Fighting In The Village

ITALY 1944

Recently I managed to get in a game of Blitzkrieg Commander in 15mm. It was a meeting engagement between a German mixed Kampfgruppe and a battered American infantry battalion. Both forces were cautiously moving into a village at the base of the nearby foothills (this gave me a chance to set up the new 15mm village we have as part of the store's terrain). For objectives we were using the Objective Cards we developed a while ago (mentioned in a couple of previous entries) which have proven to be fairly popular in the shop.

It started out OK, with both sides making cautious inroads towards the village and nearby hills. Then everything went south from there. The American commander went on a tear for the rest of the game, with his units averaging no less than three orders per turn (with more than a couple of freebie orders from critical success command rolls). The Germans,, on the other hand averaged exactly one order per turn for each of their units.

Looking North From The Village Into The Hills - Note the Panthers Watching The Valleys.

This continued on for several turns, until we finally called the game. It had rapidly turned into a one-sided affair, with the Americans taking three actions for every one of the Germans. This game highlights one of the biggest sticking points we have faced in drawing new people to the ruleset - the variable actions in a turn, from none to several, with no way to really control it.

Other than the variable orders aspect, this is one of the most popular rulesets we have seen at the shop for WWII (and its sister game for moderns Cold War Commander). The combat is smooth and fast paced; there is a need for combined arms; there are numerous challenges for deploying your troops, utilizing firepower, etc. all of which lead to a very fun, fast paced and exciting game. The one stumbling block has been if one side can't get anything going for orders because of the dice. Those games quickly become lopsided and usually are called early.

Looking Back Into The Village - The Americans Were Rapidly Rolling Up The German Positions.

So, because we very much enjoy the rules and want to use as much of them as we can, we are going to try a slight tweak to them. At the point when you would normally roll to see if you can give a group of units an order, we are going to instead use a deck of specially created cards which will determine the number of orders (from 0-4) you can give to that group. The number of orders is modified by all the applicable command modifiers (for 20cm of command distance, initiative fire, etc.), so it is easy to push a group to no orders for the turn by extreme command range, etc.

This should still allow the possibility of zero orders given to a unit in any particular turn, but by using a fixed deck there is a guarantee that somewhere down the line you will draw some cards that will grant you orders. Hopefully this will keep the flavor of the game in terms of allocating your resources and not being able to get exactly what you want out of a unit, but will prevent the "bad dice" night where one side is running around fighting a war while the other hasn't apparently gotten the memo about it yet.

Stay turned for a report on how it works.

Until next time...

Cheers!

Dan