Close Assault

From a time when the best graphics a computer game offered were on the front
cover of the box, Avalon Hill’s _Close Assault_ offers a hybrid computer/board
game experience by enclosing cardboard counters and a playing board. The
result, per the manual, is a “visual impact… much greater than on even the
best of computer graphics displays” while freeing for the processor, “a huge
amount of limited resources” normally used to manage the graphical interface.
Those resources instead are devoted to accounting for every soldier engaged in
the scenario, and fulfilling a dream of the era’s simulation board-gamers:
realism in what you know and when you know it. In _Close Assault_ , your
opponent’s units appear on the board only when they are spotted by yours,
their morale is only evident by their behavior, and only your experience will
tell you the odds of success. This is a far cry from the usual board
simulation experience, where you could pour over combat success tables and
footnoted modifiers to judge exactly where the chances break in your favor,
and use the morale markers on your opponent’s front line to decide where to
push.

Close Assault’s combination of three scenarios and three forces allows
representation of a dozen different historical situations spanning northern
Europe in World War II. Squad-level tactics are simulated on a common map
showing a small village and three levels of topography. Commands are entered
numerically or as single letters in response to computer prompts, as each
player proceeds through six phases of hotseat turns — units moving, firing,
and reacting — which represent two minutes of battle. As the computer kicks
out the results of your gambles and guesses, counters come and go on the map,
squads being spotted and routed or destroyed. In that way, the game is a
genuine hybrid, flicking players’ attention back and forth between the
cardboard map and the computer screen. Units also come and go from your
command: when they become demoralized or enter close combat, the computer
takes over. Meanwhile, the manual comes straight out of the board-game
simulation tradition, outlined by topic and case with occasional lessons in
history and battle science, such as (regarding morale), “beneath the surface
of any organized army lies a terrified mass of men who long for home and
peace”.

The game experience would be limited to the standard armchair-lieutenant’s
view, but for a simple number noted on the squad record pad (an analog device
to help the humans remember casualties, equipment, experience, and leader
placement). The number represents you on the battlefield. Somehow, this simple
mechanism effectively engrosses players in the course of the battle. If you
become a casualty, the computer finishes the scenario for you while you watch,
possibly even carrying your soldiers to victory if you left your sergeants
well-positioned.

Besides two-player hot-seat, solitaire is available, wherein the programmers
put the computer’s capable calculations to work on multi-turn tactics, nuanced
with the historical characteristics of the opposing nationalities, from
equipment to morale to battle tactics.