Before I persuaded my Regular Opponents to play some BPRE 28mm (covered here), we spent most of the afternoon giving our usual WW2 game, Chain of Command, another play. In this case I found myself in the Gamesmaster role as the Creative and Dastardly got to work. It’s a role I am increasingly finding myself in, enjoying keeping an eye on the rules, arbitrating any disagrements and occasionally passing over advice.
I decided to kick off my Games Mastering before I even got to the Dastardly Regular Opponent’s house. Chain of Command has a very good system for building your forces (take a platoon add supports) but it does occasionally feel a little odd in the single games that everyone is running at 100% with no one removed for illness, injury or just lack of supply (part of the reason I think more games need to be played using campaign systems). So for this game, I asked both players to roll a D6 for every squad they had and that would tell you how many figures would be removed. Support points could then be spent to refill your manpower, at the cost of limiting your wider support options.
Turns out this early war engagement in the desert was happening at just the wrong time, with both sides having to call back to HQ for additional men, the Kiwis taking the most losses due to pre-game attrition. This didn’t limit the support choices too much, with both forces managing to get some impressive kit on the board. The Kiwis, being on the defensive in this action, invested in a pair of minefields to help focus the enemy assault, as well as an armoured car with Boys AT rifle to back up the troops at the front (obviously borrowed by the platoon NCO when he went back to collect the support troops). The Germans on the other hand went for a pair of armoured vehicles, with an armoured car and a Panzer 3 to help push the assault forward.
As for the game itself? Well, I didn’t take too many extra pictures but it was definitely a fun game to watch and arbitrate for. I added in a little tweak that a sandstorm (reducing engagement ranges all the way down and slowing movement) would hit after two end turns but that rule ended up not being used in the end – the threat of it though definitely helped to affect both sides during the fight, once it was revealed after the first turn end.
Instead, the pair of minefields forced the Germans through a central position of the camp, where an Allied Jumping Off Point nearby allowed for the rapid deployment of infantry sections for close-range defensive fires. This area saw both the Germans and the British get torn apart, with only the arrival of the third British section holding the area. On the other flank, the Pazner 3 and the armoured car ended up trading rounds with a dug-in AT team and infantry section, which eventually caused the armoured car to brew up and the Panzer 3 to back off under a pile of shock. One major element of this game was the use of covering fire, both against the Afrika Korps infantry sections to keep them pinned down coming the other way to keep the Kiwis from knocking out tanks.
The game ended with the Germans voluntarily falling back – with a sand storm about to hit and every German infantry squad in a bad way from trying to assault the dug-in (and rather furious) Kiwis, this assault had been well and truly stopped. Chain of Command is a game I really enjoy, and I’m very much looking forward to getting to play some more. I should probably finish off my own Antipodean platoon, as well as play around with a few more options to bring some of the campaign-esque gameplay to the one-offs we play.