A couple of days ago I played another game of Combat Commander (Normandy battlepack.) This scenario saw the Americans trying to take the Pont du Hoc gun batteries. They were tasked with climbing the cliff and taking over six different bunkers. A daunting task as they could only advance up the cliff faces or get up with a special rule at the end of the time advance sequence. The Germans (who I played) were set up on the top of the cliff hunkered down in the bunkers with plenty of light and heavy machineguns as well as medium mortars. The Americans did well the first couple of turns as they got a goodly amount of leaders and troops up the cliff and successfully assaulted a bunker to establish a foothold. After that it was all downhill. They couldn't seem to get anything going and really felt the dearth of smoke grenade action and move orders. A couple of lucky white phosphorous events got some smoke out but by then there was a serious traffic control problem at the top of the cliff as the Germans gunned down American troops with impunity. From there the game quickly ended after victory points started adding up and time advanced to sudden death during round ten.
A good game for the Germans with a hint of payback from the last time that we played the map. Last time the Americans had a textbook, cliff-scaling, German-smashing scenario where most everything went their way.
Final thoughts on this scenario: Germans need to get their leaders up in the bunkers as soon as possible to be able to direct fire from the mortars and machineguns. They also must be able to move troops around quickly in order to respond to the Americans stacking up on one side of the map. The Americans need to get up the cliff as soon as possible and start tossing enough smoke so that at least some will remain on the map after a time advance. This is all important as it allows the Americans to move past the first captured bunker and attempt to assault or bypass the remaining bunkers to gain victory points. I think that spreading the American troops along both cliffs would have the greater effect of splitting the concentration of fire from the Germans across two fronts rather than loading one side down with troops and possible encountering traffic control problems when hexes become overstacked.
That game marked our 50+ play of Combat Commander and I am itching to delve into different types of hex and counter games. With that in mind I asked Paul to pick out a new game to play for our next session and he picked Warriors of God by Multi-Man Publishing. This looks to be a tasty little game that relies on area control and leans heavily on the use of leaders. Simple little rulebook that is well laid out and rules that don't look that hard to learn. Looking forward to it.
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