BAOR (game)

BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) is a two-player wargame set before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when British forces, as part of their NATO commitment, were based in West Germany as part of the defense against a potential Warsaw Pact invasion. One player controls Soviet invaders and the other player controls NATO defenders. The game was the third installment in SPI's "Central Front Series", and uses an updated rule system that could be used in all of these games.^[1] The hex grid map, scaled at 4 km per hex, covers German countryside between the cities of Hannover and Kassel.

Each unit starts a turn with a number of Action Points, which are expended on movement and combat. When a unit has used all its Action Points, it cannot move or attack, but can defend. Units also gain Friction Points for movement and attacks, a measure of the unit's exhaustion and ability to fight. A unit that accumulates too many Friction Points is eliminated.^[2]

Each turn, the players dice to determine who will go first. The active player either passes, or moves any number of units, and resolves combat with each of them. Any unit that does not move in this first phase cannot be moved for the remainder of the game turn. The second player then has the same opportunity to pass, or to move and fire. Play then returns to the first player, who may pass, or move and fire any units that a) were moved in their first phase, and b) still have Action Points left. The second player has the same opportunity. This alternating pattern of phases continues until both player pass, marking the end of one game turn, which represents 12 hours of the battle. At the start of the next game turn, all units begin with their full Action Points restored.

There are also rules for supply, artillery, attack helicopters, air power, and engineers and bridges, chemical/biological weapons, and tactical nuclear weapons.^[2]

The game includes two scenarios:

• "Race for the Weser": This four-turn scenario simulates the first two days of the invasion. The NATO forces try to set up a defensive line in front of the Weser River, and Soviet forces try to break through.
• "The Thin Red Line": This ten-turn scenario simulates the first five days of a Soviet invasion. It takes 15 hours to play.^[2]

In 1980, SPI announced a series of ten games titled the Central Front series that would simulate a Warsaw Pact invasion along the entire length of the border between East and West Germany. The first five games would cover the border, and the next five games would cover the area to the west of the first games, as the invasion progressed.^[3] These games, which shared a common set of rules and map scale, could be played separately, or the maps of two or more could be combined to create a large campaign game.

After Fifth Corps and Hof Gap were released in 1980, the third game in the series was a free pull-out game in Issue 88 of SPI's house magazine Strategy & Tactics titled BAOR. The game, which featured an update to the rules system,^[2] was designed by Charles T. Kamps, with cartography and graphic design by Redmond A. Simonsen. This would be Kamps' last game design for SPI — he was laid off due to financial difficulties at SPI. BAOR would also be SPI's last game in the Central Front series — because of its financial difficulties, SPI was taken over by TSR in 1982 and work on the series ended.

Two more games in the series, North German Plain (1988) and Donau Front (1989), were published by World Wide Wargames (3W), but using much simplified rules. The final five games in the series originally envisioned by SPI were never created or published.