Squad Leader - Strengths

Strengths

Squad Leader attempted to simulate many types of battlefield phenomena not addressed before in a tactical board game, and enjoyed a cosmetic treatment unmatched then and afterwards. Some of these strengths include:

• The effects of leadership on morale is elegantly handled, with extraordinary leaders (only) having direct effects on the ability of men to move, shoot, and resist enemy attack.

• The rigid turn sequences of war games up to that point in time was dispensed with in favor of the innovative eight-phase turns described above. Units can interact with enemy units during the other player's turn.

• The game, as explained by John Hill's Designer's Notes, encourages players to learn and adopt basic infantry tactics - defenders are encouraged to site machine guns to dominate fields of fire, while attackers are encouraged to have some men give covering fire while others moved.

• Some support weapons can fire multiple times in a phase, and machine guns have the ability ("penetration") to inflict damage through a line of several adjacent hexes - two hexes for a light machine gun, and six or even eight for a heavy machine gun.

• The system is flexible and open-ended; the geomorphic boards can represent reasonably well many types of terrain, and the use of "Scenario Special Rules" expand these possibilities even further. Victory conditions are also flexible and imaginative, not being confined to mere shootouts between opposing forces, scenarios could simulate all manners of military missions (especially in the follow-up modules), such as successfully escorting convoys (Scenario 15), parachute and glider assaults (Scenarios 33 and 46), the deliberate assault on prepared positions (Scenario 9), the ambush (Scenario 13), the meeting engagement (Scenario 20), the hasty attack/defence (Scenario 7), the passage of obstacles (Scenario 27), the withdrawal under fire (Scenario 40), and even such things as hostage situations (Scenario 26). In other words, missions that real life company commanders would have faced and performed.

• The quality of the physical components has rarely been equalled by other games; counters are functional, evocative, well designed (free of clutter), and attractive. Especially popular are the red "berserk" counters which added much flavor to the game; Cross of Iron adds striking white-on-black counters to represent the Waffen SS. The mounted mapboards (both in Squad Leader and its offspring) are a hallmark of Avalon Hill, and continued right through to the introduction of the ASL Starter Kits by Multi-Man Publishing in 2004 (which featured mapboards printed on inexpensive cardboard stock). The mapboards are also photo-realistic, with an attractive top down view that is also functional, with line of sight (LOS) drawn from hex center to hex center and blocked only by terrain depictions (often with accompanying shadows) on the artwork itself, not the entire hex as in other games.