11.2023 Orsogna

Publisher/Date:
Advancing Fire (2023)

Product Type:
HASL/Historical Module

Country of Origin:
Italy

Contents:
3 31" x 22" historical maps & 1 31" x 27" historical map (all on thick matte paper), 2 die-cut countersheets with 420 1/2" counters and 96 5/8" counters (for a total of 516 counters) , 38-page rulebook, 8 pages of charts/campaign game info, 14 scenarios on glossy color cardstock, 4 campaign games.

Commentary:

Coming out in late 2003, Orsogna is the fifth product and fourth historical module produced by Advancing Fire since its debut in 2020, which means that it is releasing historical modules at a very rapid rate–perhaps a rate that should give players pause.  Orsogna is set in Italy in late 1943 and depicts part of the Moro River campaign on the eastern side of the peninsula during which the 2nd New Zealand division unsuccessfully attacked German positions at Orsogna. It was one of countless frustrating Allied slugfests against entrenched German positions as they crawled northward.

Owners of previous Advancing Fire products will find Orsogna rather familiar, including its use of multiple maps with non-standard terrain representation, finicky terrain rules, attractive counters, and thin glossy rules pages.  Like Advancing Fire’s immediately preceding module, Prokhorovka!, it comes in a somewhat flimsy cardboard box. The module has a ton of contents–but ASLers will pay for those contents, including the direct or indirect cost of shipment from Italy.  As of this writing, Orsogna will cost a U.S. resident around $161 direct or $150 if you can find it from a U.S. retailer (both prices including shipping).

The centerpiece of Orsogna is its historical maps. There are four of them, which mate in a long row, creating a huge map area that depicts a long ridge rising from level 0 to level 10, with the hilltop village of Orsogna on the upper right.  Together, they depict a gametable-challenging chunk of geography with many interesting tactical permutations.

The Orsogna cartography is, broadly speaking, aesthetically pleasing, and thankfully it is not portrayed by Advancing Fire as exotically as was the terrain of Prokhorovka!  In terms of open ground terrain and height levels, it is closer to ASL map orthodoxy.  However, most of the terrain depictions are non-standard, requiring ASLers to re-learn much of the terrain on the map. Orsogna’s most irritating departure from orthodoxy is its portrayal of brush hexes, which are pretty darn similar to normal ASL woods hexes–and there’s a lot of brush on the map.  Less careful players might also occasionally run afoul of another oddity, which is that by rule all buildings on the map are stone buildings, but the map actually depicts buildings in both wood building and stone building colors.

One of the drawbacks of the map is that it encompasses 11 height levels (or 12 if one counts streams and gullies), which really puts challenges on the map’s palette, forcing the map to have a very dark green for its lowest level and a quite dark brown for its highest level. At those two extremes, it is often difficult even to distinguish the hexsides.  Additionally, there are two brown-colored levels that are very close to each other in hue and hard to distinguish without paying very careful attention to the crestlines (which had to be outlined in black to make them visible).  All of this is exacerbated by the fact that hex numbers for these dark levels are still printed in black, making them very hard to make out unless one hovers inches over the map. The hex numbers, in fact, are a problem overall, because, with two types of exceptions, all of the hexes have black hex numbers.  This means, for example, that there are black hexes numbers printed on top of dark green woods hexes (and olive grove hexes and other types of dark terrain), making a number of hex numbers hard to read.  In orthodox ASL maps, the hex numbers for woods hexes would be printed in white, rather than black, but that was not done here.  This is odd considering that there is one terrain type that is printed with white hex numbers–the hexes of the town of Orsogna itself (well, most of them, anyway; the outlying building hexes have black hex numbers).  Additionally, the entire II hex row for 3 of the 4 maps is printed with white hex numbers–even the very light-colored hexes in those hexrows.  This appears to be a mistake, unless there is some explanation hidden deep in the rules somewhere.

The terrain of Orsogna is also very, well, fiddly.  Not only are many terrain types rendered differently in Orsogna, but they are also full of rules changes or additions.  All sorts of terrain types have exceptions or additional rules or other differences. Hedges, for example, cost 1.5 MF to cross rather than 1; roads give a 1.5 MF bonus rather than 1 MF; there are both building-orchard hexes and building-partial orchard hexes; and so on. Buildings in particular have a large number of rules, including rules for roads that run straight through building hexes (image two building hexes on either side of a road hex, then compress all that into a single hex). There are three types of roads and two types of crestlines (with one type being treated sort of like a hillock). The maps also have slopes, but perhaps players should be grateful that there is only one type of slope. The cumulative result of all this is many pages of terrain rules.  When combined with unit rules, players have to master 14 pages of additional rules even to play a single scenario, the same as the complex Festung Budapest (in contrast, Blood Reef: Tarawa has 4 such pages and Red Barricades about 7). For this reason, Orsogna has been deemed an “advanced” ASL product, not necessarily suited for non-veteran players.  A legitimate question is to what degree all these rules and rules changes were needed to satisfactorily depict this battle.  On the playability/realism index, Orsogna seems to lean rather strongly towards realism/detail at a cost of playability.  The more changes or additions are made to the rules, the more chance there is that errors or oversights can creep in.  For example, Orsogna adds “Cobblestones” to ASL, located in the town of Orsogna itself. They are treated like Open Ground, except for Mud. This means that players can dig foxholes in Cobblestone hexes (that are devoid of other terrain), which seems a little odd, and one wonders whether that was the designer’s intent or an oversight.  The road-through-buildings terrain type would seem to be especially ripe for potential unforeseen rules complications and it will be interesting to see if any errata or clarifications have to be issued for it at some point.

In addition to its historical maps, Orsogna also comes with two countersheets–one that contains only 1/2″ counters and a second that is half 1/2″ and half 5/8″ counters.  The counters are nicely done and very attractive. The die-cutting also seems good. The first countersheet is mostly “British”–or, in this case, New Zealander–with lots of leaders and SW, plus counters for the Maori Battalion, which appears in some scenarios (they are Elite, stealthy, and can use Hand-to-Hand combat) and for Assault Engineers, which everybody seems to be adding these days.  The sheet also has some German SMC and SW.  The second countersheet has counters for German paratroopers (which, oddly, come in 6-5-8, 5-4-8, and 4-6-8 varieties) as well as Italian paratroopers (who only have one flavor).  The 5/8″ counters on this sheet include a lot of control markers, counters for burnt-out orchards and woods (some of which have debris, crater and haystack markers on the back), some AFVs, and snipers.

Orsogna has a 38-page rulebook (which also includes a couple of interviews with people who have written on Orogna, as well as a bibliography, mostly of hobbyist and military buff sources). Though Advancing Fire has made progress in the physical quality of its maps and its counters, it still is lacking when it comes to its rules pages. In previous products, Advancing FIre printed the rules on thin glossy color paper (hole-punched or not, depending on the product).  The Orsogna rules are printed on that same thin paper, though this time they are staple-bound into a booklet.  The problem is that they are still fragile, which is problematic given how often these rules are going to be accessed.  Moreover, the booklet format means that players who want to scan the rules and print them out on sturdier paper will have to take the staples out and cut the paper in half.  Advancing Fire really needs to start printing its rules on a heavier stock of paper.  That said, the rules are attractively laid out and do include a number of examples, though there are times where the reader can tell that the author is not a native English speaker.  In addition to the rules, Orsogna comes with various charts and tables for the campaign game, which are printed on thin cardstock.  These include a two-page Terrain Aid Chart, which is definitely needed, as well as campaign game purchase charts that are printed with counter depictions (i.e., showing a Sherman counter or 4-5-7 squads, rather than just using a Vehicle ID or 3 x 4-5-7).  While this comes at the expense of space, it does make it easier to visually take in what the different Reinforcement Groups represent, which some people might prefer.

The module comes with four campaign games, though this is a little misleading.  CG1 (Operation Florence) uses all four maps and has 4 campaign game scenarios set over two days. The second campaign game, CG II (Zone Nord), is basically the same campaign game, but just one-half of it.  CGIII (Zone Süd) is simply the other half of that first campaign game. The fourth campaign game is the first one all over again, only “less tightly based on the actual historical events.”  So basically the four campaign games all recreate the same action (or half of it, as the case may be), which provides less variety than the multiple campaign games of some other historical modules.  The campaign games each have 2-4 campaign game scenarios, but they introduce a new concept, dubbed “CG Timeframes,” which means that scenarios may take place at different time intervals.  The mechanism was not that clear to Your Humble Author after a single reading of the rules but hopefully will be clearer upon closer inspection.

Orsogna comes with 14 scenarios printed on (thin but serviceable) glossy color cardstock.  The artwork and layout is attractive but space-consuming, with scenarios commonly taking up two pages rather than one.  All but one of the scenarios are historical map scenarios; the one exception, ORS1 (Salarola Junction) is apparently a very slight variation of a scenario previously printed in MMP’s ASL Roma 2020 mini-pack.

All of the other scenarios use either a single one of the four maps (3 scenarios) or two of the four maps (10 scenarios), with the map area straddling portions of both maps, which may cause some difficulties for people with limited playing areas.  Most of the scenarios utilize a fairly small map area each, although there are some that use a good-sized chunk of one.  No scenario uses as much as all of a single map.  The scenarios are not equally distributed across the four maps. Six scenarios use maps 3 & 4, while 2 scenarios use maps 2-3, and one scenario use maps 1-2. Additionally, two scenarios use just map 1, one scenario uses just map 2, and one scenario uses just map 3.  The scenarios strongly trend towards the large or very large in size, with only a handful of scenarios being small or medium-sized. There is no “monster” scenario like The Last Bid from Red Barricades.

More than half of the scenarios have OBA or Bombardments (or both), even in some of the smaller scenarios.  Five of the 14 scenarios use Night rules; no scenarios use Air Support (it wasn’t great flying weather).  Fully 10 of the scenarios have Mud conditions, which limits mobility. This may be one reason why a lot of the scenarios in Orsogna are quite long, including no fewer than 6 that are 10 or more turns in length.

Many of the scenarios also feature a quite generous allotment of support weapons.  Although the ratio of SW to squads varies from scenario to scenario, there are a number of scenarios in which there is at least one SW for every two squads (and sometimes rather higher still).  The scenarios do have more AFVs than one might think a historical module set in Italy might have, but this is primarily because the 2nd New Zealand Division was an unusual division, as one of its three infantry brigades was converted into an armored brigade in 1943, and because one of the German defending units was the 26th Panzer Division. Both the New Zealanders and the Germans have non-carrier/halftrack AFVs in half of their scenarios (not always the same scenarios, of course).  Of course, the Mud may limit what they can do.  While the Italian theater was full of third-rate units on both sides, the combatants here have a fairly generous allotment of high-quality squads.  Still, the weather conditions, the terrain, and the fortifications are going to make a number of the scenarios and campaign games here something of a slog.

Orsogna is going to get fairly limited play simply because it is a third party historical map module produced in Europe, all of which limit its distribution and/or likelihood of play.  How much the historical situation and the specific nature of the scenarios may further affect how much it will be played is hard to say.

 

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