21 February 2025 ~
The OCS games are one of the current standards of the industry for large-scale ‘monster’ games with a reputation for both complexity and consistency. Series rules are usable across almost all of the 20-odd games, and veteran players have literally hundreds of hours under their belts.
We talk about the scope of the series, how far before/after WW2 you could reasonably extend the series and why, the logistics model, the surprise mechanic, splitting roles across multiple players, and even a digression about bad dice.
A couple of relevant links
- The logistics column mentioned around the 10-minute mark
- The OCS home page
- Ardwulf’s “How to Play OCS” video from the ACDC several years ago
- BGG series page
- The OCS Depot
We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think. Thanks!
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
Hi Brant and company,
I listened to the podcast. Brant, James, and Ardwulf did a great job explaining OCS to the audience. And if I ever find myself at Origins, I’ll take you up on that offer.
As OCS Honcho, I am knee deep with active OCS designs, and have extensive background in OCS history, having worked with Dean Essig for over 20 years back when Case Blue was being playtested.
To answer a few of the discussion points mentioned in the podcast:
– OCS West Front vs. East Front scale: The East Front OCS game scales have been 5 miles per hex, as they also were for DAK, Tunisia, Korea, and Burma. Several of the West Front games use a smaller scale – Beyond the Rhine and Sicily II were 3.5 miles per hex. The Blitzkrieg Legend was 3 miles per hex, and the original Sicily was 2.5 miles per hex. However, there really is no standard “West Front vs. East Front” scale. That was a decision made during design and development by individual designers and honchos at the time. Beyond the Rhine, Sicily II, and/or The Blitzkrieg Legend could have worked at 5 miles in combination with other design choices. Having the 5 mile per hex scale benefits in having smaller footprint (relative to the size of the campaign depicted), but counter density can be a consideration along with maneuver through ZOCs and terrain at the given scale.
– OCS bounded by WWII-Korean War time period: The series rules has a rough “from 1900 to the mid-1950s” timeframe for topics that it can cover. This is not a hard and fast rule but is there to provide the type of combat and maneuver that the rules were meant to cover. James pointed out missiles (ATGMs, AGMs, and SAMs) being a potential breaking point for OCS, where they get introduced into post-WWII combat heavily. While true, I don’t think missiles and any supply-related issues are necessarily a limitation. At least when I ported over Valley of Tears from OCS to BCS, ATGMs were not a concern, as ATGMs were essentially just “better AT Guns”, and I do not think missile supply would have been a complication into the existing supply token calculations (being lumped in with ammo supply be is small arms, artillery, or ATGM supply).
Here is Dean’s own words with respect to modern OCS (i.e. post-WWII):
“Modern OCS: Goes back a long way, but I was right in the middle of pasting counters for an Iraq game using OCS when the 91 Gulf War happened. The ground war finished before I was done pasting up the counters.
FWIW, I played it once after that…the helicopters worked like very fast recon battalions (using overruns, unaffected by terrain). I recall a French attack helicopter making repeated runs over several Iraqi infantry divisions and generating quite the bag of dead counters.
Don’t recall what, if anything, I did about anti-air stuff…B-52s make for really slick barrage attacks 🙂
Didn’t make much of a game.”
Mind you, these are limitations from the “out of the box” series rules. There can be expansion rules to cover unique aspects of these post-WWII military technology – to include things like Electronic Warfare, tighter and faster Command, Control, Communication, and Intelligence. This is what Dean did in the one-off Modern TCS expansion – Force Eagles War.
– Possible Post-WWII OCS Topics: As you guys ran down the list, they were spot on. But overall, in combination with the comments above, what wars after WWII fit the criteria that OCS is mastering? That is, conventional maneuver battles at the operational scale. Korea – yes, which is why it was done. Vietnam? No, unless you just do the conventional phase of the war from 1972-1975, but by then it was mostly one-sided with the US on the way out of country. The various Arab-Israeli Wars? Yes. Ardwulf noted that I did convert Valley of Tears from OCS to BCS, but it was not just the 1973 war, but included 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars. It was two maps at 2.5 miles per hex. Design and maps were preliminarily done but ultimately abandoned when Dean suggested to focus on the Yom Kippur War and port it over to BCS which could show the war at a more granular Battalion scale (as opposed to Brigade scale) with a map scale of 1 mile per hex. And for certain it worked and showcases the full Yom Kippur War at a detailed scale and representation given the 20+ years of research I committed to the battle. Note that the other Arab-Israeli Wars could have worked but each have limitations. none of which would be military-tech limitations as the conduct of combat and maneuver was very similar to WWII and post-WWII tech was fairly limited or could be handled within the OCS rules. The 1948 could have been done, and while it was mentioned that it consisted of guerilla combat, following the declaration of Israeli Independence in May 1948 the neighboring Arab Armies launched a conventional invasion with some armor and combined arms. The difficulty was the start and stop actions with ceasefire lulls in between. The war is doable, but the game would need to handle the fits and starts of the fight, but is overwise conventional. The 1956 and 1967 Wars are absolutely possible, the limitation is that they were extremely brief – Basically 2 turns in a normal OCS turn scale, and decidedly one-sided lest we artificially beef up Arab capabilities (both quality and command capability) which would leave me with a bad taste in my mouth in the alt-history sense. Hence the 1973 war is the only viable topic given opposing side capability (gotta have both players do something worthwhile), turn length, maneuver, and scale. The only other post-WWII conventional war(s) before the Gulf War where the out of box game series starts to stretch are the Indo-Pakistani Wars – similar in timelines as the Arab-Israeli Conflicts at 1947, 1965, and 1971, with 1965 being the most viable of the three. But the issue arises if the topic is popular enough to design a while game on, then have if fall flat when its listed for preorder. The Arab-Israeli Conflicts and Korean War are popular enough among wargaming circles that they are readily viable game design topics that will meet preorder numbers. I’m not convinced Indo-Pakistan Wars are.
– Possible Pre-WWII OCS Topics: Years ago, Hans Kishel started a design for WWI 1914 OCS. I helped him out and we had initial traction before other things in our lives got in the way. Like OCS Korea, the WWI design only covered the initial maneuver portion – from the start of 1914 to following the Battle of the Marne, ending at the Winter 1914 lull which eventually led to trench warfare. While thinking about that topic, I started looking into a 1918 OCS campaign, which would include the German Spring Offensive to the Allied final drive before Armistice. This would include rudimentary armor. But as with many ideas turning into reality, it is a matter of available time, to which I have virtually none as I am trying to guide future OCS, BCS, and other The Gamers’ series into production.
wow – some seriously in-depth feedback! Thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the details for us 🙂
Thank you, Carl!
In my experience, the missiles that really mess up a logistics system are the ones that are high capability and low in supply, especially TBMs such as ATACMS, because limiting them merely by tonnage means players simply prioritize resupply of these high capability (and relatively low tonnage) systems, where the real limiting factor of their use is the very small number of missiles available to fire as compared to ATGMs For any given era’s exquisite system you have to limit the supply explicitly.
SAMs also add another layer of complexity to the air war. Not insurmountable by any means, but an accumulation of simple rules makes a complex rule. 🙂