I first came across the “battle” for Trieste in an article in the British Army Special Issue on Urban Operations (Volume 2) by Major Matt Lewis. It seemed, and was presented, as an interestingly complex conflict so it lingered in my mind as a suitable subject for a future wargame.

When I heard about the Postcards from the Front postcard game jam Trieste was pretty rapidly front of my list. I had thoughts about a 2 or even 3 sided game (on a postcard!), with Allies and Yugoslavs competing to race to Trieste and beat the Germans. Reading a bit more on the web showed though that the BAR article hadn't really given much detail, and many web resources tended to give the Yugoslav or “allied” story. I then found out about the Geoffrey Cox book, The Race for Trieste, and discovered that one of the few copies for sale was at a local book dealer. A quick trip out and I had a copy, and learnt far more about Trieste and realised that the only way to do it, or at least the actions of 2-3 May, was as a solo game since the German's were very passive and the Yugoslav's primarily just a thorn in the Allied side - actual casualties amongst the Allies seeming to be in single figures.

Given the limitations of the postcard format this could only ever be a fairly “slight” game. My aim was really to use it as an “advert” for this fascinating moment in history, and I was really attracted to an urban combat which was very much about trying to save lives (no matter that it was of enemy soldiers rather than civilians) rather than trying to take them.

The core idea then came fairly quickly, having briefly toyed with a Tokaido style linear game. A simple “network graph” of the key locations, and some form of dice roll to rescue the POWs from each location. Dice had to be D6 for easy access - although I did think about a card based game, with asymmetric decks for each side. Initially I thought of each location as having a German “DM”, with positive for support and negative for resistance. But that wouldn't showcase the Yugoslav actions, hence the evolution to dice for both sides. It took me a while to realise that the dice would need to be reversed for some locations (such as the Tribunale) where the Allies and Yugoslav's actually had to join forces. I can't say I'm 100% happy with the extra 6-dot dice that has to be added in (but its an improvement on the +6 DM I started with), but trying it with just making D6 rather than 2D6 roles just didn't work as there both wasn't enough of a range in target numbers (realistically only 2-5) and not enough options for double/triples and single dice matches to make it fun.

Originally I had separate tracks for Allied and Yugoslav “prestige”, but then decided that they were pretty much the inverse of each other and that “tension” was a better measure. I also had a separate turn track, but in working out how to save space on the postcard decided that just adding 1 to Tension each turn would remove the need for a separate track. 10 just seemed like a sensible limit, nothing else drove the choice, but in playtesting it seems about right. I represented POW abstractly, because Villa Opicina was actually much bigger and I didn't want that to unbalance what is anyway a secondary element of counting POWs - but apart from Opicina 1 POW is pretty much always about 100 real POWs.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the game. It is very short, but it is just a postcard. However I'd like to think that every roll is meaningful, and there are a few real decisions to be made at each step, which is something I found that some postcard games lack.

And ultimately, if you click on any of the links in References and Further Reading and read a bit more about Trieste in 1945 then I've succeeded in my goal!

If you've any comments on the game then I'd love to hear them - you can email me at david@burden.name.

David

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