State of Play: Great War Commander (1/6), and Undaunted: Normandy

 

 

So, I was able to catch up with our Wednesday night host, B, on Monday last week for a couple of games in a kind of reciprocal assistance gaming session. Great War Commander (Hexasim, 2018) was one of the first games I put on to my 6x6 list for 2023. I’ve had it for, I think, about two years or may a tad longer. I’d punched it, read through the rules when I bought it and again around March last year, but had never managed to field this visually splendid game. Its mechanics are based on Chad Jensen’s Combat Commander: Europe (GMT Games, 2006), which I also own, and have similarly never actually played (in spite of also possessing several expansions – that would be the completist gene expressing itself), which is set in the Western and Eastern fronts of the European theatre during World War II. Great War Commander shifts the action – as the name would suggest – from the Second to the First World War, making a few minor changes, but keeping true to the mission of the first game.

B Offered a tutorial game of Great War Commander, but in return, I was to give hm a refresher in the Undaunted system. B and I had played two scenarios of Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019) a back in July of 2023. On the strength of that, he’d bought Undaunted: Stalingrad (Osprey, 2022) for him and his son to play, but life had managed to put the breaks on that. The Undaunted system is a neat, reasonably simple system that nonetheless provides a much more immersive experience than I anticipated, and Undaunted: Stalingrad builds kind of legacy-style narrative development into the mix; scenarios are played sequentially, but the success of failure in one scenario will affect the set-up of the next and the resources available or denied to the combatants. What’s not to like?

We stuck to the first scenario, La Reye. It’s a straight capture-the-flag set-up that has balanced forces and objectives, though may be skewed a little in the American’s favour. Or that could just be sour grapes; I played the Germans, and though we gave each other some blows, B romped it in six points to three (full disclosure, the Germans start with three points).

After grabbing some lunch, we went straight into my first real game of Great War Commander. The scenario is historically based (as, I believe, they are all) a dawn raid by the Germans on a little Belgian town, where a young Lt. Erwin Rommel made a name for himself as an on-the-ground tactician. As the game played out, art imitated life.

The action, and to a degree the level of player agency, in the Combat Commander/Great War Commander system is driven by the two players’ Action Decks. Each aide has a deck of 72 cards which serve in a host of rolls. Each card has an Order and an Action, and these will dictate what options are available to the player in a given turn. In this role, they also help to mimic the fog-of-war aspect of tactical fighting in a dynamic environment, limiting the player’s options using several mechanisms (more on these later).

The Germans start on the edge of fairly open terrain, with a tree-lined road leading up to the town. The French formation guarding the town were caught napping. It felt over before it began for the French (me) when I drew my starting hand of an Offensive order (which requires adjacency, when all of my units were spread across the town), two Artillery Request Orders and an Artillery Denied, which would have been great since the Germans were probably in view, except for the fact that only an officer of a forward observer (I think they’re called Spotters in GWC) can call in an artillery barrage, and neither of mine had line of sight my commanding officer didn't even have line of sight to another of his own units).

The dispositions of the antagonists, and my sorry opening hand.

A big part of GWC is the attitude of the belligerents, indicated in the scenario details. Each side is either attacking, defending or on patrol, and this will dictate how big a hand you draw. The scenario will also state the parameters for how many orders a side can declare in a turn and how many cards they can discard if no orders are given. The Germans (attackers) in Scenario 1 have a hand of six cards and can give up to two orders or discard three cards, while the French (asleep-at-the-wheel defenders) have a hand size of four cards, and the player can give two orders, or a discard a mere one card from their hand. If that sounds like a disadvantage, you don’t know how much of one until you don’t draw a move or a fire card in the first four rounds.

B, playing the Germans, had a full three rounds to advance and get some of them into defensible positions – ge still has his heavy machine gun out in the open, but that was to offer the best coverage, and actually fire on two of my positions, and I still couldn’t respond because of my less-than-spectacular card draws.

An orderly (unchallenged) German advance.

I thought I’d address this in a later GWC game report, but I did so spectacularly bad early on that I should take this opportunity. Gary Mengle on YouTube at Ardwulf’s Lair has gone on record several times about why he doesn't enjoy playing Combat Commander; this is why. The deck is made up of 72 cards, and among those are around a dozen or so each of Move and Fire commands. Not until my fifth draw did I see a Fire command, and on the sixth I pulled a Move. That’s round five and round six. In those first four rounds, B was able to steadily move his units up and place them in good positions for an attack. He even got some shooting in. Sometimes you’re just going to pull a crappy hand. Sometimes you’re going to pull three or four crappy hands in a row. It may even cost you the game. This is where Ardy and I disagree. Ardwulf argues that this is a failure of player agency. He goes to great lengths to make it clear it’s a personal preference, that he simply doesn’t enjoy not being able to do something for three or four rounds in a row. I choose to see this as one of the virtues of the game, or at least something like a virtue. Troops in small being out of command and paralysed by indecision is probably the norm rather than an anomaly. Research has shown that when people are put in a situation of high stress and limited information, roughly 75% of them will freeze up, waiting for more information before they will act, with the remaining fairly evenly split between breaking down emotionally or acting on the available limited information.*

To me, this amounts to the tactical equivalent of what a chit-pull mechanic does in an operational game. In some chit-pull situations, the last chit or two in the cup don’t get pulled. The drawn chits are returned to the receptacle, and a new turn begins. It’s possible for a regiment or a corps to remain inactive to two or even three turns. Or perhaps, it’s closer to the orders cards in the Commands and Colors games, where, like me a couple of weeks ago in our Austerlitz La Grande Battle game, I simply couldn’t seem to draw an order for one whole flank and had to watch the French troops draw dangerously close to my side of the board, taking pot-shots at my forward-most troops.

To me, this is a similar thing to the inclusion of combat dice in the Conquerors series of games (Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2019) and its sister games); Like Combat Commander/Great War Commander, the system is designed around the drawing cards for all the game’s randomised functions, including allocating damage in combat. Apparently, some people don’t like leaving their chance to cards, and insist they have dice instead, so special dice with the same statistical rage of results as the cards – separate sets reflecting the variations between the two sides – are included in every copy of a Conquerors series game. I don’t know how many people use them, but to me it feels like a departure from the intention of the designer. And it’s giving in to misguided notions of player agency.

If the game was significantly longer (a bigger time-investment), or I was more invested in the competition than in the narrative or the experience of playing, I might feel more strongly about it. But to me it’s an artefact of the game that doesn’t really occur that often (though it will feel like it sometimes) and creates something like real-life experience rather than the cinematic experience some people expect. Here the rant endeth. For now.

French line falling back.

As you might imagine, it was difficult to come back from a beginning like that. The Germans swept into the town, checking the French units as they went. I did manage to call down an artillery barrage on top of several German sections (in a departure from Combat Commander, four-figure units in Great War Commander represent around 20 men), and a handful of suppressed French survivors managed to hold their own in a melee assault on a position that happened to also have (thanks to a timely card with a Hidden Position (Scenario Defender Only) Action) a 75mm gun – when opposing nits end up in the same hex an all-or-nothing fight breaks out and the loser is eliminated. And I knocked B’s communications out, so the Germans couldn’t call in their own artillery support.

But the day belonged to the Kaiser’s soldiers, many of whom managed to achieve the stated goal of the scenario and leave the map intact via the roads leading out of the town on the far side from their entrance. I think the final tally was four or maybe five points for the French to more than 20 for the Germans, who had also managed to take most of the French victory point locations as well. All in all, it was a tough lesson, but a worthwhile one, and an early loss hasn’t dampened my consideration of the game. I’ll admit, I’m looking forward to more fire and movement orders.

 

* This is getting off-topic, but there is an excellent short piece on this very psychological phenomenon I recommend everybody read (link here). It's an excerpt from an excellent book by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, called The ExaminedLife: how we lose and find ourselves. The excerpt is confronting – I used to send it to the people and insist they read it when I was a fire warden – but the whole book is worth a read if you’re interested in why people behave the way they do (including those across the table from you, and of course, yourself).