With GothCon less than a month away, I needed some trigger time with CoC. My good friend Koen was spending the evening in town anyway, waiting for a night-time service window at work and agreed to play.
I set up the game in the office with what little terrain I had available and set up a platoon of US Airborne (played by 1940 Frenchmen as the actual Airborne figures are at Laffes house) vs a German infantry platoon. I took the US and Koen the Germans and away we went.
The table set up. US entered left, Germans right. The scenario was Patrol so we diced for entry points with US on the nearest third and Germans in the middle.
All US Patrol markers locked down.
Bottle caps had to do for Jump Off points. Red for US, black for Germany.
US gets the first turn. As time was short (long train ride home) I decided to go for broke straight away as is good and proper for airborne troops. From the left: 1st Squad, 2nd Squad, HQ bazooka team and Plt Sgt. Only the Lt remained off table after the first phase.
Koen followed my example and deployed all his troops. This was going to get very bloody very quickly!
Some good old Fire and Manoeuvre! We shot the German squad in the ruin to bits and 1st squad moved across the road. One of them can be seen on the left.
1st squad advanced...
...and took the ruin in hand to hand combat.
Or more correctly, they took the ruin and the remaining Germans ran for it.
I rolled four sixes, leading to a roll on the Random Events table. We spent two phases shooting at each other while jabos of unknown origin made movement impossible.
We ended the game in this position, with the fire-fight undecided but the US Lt wounded and 1st squad's leader dead. US Force morale was down to 3 and German to 5. A single lucky roll would have finished one side so instead we called it a draw and a great game.
In summary: if you have not tried Chain of Command, you owe it to yourself to give it a go. It is fast, it is tactical, it rewards proper tactics ( fire and manoeuvre) and it punishes bad tactics (do NOT get caught in the open in front of an MG34!) and above all it does this while being fun!
Heck, you were quick!
SvaraRaderaIt was a good, quick, fun game, played in 2,5 hours, even if both of us were pretty rusty ruleswise. Despite that, there was a good flow.
You had me on the backfoot right from the start, with some double moves, and the elite status of the paras - which is quite scary as they take so much less hits. In the end the larger size of the german platoon (3 sections to the paras' 2) allowed me to soak up the higher losses, and once all my sections got closer, I was able to pour in more fire from the MG34s.
Thanks for setting up the game!
/Koen
Well, I had an hour on the train home to write the report while the memory was still fresh. I am guessing we spent at least a quarter of the time looking up tables and rules. With the QRF and a bit of practice we'll be able to run a platoon sized game to a clear conclusion in two hours.
RaderaThanks for playing!