NQM at COW 2023

I’ve had various discussions with Chris over the years about NQM and I have several different versions of the rules. Various ideas from them have also made their way into my own rules, but until this year I’d never actually played a game of NQM until I had a visit Chez Kemp and we spent the day pushing a couple of Corps around, as reported recently on the blog.

I’m a big fan of grid based games and I think for operational games they solve a lot more problems than they introduce. The main thing is to get the players thinking like Generals and not Corporals.

Chris runs through the concepts with the assembled multitudes. There was a big turnout for this session.

I dropped in on this session to observe, but after some introductions to the game and a description of how the latest version worked, virtually everyone there got roped in to play, so I found myself commanding a Panzer Corps, which was a bit of a surprise.

Here is our Panzer Corps! Two infantry divisions and a Panzer division. Although notionally using battalion sized elements, these were pretty big units, the infantry regiments typically had four stands, as did the Panzer Regiment, and there were a ton of divisional and corps level assets.

The game was set up as a tutorial, so the plan was only to play a few turns to get a feel for the mechanisms and flow. We were slightly thrown in at the deep end, so after hastily scribbling a Corps defence plan, I spent much of the game helping my divisional commanders understand what units they actually had, and what they could (and and couldn’t) do.

We were defending a major river in late 1943, with two towns as bridgeheads on the far side, as two entire Soviet Armies rolled up to assault our positions. 

Here is the first division, most of it is on our side of the river with a bridgehead in the town. The divisional artillery is positioned to cover the whole divisional front (each square is 6km at this scale). 

And our second division. More of it is on the far bank holding the town, and the river here has two bridges across it (rail and road). The Russians have apparently concentrated a lot of force here!

The defence to the west held out OK, but in the east the Russians inflicted heavy losses and fought their way into the city behind a torrent of artillery fire and bombing. The Luftwaffe attrited the enemy gun positions, but there was just so much of it.

Eventually we were ejected from the far bank in short order, albeit having inflicted heavy losses, and fell back behind the river as the bridges went up to thunderous explosions.

It was a pretty good tryout of all the mechanisms, including air power, recce, ammo resupply, casevac etc as well as the more mundane things like moving and fighting. At the conclusion of the session a number of copies of the rules were offered for sale at a nominal price and were snapped up by the participants, so clearly a successful session.