Overthinking it: Weighing in on something so not qualified to talk about

  

 

Jerry over at the Cardboard Commander blog has just posted his take on the most recent Compass Town Hall, specifically the discussion around the reception of Combat! Vol. 3:Arnhem (Compass Games, 2025). CC is always worth reading (and his YouTube channel is always worth checking out), and this was personal for him; in his most recent post he talked about bouncing off Combat! Vol.3. in this post. He begins briefly reiterating his own experience with Vol. 3, and then goes into Compass publisher Bill Thomas’s comments on the public reception of Vol. 3 on the Town Hall (Episode 129, about 42 minutes into the Town Hall and runs for about seven minutes in all) and suggests some options for customers (in general) going forward.

"Any game's harm diminishes me, / Because I am involved in game-kind."
(With apologies to John Donne).

CC made a lot of good points, and I encourage readers to go have a look at both posts (and have a general poke around while you’re there). But the overall reaction to Combat! Vol. 3 that Bill Thomas (for the uninitiated, Compass's owner/ publisher) was referencing during the Town Hall got me thinking tangentially – as is my want – about the wargaming industry and how everything is amplified by social media and its attendant hysteria. This post isn't intended to diminish or repute anything Cardboard Commander brought to the table – to start with, Jerry has played the game while I haven’t. I’m more interested in how the game is being portrayed in the public discourse. Jerry was clear and concise regarding the game about what didn’t work for him. But there has been a lot of spleens vented in the last few weeks (maybe longer – I started to notice it about a fortnight ago), and I wanted to examine the scant evidence available regarding what people are generally feeling about the game, the signal within the noise.

Compass Games is a different beast to pretty much any other company in the wargame publishing sphere. They are one of the very few companies that maintains availability of games when they're selling (I believe Revolution Games and some European publishers also try to keep their back-catalogues in print). So, those that can resist the FOMO associated with the gaming industry in general can probably expect to be able to grab a copy of that game they missed out within six months of the first batch selling out. A side-effect of this is that the reprint files tend to be untouched from the previous version, so the known errata isn’t necessarily addressed, but this meant that I only had to wait about six months for Imperial Tide (Compass Games, 2022) to come back into stock, instead of watching a pre-order number slowly creep up over long years.

As I said, I can't speak directly to the game(s); I haven't played any of the Combat! series (and, to be honest, I’m unlikely to; the granularity of the game just doesn’t appeal to me), but I will say that Compass games sometimes suffer from an expectation of player foreknowledge (the notion having a clear idea of what the designer meant, rather than what is committed to the page).* I haven't seen this myself in the No Peace or Tide games – series games are where you might expect to find this kind of oversight – but I have seen it occasionally in one-off games; nothing insurmountable, but something that disrupts the flow of the game or impedes understanding. Maybe that was what was lacking here. I will say that, in my experience, it feels like Compass can sometimes be a little too hands-off with the way rules are presented, leaving it up to the designer or developer. A while ago at another Town Hall, I mentioned in the chat that I'd just got a copy of Flanks of Gettysburg (Compass Games, 2024) – this would have been about six months after its release – and Brittani Eaton-Koch highlighted it and made an off-hand comment that I'd need to download a copy of the living rules before I tried to play it.

As for the scenarios, that's a different thing. I don’t like commenting on a game I haven't played (which seems to put me in the minority), but enough people are saying there are some issues with them, maybe there should have been more playtesting. But this also comes down to play-tester availability. A lot of people want fully tested games, but would never dream of giving up their own time to playtesting an in-development game because it’s not done yet. If nobody puts their hand up to help out, things are going to be missed. In publishing of any kind, products need multiple sets of eyes, different viewpoints, or groupthink can set in and mistakes will inevitably be made, or existing problems overlooked. That said, I don't have time for complaints about introductory or learning scenarios; every free-standing series game that comes out should assume it may be somebody's introduction to the game and have a couple of on-ramp scenarios to get the newbies started (having said that, there's no reason they can't also be challenging and fun for old hands, but I digress).

I feel sorry for Compass as a whole. Lots of publishers try to have a more or less open discourse with their customers; GMT does their monthly update, Worthington is getting better at communicating their plans and production-status (although I really wish they'd have a few weeks’ lead-time for announcing when their fourteen-day Kickstarter campaigns are going to start; I'd probably back more games given a heads-up), and Legion Wargames has upped their game with a quite active Discord channel. Even MMP does a monthly (IIRC) podcast now, talking about their products, events, and what's in the pipeline.

But Compass is the only company of which I'm aware that has such an open, two-way discussion directly with their public. A lot of designers and developers show up in the chat as well, and most questions get answered, though the answer isn't always what one hopes for. 

Compass is extremely open with their customers, which is a profoundly good thing, but that kind of familiarity breeds a measure of contempt. The company consistently gets more crap for their perceived failings than any other three wargame publishers put together. I was a little dismayed when I saw the three pages of "errata" in Burning Banners (Compass Games, 2024) (in truth, mostly clarifications of rules rather than typos), but I've worked as a copy editor, and I know how hard it is to get everything right on the day. I understand Bill's frustration when other publishers seem to get a free pass on their mistakes. And kicking Compass in the butt has become a sport for some. Maybe they even deserve it sometimes, but in the case of Combat! Vol. 3, it feels like a pile-on.

Combat! Volume 3: Arnhem stats (sourced from BGG, 22 Feb. 2026).

So, let's take a look at the the numbers. Some point to the BGG rating for the game for validation of the criticism (never a good measure to my mind, but let's work with it for the moment). The Overall Rating for Combat! Vol. 3 is 6.9, considerably lower than the previous two volumes (8.4 and 9.1 respectively). But if we dig into the numbers (such as they are), you start to see a shift. At the time of writing, 59 people indicating ownership of the game, of which 40 have given a numerical valuation, and from these 40 ratings we get the less inspiring aggregate of 6.9.

Combat! Volume 3: Arnhem Ratings (sourced from BGG, 22 Feb. 2026).

But let’s dig a little deeper. Looking at the individual rankings adds some nuance. Twenty-seven people rated the game as a 7 or higher (67%), while only seven contributors rated the game as a four or lower (7%). 

If we dismiss the shrillest of boosters and denouncers, removing the knee-jerk 1s (three ratings – 7.5% pf the original forty) and hysterical 10s (six ratings – 15%) from the count altogether we’re left with a more rational pool thirty-one numerical ratings. Keep in mind that this levelling hurts the higher order ratings in real terms twice as much as it does the lower ones – 6-3 removed ratings respectively. Out of this reduced pool, twenty-one people rated the game as a 7-9 (67.7%) while only five rate it as a 2-4 (16.1%), a ratio of 4:1 favourable responses over unfavourable ones, and about 3.5:1 over the middling scores). 

The highest number of individual rating-levels goes to 8, the only level to make double digits (and 25% of full count of ratings overall). This all goes to suggest – as much as such a small sample size can suggest anything – that the actual response to the game is much more positive than the conversation around it would suggest.

None of this means you need to like this iteration of Combat! or the whole series. No game is ever going to appeal to everyone. I can’t speak to the lived experience of people who genuinely didn’t enjoy a game, and I’m in no way trying to undermine anything Jerry said in his blog post, he’s been around the block enough times to know what works for him. All I can do is point to the numbers, and, so far, the numbers for Combat! Vol. 3 aren’t too bad at all.

I don't expect this to change anybody's opinion about anything. This was really an exercise to slake my own curiosity. Thank you to Cardboard Commander for the inspiration, and to all who have read this far for following me down the rabbit-hole.