Rommel: The Refight

 As planned, we reset the previous week's game and had another try of the Rommel rules. Not as planned, it descended into farce. 

The British commanders are caught out by a daring German attack on their HQ

We have been trying the rules at the behest of Mark, who wishes to rebase his existing collection of Western Desert models to suit this game (*). In the meantime we have been using James' stuff and his gridded desert cloth as originally made for Crusades and To the Strongest!. Unfortunately, Mark wasn't able to make the game, even more unfortunately the rulebook didn't make it either. We were left reliant on the quick play sheets and what James and I could remember from the previous week. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.

I didn't really help by repeating my tactics of the previous week - I was once again the Axis commander - and making an armoured thrust straight for the British supply dump. I confess that I was partly doing this to demonstrate where I thought the game was a bit broken. If units can't be supplied then there are consequences. The problem was that without the rule book we weren't sure what those consequences were. In particular the reference sheet - and one of the action cards - differentiate between being 'isolated' and being in a state of 'low supply'. Handily we had the page references for the relevant rules, less handily we didn't have the pages. We carried on regardless, but the game rather drifted. The Panzergrenadiers on Hafid ridge were as indestructible as in the first week, but this time I moved the Panzer reinforcements into the centre to try a two pronged attack on the British armour. Unfortunately I had misread where the grid markings were and there wasn't actually a route for me to get through. It seemed to sum up the evening and so we gave up.

We're clearly going to put Rommel to one side for now and do something else. On the negative side, they are all a bit abstract. As James observed, Command & Colors is a board game that becomes a wargame if you use figures to play it, whereas this just stays a board game with clunky playing pieces. On the plus side, I think there are nuances within that board game. For example, after a few combats it becomes clear on which occasions you should play cards to try to improve your odds of causing casualties, and where you should be trying to reduce those of the enemy; you can rarely achieve both. 

Overall verdict: meh.

* One of the reasons that I like wargaming is that the hobby covers such a wide range of activities: military history, modelling, painting, rule writing, playing the games etc. We can all dabble in a bit of everything, but choose the one on which we wish to focus most of our attention. For reasons known only to him, Mark has chosen to specialise in rebasing, an activity he carries out pretty much continuously.

Battleaxe

"It sounded suspiciously as though the British commander no longer felt himself capable of handling the situation. It being now obvious that in their present bewildered state the British would not start anything for the time being, I decided to pull the net tight by going on to Halfaya."
                                                                        - Rommel

We were back in the Western Desert, and for once we weren't at Sidi Rezegh; indeed we weren't even in Operation Crusader. We had slipped back six months or so to Operation Battleaxe (I think the second day, June 16th 1941) and were playing on a grand scale using the new to us Sam Mustafa ruleset 'Rommel'. A much shortened section of James' table represented 30km or so of the Libya-Egypt border, from the Hafid ridge to Sollum on the Mediterranean coast.

Peter was absent doing some horse-whispering, so I took the Germans, James the British and Mark umpired in the "Don't ask me, I've only read the rules once myself" stylee that I myself frequently adopt in the annexe. Initial overall impression: it was OK. Clearly this was just a test game, so we shall reset it and play again next week, hopefully with a bit more fluency and control.

It's a high-level, gridded game, and seemed to me to be very abstract and boardgame like. Obviously that doesn't mean it won't either be fun to play or that the narrative arc of the game can't match one's expectations of the period. What I am really getting at is that the mechanics themselves are only superficially thematic. It's a action point type game - as an aside, Mustafa's choice of terminology is really irritating throughout - where those points are spent in moving, fighting etc, but also in playing cards from one's hand which add to one's own abilities or detract from the enemy's. These might read, for example, 'Air Strike', but it would be used simply to give a boost to one's dice roll, not because the circumstances especially favour that manoeuvre over another. One might quite as happily have played 'Reserve Artillery' instead. 

I don't want to sound too negative though. I very much enjoy all sorts of board games whose theme is so thin as to be transparent. In this case I am certain that there will be many subtleties of card play and action point management, which will make for an enjoyable and challenging game. For our first outing we were clearly just doing things to see how they worked, and in subsequent games will certainly be more cagey, which will probably result in a more 'realistic' outcome; provide your own definition of what that actually means. My experiments worked the better on the night, particularly a nifty thrust through the British lines towards their supply dump, forcing the retreat of their armour to defend it. James tried the strategy of expending most of his action points in defence, only to twice roll badly when trying to replace them for his offensive turn. I think there is a lesson to be learned there.

Update: Mark has posted some photos here.