Wood gas, charcoal trucks and North Africa
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I'm setting up Scenario 1, the "Race for Tunis" in the OCS Tunisia game. There is a lot of vocabulary I to learn, some of which seems to be assumed known to the player. For example, the setup OOB calls for "charcoal trucks," which I've never heard of. Cursory examination of relevant forums didn't turn up much information. So I had to go to Google, where I found the following links.
- From the Reading Eagle
- Shanghai Times
- Life Magazine, March 8, 1943 has a very interesting human interest article by Corporal Robert Hopkins, who turns out to be Harry Hopkins son.
So that's pretty cool.
We're not going to ever run out fuel, not really. We might get low for a few decades before finding a sustainable steady state, but the fuel is there. It grows by itself, for free.
Setting up Tunisia
Setting up an OCS game which models an actual, historical battle is a non-trivial exercise. Tunisia has the advantage of of having few units on the map at the beginning of the game. However, this is offset by having often substantial reinforcements arriving nearly every single turn. For game play reasons, these reinforcements should be organized in advance. Unfortunately, I don't have the table space to organize that. The space I have is roughly 2'x3' total, the size of a standard map.
The set up is interesting though. I recognize the general situation from playing Chadwick's Race for Tunis a couple of times. For some reason, the map and counters are difficult to read on both Chadwick's game and this OCS game, so they share that as well.
As it turns out, I didn't have enough time to devote learning the OCS system to play 14 turns of this scenario, so I ended up tearind it down. I'm still interested in it, but I want to get more comfortable with the OCS system first.