A Brief History of the MBC

Contents
1. Beginnings
2. Vietnam days
3. The First Modern Campaign
4. Founder Leaves
5. Surviving Troubled Times
6. Founding the Soviet Squad
7. Merger Talks
8. Opening The Club To WW II; A Problem Posed, and Solved
9. Free Choice Of Sides

Beginnings

When Thomas Wieck asked me in July 2001 to assist him in founding a new club as a place to play the upcoming first HPS Squad Battles title, SBV, and future post WW II games (Thomas was a playtester for ME’67), I was not very interested in Vietnam, or any post WW II conflict, and would probably not even have ordered the game. I was thrilled, however, by the chance to create a club from scratch and avoid what back then I thought were the shortcomings of the "older“ roleplaying clubs in which Thomas and I were comparatively junior members, the American Civil War Game Club and the Napoleonic Wargame Club. Especially, we were both active in the Panzer Campaigns Club (we both commanded the Axis Forces there for a while) and the club was just then moving in a direction we both did not appreciate: there was a very real danger that it would become a pure ladder club like the Blitz. Adding post WW II games to a hitherto exclusively WW II club would have spoiled roleplaying completely, we thought back then, and hence the MBC was born.

The main difference to this very day between the MBC and all its sister clubs at Wargame.ch is the fact that the MBC doesn’t give the rank and file "command“ of regiments or brigades. We always found it odd that, especially in clubs that start with enlisted ranks, like the PCC, a member with a low NCO rank would "command“ something in the four-digits range. In our eyes, this was aggravated by the tendency to create huge army-level OOBs with lots of vacancies, and then brevetting the corps and army commanders to fantasy ranks commensurate with their position. In extreme cases, in small clubs like the PCC, an active member with a substantive rank of say PFC would be brevetted a LTG and given command of a corps, only that said "corps“ consisted of maybe him and two other guys (that’s what happened to me leastways). With the MBC, we went the opposite way. A member who holds command over a small group of other members is a Squad Leader and as his rank is usually sufficient to command a squad, there is no need for fantasy brevets. As a system, it appeared to us way more consistent and logical, and we also hoped that emphasizing the group over the individual (by not giving individual rank and file members units to "command“) would help develop some sort of small-unit cohesion and esprit de corps in the national forces.

We officially founded the club on August 4, 2001. I know that even senior members these days think that I was the initiator, and the fact that my membership ID is #1 supports this idea, but Thomas was #0, and he absolutely was the most active leading figure in the club for the first half year. Once we had kicked off the club, the members were pouring in; we were 25 after a mere fortnight and hit the 50 mark after a quarter of a year. The 100th member enlisted almost exactly a year after the club was founded, in August 2002.

Vietnam Days

In the beginning, everything was focused on ‘Nam. The main board was the Saigon Country Club (now Cafe Europa), the Commie board was the Ho Chi Minh Trail Roadhouse (now The Factory) and the Imperialists (now Allies/NATO) had Alice’s Restaurant (now The Eagle Club). Also the national forces were exclusively taken from the Vietnam War parties. The Imperialists had the USMC 1st Recon (always the most popular choice for new members), the US Army 173rd Airborne, the always small, but proud C/6RAR from the Australian army, and the tiny Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). The Commies, naturally, were the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Both Thomas and I resisted the inclination to join the USMC and assumed command of what we then saw as the "bad boys“. We thought that most members would lean towards going Imperialist and hence we wanted to make sure the Commie squads wouldn’t be stillborn. It turned out a prudent decision, as for a while the VC, under Thomas’ inspiring leadership, engaged in a spirited competition with the NVA (under my own command) for the better win/loss ratio. And in the beginning the Commies usually won. I am surprised so many Imperialists stayed around long enough to see TOD arrive, which immediately enabled them to turn the tables on us.

Did I mention that we started the club before anyone even had seen the game? It was two weeks before the European members had their copy, and I have to say the fortnight spent waiting for the game that was the sole reason for the existence of the club we had just created was one of the longest of my life. Now just imagine what would have happened had the game sucked! Well, it turned out that quite to the contrary it was big fun, and the late summer of 2001 saw an incredible outburst of gaming activity that must have meant a dry time for the other clubs many of us were in. Of course, eventually this subsided and gaming returned to a normal level.

Well, after a while we realized that the club wouldn’t grow forever. Members began to drop out almost as fast as they came in, and some squads were left with very few active members. In certain cases, when the SL himself was virtually AWOL, a squad started slowly dwindling away, as pages were never updated and nobody was there to rally the boys.

The First Modern Campaign

We expected a new boost from additional titles, but in the case of Middle East ‘67, the first Modern Campaign series game to be integrated in the club, this expectation was too optimistic. The game didn’t appeal to a lot of people in the first place, and being desperately unbalanced in the Israeli favor it didn’t really capture even those who played it (save some masochistic few). We had an Israeli (IDF) squad for a short while, but the SL lost interest and we assigned the few players to other Imperialist squads. An attempt to raise an Arab squad never got off the ground at all.

The real significance of the Modern Campaign (MC) series lay in the fact that the engine was so similar to the Panzer Campaigns (PzC) engine that the PCC seemed to have a natural claim on the new title. This issue became more important when, shortly after ME’67 (February 2002), SB: The Proud and the Few made its appearance, the first Squad Battles game with a WW II theme. This time it was our members who expected, quite naturally, that, like SBV and TOD, this game would be supported by the club. For a while, there was a general expectation that the PCC would cover all PzC/MC titles while we would support all SB games. In an effort not to spoil roleplaying, however, the leadership of both clubs then reached an agreement that drew the line thematically, not based on the game engines. The PCC would support all WW II titles, PzC or SB, and the MBC all post WW II titles, MC or SB. This agreement has remained in force until early 2004. As a result, though, the membership of both clubs began to overlap even more than before, as PCC members joined the MBC to play modern titles and MBC members went the other way to play The Proud and the Few and the next WW II SB game, Eagles Strike! I even founded the Imperial Japanese Army in the PCC, only to forever remain its only member.

Founder leaves

Meanwhile, the club underwent drastic organizational changes. In the last quarter of 2001 the club president, Thomas Wieck, slowly disappeared from the club, but without yielding the reigns to anyone else. As a result, for several months there was no club administration worth mentioning, pages were not updated, the boards went quiet, and the club was in very real danger of just dying a slow death. With a heavy heart and the consent of all senior members, on January 21, 2002, I declared the presidency vacant. In order to have a firmer grip on the individual squads which hitherto had been directly under the cabinet, the Forces Commander positions were created. Craig Deaton of the USMC was appointed US Forces Commander, and I personally assumed command of all the Communist Forces. In order to steer the club through the crisis, the presidency was transformed into a benevolent dictatorship for a limited time, with all powers hitherto held by the cabinet concentrated in one hand. A major effort was then made to clean the roster of all dead wood and streamline administration, and a new club website was created.

Surviving Troubled Times

I was determined to give the club three months during which it was either to prove that it could live, or else I’d let it die. I was not too optimistic, but it was worth a last try. And we succeeded. On April 14, 2002, a the extraordinary powers of the presidency reverted to a newly formed club cabinet that comprised Tom Ciampa (SecState), Craig Deaton (SecWar), Glyn Hargreaves (SecInt), and me as president.

The club had proven that, with an effort from its senior members, it could survive even in troubled times. It was not our last crisis, but it was the most serious one. Never after have I doubted that the MBC would be around for a long time.

Not all the new efforts we planned to revitalize the club actually materialized. We had hoped that the new SecWar would create some sort of training center, which never happened. On the other hand, Tom Ciampa gave the club its journal, the Line of Demarcation (LOD), which saw three issues May to November 2002 before Tom found it too hard to find contributors and stepped down as editor-in-chief, never to be replaced.

Founding the Soviet Squad

Summer 2002 brought us Fulda Gap ’85, the first MC title to be attractive for most of the present members, and some new ones. We founded the Soviet squad which today is one of the largest in the club. This was the last time, though, that a new game affected the club structure. Although in 2003 we added both SB: Korea and Korea ’85, nobody so far has felt a desire to raise a Korean squad. On the other hand, FG’85 and K’85 established the habit of multiplayer games in the club, which just aren’t viable with squad based games, but are a very rewarding mode of play with operational level ones.

2002 also saw the first club tournament, Tet 2002, run by Craig Deaton. Over a dozen participants played through all seven Hue scenarios in SBV. Unfortunately, most of them are sadly unbalanced, so badly that even mirroring didn’t help much. Still, it was a worthwhile endeavor that unfortunately ended with the initiator disappearing from the club.

Merger Talks

Troubled times were not yet over. In July 2003, Rich Hamilton suggested to merge the PCC and MBC, reasons being the sorry state of active membership participation in both clubs, the similarity of the games played, and the widely overlapping membership. Seeing how gaming was high in both clubs, but only very few members felt a desire to contribute to the club administration, it seemed an eminently sensible suggestion to concentrate the administrative efforts. Roleplay, which to preserve would have been the major objection to a merger, was already largely absent from both clubs, so the cabinet accepted the wisdom of the unpopular proposal and started negotiations with the PCC leadership.

Talks were a disaster, and the project proved stillborn. All the PCC would agree to was that the MBC membership would join the PCC, with no organizational chances whatsoever to account for the very different nature of both clubs. We buried the project and embarked upon our own course of streamlining the club, so to free some administrative capacities. The NVA and VC were merged under Rich Hamilton as the Asian Forces. The wide array of tiny squads on the Imperialist side was consolidated into the NATO forces with only three squads, USMC, US Army, and Commonwealth (formerly Australian). The reporting business and most squad administration was moved to the FC level, so to concentrate it in one hand on each side. The SLs in future would only be the assistants of the FC, thus reducing the workload on these jobs to a dimension a “normal” member would be able to handle.

Opening The Club To WW II; A Problem Posed, and Solved

It proved to be the last reorganization but one. In winter 2003/2004 the cabinet learned that the PCC was in serious danger of dissolution. Rather than reopen the merger debate, which had already once proved abortive, the cabinet decided to open the club for WW II gaming, so that all PCC members who felt that way could do their gaming under our roof. It was the logical consequence of the failed merger and it will hopefully give the MBC a more solid fundament, for a long life. As long as HPS keeps giving us interesting new games, there is no reason why the club shouldn’t see its fifth (or tenth?) anniversary.

The inclusion of the WW II games (PzC and SB) necessitated yet another organizational change. In almost all PzC and most SB titles set in WW II, the German army was a major protagonist, so it was almost automatic that a German force was to be raised in the club now. The decision was easy, but it presented us with a grave problem. Germany was the enemy of both the Russians and the Allies in WW II, yet the two parts of the divided Germany during the Cold War were allied with NATO (Federal Republic) and the Warsaw Pact (German Democratic Republic). So was the German army to be NATO, or Commie, or neither? Or did we need several German armies?

In the end, the only reasonable solution was to create the German army as a separate entity, representing both the WW II Wehrmacht and the post WW II Bundeswehr (we skipped the East German forces for the time being, as it appeared unlikely that members wanted to be part of those). We had thought of some sort of “wings” model where a German Forces Command would be the roof for a WW II Wehrmacht, a post WW II Bundeswehr, and maybe even a Nationale Volksarmee (East German) squad, but in the end it seemed easier to just have one generic German army squad. With the 5. Panzerdivision chosen as unit designation, a unit that existed both before 1945 and after 1955, there was not even the need to make a choice there. So at present the club is composed of three major entities, the NATO/Allies, the Communist Forces (including Soviet and Asian), and the Germans.

Free Choice Of Sides

The existence of the generic German army squad, in turn, made it imperative to give players free choice of sides in all games. A rule whereby a German squad member could play against an Allied/NATO one for battle points only in a WW II game, whereas in a post WW II two game the same pairing would count as maneuver, would have been utterly confusing and just not feasible. As a consequence, from now on every game between members of different national Forces counts as battle, regardless of the side played. Only games between members of the same army are maneuvers.

March 14, 2004