Valor and Victory and ASL: A War Gaming Cross over

By David Garvin

One thing I’ve found in war gaming is that I tend to stay in one genre for most of my gaming. In spite of the computer evolution of the 1990s that saw many war games be released in digital form, I have almost always come back to play my games on cardboard. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, I have stuck to tossing dice.

For a while, I did get into Flames of War (FOW), but my interest faded with the advent of edition 4, which coincided with my deep dive into Advanced Squad Leader. But one thing that I do like about war games, in general, is that the variety of genres allows many people with various interests to play.

As stated, I started in board wargames. Squad Leader was my first serious foray into gaming, and in that original box is a scenario, Hill 621, that has become somewhat legendary. Although it doesn’t depict a single battle as such, it does provide a metaphor for the Soviet offensive in 1944.

The first time I fully realized how legendary this scenario is, occurred in Fredericksburg, Virginia a few years ago. I was there for a FOW tournament as part of a larger miniatures gaming fest. Between matches, I wandered around and stumbled across this macro game going on in another room. It was quite obviously a Second World War game and the scale was similar to that of FOW, but there was something quite familiar about it. Then it dawned upon me and I asked if this was Hill 621. It most certainly was! This was my first real taste of a scenario from one game system being used in another.

Moving forward deeper into the 21st Century, I have found another crossover of sorts, and it is between ASL and Valor and Victory from Matrix Games. The interesting part of this is that this is much more than a single scenario from one system incorporated into another. In this case, the ASL historical release “Shield of Cholm“, about which I have previously written, is found in the Matrix system.

Intrigued by the concept of this Historical ASL (HASL) in a different form, I was compelled to download the DLC and try it. The bottom line up front is that the map is practically the same as that in the HASL and the game plays only slightly different from the ASL version, all things being considered.

The sequence is essentially an IGOUGO format as with many cardboard games, with some defensive fire interaction during the moving player’s turn. The actual sequence differs slightly from that of ASL; there is no Advancing Fire phase, which I found out the hard way the first time I played. The defensive fire is automated by the computer, ie, the defending player does not need to decide when to fire.

That differs from the in-person version, in which the defender may wish to hold his fire for a more valuable target, or even to draw in an unsuspecting attacker. Hidden Initial Placement (HIP) is in effect, and the concept of concealment is dealt with in a manner similar to HIP. Although there is no residual fire, there are fire lanes if you happen to stumble across a machine gun.

The draw, for me, when I play war games, is to capture the flavor of a battle that actually happened, and I have found that both ASL and Valor and Victory draw me in for that very reason. They play differently, of course, acknowledging the characteristics of the medium in which the game is played. With ASL, there is a greater time commitment, of course, given that I have to set a time to play my opponent and the interaction between attacker and defender is much more complex.

With Valor and Victory, the ease with which one can start a game is a good draw and it can help to pass the time when one only has only a few minutes before he has to go back to work.  All this to say that if you are a fan of ASL and are looking for an online game that can give you a similar experience, then Valor and Victory is that game. Conversely, if you have enjoyed any of the Valor and Victory games, then maybe, just maybe, you ought to give this a read.

David Garvin is an avid wargamer who enjoys many genres of the hobby.