Sherman tank crew of 'C' Squadron, 13th/18th Royal Hussars, 27th Armoured Brigade, rest and write letters home by the side of their vehicle, 10 June 1944. IWM (B 5425).
Join us to help playtest Death occurs abroad, an archive-building roleplaying game set during World War Two. The game combines a traditional hex-and-counter wargame with a collaborative journaling role-playing game involving form filling, letter writing, constructing memorial cards, and completing war diaries.
Overview
‘Some delay in these matters is inevitable, particularly when death occurs abroad.’
Death occurs abroad takes its name from the above note, found on the back of Army Form B104-83B. The form is the official letter sent to a family in the event of a soldier’s death. The note advises of potential delays in obtaining death certificates and the return of personal effects to the late soldier’s estate. Inspired by this note, the game takes death as its theme, and delay as its core mechanic.
Death occurs abroad combines two games. The first is Peter Bogdasarian’s Tank on Tank (Lock ‘n Load 2015), a hex-and-counter wargame that represents tank combat on the Western Front in 1944-45. The second is a journaling roleplaying game designed to represent the work (administrative and emotional) of responding to wartime casualties.
Designed for ‘quick play,’ Tank on Tank ‘offers an engaging experience for both new and seasoned wargamers, delivering the tension and excitement of tank combat without complex rules.’ Death occurs abroad punctures this fast-flowing gameplay at the moments in which it is most intense, the moments at which enemy units are destroyed. The wargame halts mid-turn, while the cost of losses (lives not materiel) are counted.
This hiatus initiates a second form of play in which deaths and injuries are documented and an archive of remembrance, common to both British and German forces, is constructed. This is a kind of dark play, interrupting the easy pleasures of the game with potentially uncomfortable reflection. The commonality of this archive notwithstanding, there is an asymmetry in the forms of remembering on offer, this is partly deliberate (it must surely prompt question if not complaint) and partly practical (accessing the forms used by the German military proved beyond my expertise).
Death occurs abroad is not intended to be fun. Nor it is intended to be historically accurate (though historical records do indicate that in 1944 Montgomery, who wanted to tie down German armour in the east, decided to use armoured units as he could afford to lose tanks but not infantrymen). It is intended to provoke thinking about what it means to simulate war, about what it means to play at war, and about what and who might be remembered, by whom, and in what ways.