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).

 

 

State of Play: the slow drilling of hard boards

We’ve been back from our interstate jaunt for nearly two weeks but I haven’t made any progress on my self-appointed 6x6 challenge. Not quite at the point of despair yet, but there’s a kernel of nervous anticipation that I may not be able to pull it off, especially since my primary opponent, T, left late last week for nearly a month overseas. Gaming will be had in the ensuing weeks, but how much of it will be progress toward the outstanding twenty-nine game target I set for myself? We’ll see.

 I did get a game in with T before he left. Commands and Colors: Ancients – Expansion 1: Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (GMT Games, 2006); Scenario 6: Crocus Plain 352BC. T played the Phocians, and I took leadership of the Macedonians.

Superior numbers of cavalry

By the numbers, Philip of Macedon would have been the favourite, given his superiority in cavalry numbers, despite fielding roughly the same number of sandals-on-the-ground, plus he also had a favourable position, wedging the Phocians up against the shore and limiting their manoeuvrability.

On the night, T put up a valiant fight, taking out two of my leaders before the end, but with the help of a couple of lucky card draws, I was able to use my cavalry to good, replicating Philip’s tactics by probing T’s Centre with my heavy troops (Philip’s innovation of the long-piked phalanxes), rolling-up his left flank to take the game, 6-5. Being forced to retreat to the water’s edge cost T’s units a couple of blocks, making them easier prey. The game was over in about eight rounds (not to gloat – it really was a fast game AND a good game).

The aftermath

As for further play, I’m hoping to get together with B for a couple of games of Great War Commander (Hexasim, 2018) while T is away. He has actual play experience with this one – I’ve only read the rules and pushed a few counters around. It can be difficult to juggle our calendars a lot of the time, but I’m hopeful for a least one game before T returns.

The fresh contenders; or Churchill’s replacement

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been wanting to swap out Churchill from my original 6x6 list of games for 2023. I was excited at the prospect of a game-related challenge, and have been keen to get Churchill to the table since my P500 copy of the latest print run arrived. I knew it was a three player, but that it can be played as a two player with a Stalin-bot, but from earlier experience with under-player-ing Versailles 1919 (GMT, 2020), I really think I owe it to the game to have a three-player experience.

So, having decided to put aside Churchill for now, I needed to come up with a suitable replacement for that slot in my 6x6 endeavour. Going through my shelves, I picked out a stack of possible candidates. After some consideration of my shelves, I managed to whittle the list down to four likely contenders which, I am embarrassed to say, I still haven’t got around to playing for one reason or another. These are:

• Richard III: the Wars of the Roses (Columbia Games, 2009)
• Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019)
• Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62 (GMT, 2017)
• Verdun1916: Steel Inferno (Fellowship of Simulations, 2020)

The oldest of these, in terms of ownership, is Colonial Twilight. I bought it during GMT’s 2021 Summer Sale (along with a truckload of other games), and was very excited about it when it arrived. I read the rules, flattened out the mounted board under some other weighty game-boxes, set the game up and played through handful of turns, two-handed. By the end of that I felt like I was getting the game. I was impressed by the new mechanics for this first two-player COIN game and the simple actions - complex ramifications nature of the play. It was an elegant game and I couldn’t wait to play it with an opponent.

And then I didn’t. Looking back, I don’t know what pushed it off my radar; it may have been another game I was even more eager to try out, or it might have been some aspect of my Life Outside Games that fought for my attention. I would have put away Colonial Twilight with the best of intentions of pulling it out again soon and getting back to it, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The problem with Colonial Twilight is the fact that is breaks one of the informal guidelines I set myself for the 6x6 challenge; it would be a second game designed by Brian Train, who is responsible for Brief Border Wars and the upcoming Brief Border Wars 2 (Compass Games, slated for release this year). Brian’s games are always interesting and challenging, but it would feel wrong to privilege one designer over all the others whose work I really like and respect. If I do this again next year, though, I think I have my first pick.

Richard III is a classic Columbia Games block game. They make a lot, and by all reports, nearly all are at least very good, and some are exceptional (Crusader Rex (2005) gets mentioned a lot around the forums). This would be an easy choice is I didn’t already have three block games (This War Without an Enemy, The French and Indian War, and Napoleon 1806) on my list already. I’ll still try to introduce T to the joys of Columbia’s block game style sometime soon, but It’s not going on the list.

Verdun 1916, while technically a block game (it uses rectangular wooden pieces to represent formations and thinner, matchstick-sized ones for trenches), the style of play is so radically different from anything else I possess that I would be happy to pick it. There are two things that are stopping me from going with Verdun for my 6x6 challenge; firstly, I’ve tried to select games from different conflicts. World War I is already represented by Hexasim’s Great War Commander.

Which brings me to my second reason for its exclusion. Three of the five remaining games on the list are from French publishers – Nuts!, Shakos, and Hexasim. This shouldn’t be at all surprising; companies all across Europe are producing excellent, thoughtful, and challenging games. In good conscience, wanting Great War Commander on the list precluded me adding The Fate of the Reiters (Hexasim, 2019). Nonetheless, I hope to get in a few games of Verdun sometime this year, and report back accordingly.

It would seem that the last man standing will be Undaunted: Normandy. This is a fairly recent acquisition, having arrived a little before Christmas. I’ve owned Undaunted: North Africa (Osprey, 2020) for maybe a year, and have managed to get it to the table – at least for two-handed solo play – several times.

When U:N first arrived on the scene, I was sceptical. I owned a handful of Osprey games and loved all of them.  But it seemed to me, on the face of it to be too much of a crossover game, a self-conscious attempt to make a wargame that would appeal to non-wargamers to “trick” them into wargaming. When U:NA came out, I was a little more familiar with the work of co-designer David Thompson, and, having only recently read Gavin Mortimer’s The Men Who Made the SAS (Little, Brown; 2016), I was intrigued by the historical background of the game, and – frankly- it was pretty good value for money.

Reader, I bought it. And it’s a purchase I haven’t had cause to regret. I was really surprised to see how well the deckbuilding mechanics worked in the context of the game. It’s definitely at the “game” end of the game-simulation continuum, but it’s a lot of fun, and, as rules familiarity increases, quite a fast-moving game, but it still offers challenges and decision-points enough to feel like a satisfying and worthwhile experience.

As I understand it, the scale of Undaunted: Normandy differs from U:NA – the units are squads and support weapon teams rather than individual combatants, and vehicles were only introduced to the game in the second offering (although, I believe, vehicle options for U:N scenarios feature in the Undaunted: Reinforcements (Osprey, 2021) deep box).

I think Undaunted: Normandy will also be the right level of complexity for my primary opponent, T. T is by no means stupid – he’s a senior medical specialist – but he has a serious job that comes with equally serious responsibilities, and as such, has a limited capacity for processing new information, like game rules. After a couple of plays he’s usually picked up the basics, and after half-a-dozen or so games he’s usually giving me a run for my money (we're pretty evenly matched at all of the games we're most familiar with), but as we catch up at best once a week, a lot of table time will be spent in revision for the first few runs at a new rules-set.

But for now, we will be concentrating on Napoleon 1806.  This week we’ll be graduating to the Rules for the Conscript. I think I’ve assimilated the extra rules and am ready to make six or seven mistakes in the first half-hour of play, but that’s how we learn, right?