (of course), and Bounding Fire Production geoboards BFP DW-6a (from Poland in Flames) and BFP DW-7A (from Into the Rubble II).  It’s really irritating that the scenarios using boards from Bounding Fire Production products do not state on the scenario card what product those geoboards are from.

Making the Grade claims to be “scenarios for competition.”  Its scenarios do tend, overall, to be smaller and shorter than most of the scenarios in previous Hazardous Movement packs, which tend to be large to very large in OB size.  Seven of the scenarios here are medium in size, while one is actually small.  Two of the scenarios, though, are quite large and obviously not suitable for tournament play.  None of the scenarios use OBA, Night rules, or Air Support.

The scenarios do continue a strong tendency for Hazardous Movement scenarios: they use tiny board areas.  Eight of the 10 scenarios in this pack take place on an area of only 1/2 to 2/3 of a single geoboard.  It’s truly puzzling why Hazardous Movement scenarios so often have such tiny playing areas.  At least with these somewhat smaller scenarios there is not quite the congestion problem as in some previous efforts. It is still there in the larger scenarios, though, such as HazMo 39 (How It Will End), which features 25 Soviet squads and accoutrements fighting 13 German squads on a playing area measuring only 10 hexes by 12 hexes.

Several of the scenarios pose interesting situations, starting with HazMo 31 (The Cloak of Disorder), a Sino-Japanese action depicting a Japanese attack and a Chinese counterstroke. Both sides have toys (including tanks) to play with.  HazMo 32 (Destined to Defeat) is also an interesting early Pacific War scenario with toys, although the U.S./Filipino OB includes a 60mm MTR, when in fact there was virtually no mortar ammo on Luzon. Similarly, there was no HE ammo for Stuart tanks on the island. This is not the only historical issue with scenarios in this pack. In HazMo 34 (The Will to Win), for example, set in October 1942 (the scenario card says October 1943, but this is a typo), gives the U.S. forces a flamethrower, but the first U.S. use of a flamethrower on Guadalcanal (or at all) was in January 1943. HazMo 35 (In the Vanguard) has Tito’s partisan force armed with Soviet SW, but in February 1943, the partisans had no Soviet SW; they were primarily armed with Italian, British, and old Yugoslav weapons.  There are no weapons issues with HazMo 37 (Executed Now), a tight little Normandy scenario pitting U.S. paratroopers against German defenders, with American stragglers entering the board from random directions. Also worth a look is HazMo 40 (A Bit of Colored Ribbon), a French attack (with an FT-17!) against a Thai defensive position during the brief border war between Japanese ally Thailand and Vichy French forces in Indochina in early 1941.

Of Hazardous Movement’s four products to date, this one seems the most promising, with the combination of mostly manageable scenarios as well as new geoboards (although the production issues with the geoboards need to fixed in the future).

 

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