Sheffield CALF 2025 - Officers don't duck

 James Langham put on his tactical WW2 game 'Officers don't duck' at CALF 2025. This covers platoon-company sized actions and is specifically aimed at covering fighting in and around Arnhem in September 1944.

James ran two games in parallel, this one covered the KOSB clearing Dutch 3rd SS from the tree lines covering the landing/supply zones. So good quality British attacking 3rd rate Germans.

The second game covered various elements of KG von Allworden attacking the Church at Oosterbeek. In this case 2nd rate Germans attacking good quality British paras. The elements are similar to those in WRG 1925-50, rifle groups, gun groups, HQ groups and support weapons. Ranges are long, and I think the ground scale is around 1"=10m, possibly 20m The elements are grouped into platoons.

For this scenario the British had one Para platoon including a 2" mortar, and another rifle section (led another officer) was en route as reinforcements. The British gun groups had higher close range firepower than the Germans due to the large number of SMGs they held. All groups were rated for number of fire dice and scores to hit required in various range bands.

The Germans had three raggedy platoons of engineers, marines and supply troops handed rifles. The engineers did at least have a flamethrower team attached. Standartenfuhrer von Allworden could also make an appearance. The engineers arrived on turn 1, the rest straggled on in bits and pieces in the course of the game.

Activation was element based and was a three step process. Both sides drew a card to see who went first, lowest first, then to keep the initiative you had to keep drawing cards higher than the previous one.  If it was lower it swapped to the other side. This is a clever variation on card drawn initiative as it becomes progressively less likely that you will keep the initiative, and depending what your initial card was, you can plan to a degree.

Once a a side has the initiative, it can activate one element. Roll 1D6, cross reference the element type and troop quality and there are a range of actions (move, fire etc). Lower quality troops have a chance of doing nothing, you can also opt to to roll 2D6 and get two actions, but on a double, the unit does nothing. A nearby officer allows units to roll three dice and pick the best of two. This is also quite clever, but we found in playing that this step took a while to look things up. I guess it would get faster with practice.

Anyway, Jerry and I (German) tried to put this into practice against Chris K and John A. I tried to set up a base of fire on the left with the engineers MG groups, and push the rifle teams through the woods on the right to take the first building. Movement is IABSM style, 'say where you are going and throw some dice' - so movement was a bit erratic. The better quality British proved more effective at activating their stuff and getting their troops to do what they wanted, but we did eventually get some troops into contact with the building.

Hits on units in combat accumulate as 'pins', which reduce firing dice and at the end of a set of activations there is a chance that units will rout if they have a lot of pins. The main effect is to reduce movement and firing. You can see some little red pin markers on the various units above. The mechanism reminded me of 'Iron Cross' somewhat which also uses accumulated hits, and is much more attritional than e.g Crossfire or Fireball Forward, where units are pinned or routed in fairly short order.

Ammunition depletion was handled in a similar manner to failed activations, a double 1 on any set of dice rolls reduced ammunition first to low, then spent. Unsuppressed units or units at closer range, throw more dice in combat, so have more chance of running out of ammo. We did suggest that units should have the option to fire with fewer dice (as in Don Featherstones WW2 Commando game) so units could manage their own rate of fire.

Although we failed to push the British out on the first assault, we did put lots of pins on them. Unfortunately they did the same to us, and when pin resolution came around, the Paras shrugged a lot of theirs off, while one of our teams had become exhausted and was removed. 

More and more of our troops were straggling on, and despite the best efforts of the Paras, we eventually got our flamethrower team in range and hosing the building down in flame finally convinced the Paras to run back across the road and join their pals. Looking at the turns remaining it was very unlikely we'd manage to get two teams off the far side of the table, so we called it there.

So at the end we haven't really made much impression on the British position, but neither have they killed enough of our stuff to claim a victory (yet).

As a playtest it worked very well, although James was keen to note that this was very much at the 'stress test' end of things as it was a large scenario with a lot of moving parts. We got to try out all the major mechanisms, and the differences in effectiveness he was trying to emphasise came out well. For me there was probably a bit too much going on for a company sized game, rather like my recent playtests of the new WRG 1925-50 rules, certainly for a time limited participation game. For platoon level action (which was being fought on the other table), I think they'd work very well indeed. James had obviously thought about this a lot, and and had also spent a lot of time on the supporting material. 

Some of the mechanisms were very interesting, particularly the card initiative, but I think some of the mechanisms could have been streamlined a bit,  particularly the activations. A simple alternative would be to just roll dice for how many activations a unit wanted to make (1 or 2), doubles fail as do rolls of 1 for medium quality and 1 or 2 for low quality units, then let people pick which actions to make instead of using a table. Hard things like rallying could perhaps require a double action.