Learning a New Game

Steve and I had our introductory Chain of Command game last night to get our first taste of the mechanisms. We didn't use any terrain at all, so tactical options were pretty limited — BEF vs. Jerries on the barren open steppes of Dinnertable — but demonstrating tactical brilliance wasn't really the aim of the exercise.

Unfortunately we had to work from the PDF (still waiting for our books to arrive). I hate PDFs for game rules, they suck, especially when they're not bookmarked. I hate not being able to easily flick back and forth through the text. It may be a convenient format to carry stuff around in, but give me a hard-copy, even just a print-out, any day.

Still, it was fun as far as it went. The Patrol Phase mechanism was an interesting way of setting up the initial parameters of the game, and the Command Dice lottery leads to some really interesting (and often frustrating!) choices. There are lots of bits and pieces in the rules, but the fundamentals are simple enough that we were playing along quite smoothly within half an hour — until we hit a new situation and had to find it in the accursed PDF!

From first impressions, I'd say it shows great promise. I think it will likely become our preferred platoon-action game system, with Battlegroup for anything larger.