The Day After D-Day

Not a zombie game, but a new scenario for Mission Command, to be played on 7 May 2016 at Frome, Somerset.  It will be a psuedo-historical affair, so that reading up on the history won’t be relevant.  Set around Caen it pits the Canadians against the Germans.

Since the Canadians have more or less the same lack of doctrine as the British in this period, it’s an opportunity to see how British and Commonwealth forces and Germans fight differently, and of course, how that’s reflected in the game.  The basic smallest ‘unit of command’ in Mission Command is the company-sized group, and we describe command and control via orders of battle that specify which company-sized groups are within which battalions, etc, going up the hierarchies to brigade and division.  Generally each company has its own command card with details of the elements in it, plus their capabilities.  Where units are within kampfgruppen, combat commands or regimental groups, these are specified in the command cards, and players have these in front of them as they play.  Control on the table-as-battlefield is exercised through the activation of each group, one after the other.  So, for example, a battalion of infantry may have an HQ company and 3 or 4 rifle companies, represented by 4 or 5 groups, each successively carrying out its actions during a side’s bound (or turn).

A new restriction that we’re testing is to limit company operations, so that random or convenient mixing of groups has bad effects. If a player moves one company into a position occupied by another company, some elements in the line are effectively put out of command, because their normal voice and runner communications are disrupted by the new unit.  Once the offending company has gone, the company in line will have to spend actions to re-establish the normal communications between the rifle elements and their command element.  Of course if these companies should be attacked while this confusion is on-going, bad stuff may well happen.  What we want players to do, is to keep their companies organised and separated, as they would have been in reality, so as to avoid confusion.

Doctrine and experience affect these command and control issues.  The advantage the Germans had was their more integrated combined arms training and experience within their panzer divisions in particular.  So German kampfgruppen can arrange for 2 groups to work together with no penalty, typically panzergrenadier and tank or assault gun companies.  Also these jointly activated companies take reaction tests (morale checks) together, ignoring the worst result.  This reflects the advantage of fighting alongside familiar partners.

British and Commonwealth troops learned these practices very much later, so do not gain these advantages.  I suspect, and hope, that the need to keep the companies organised and separated should focus the minds of our players on maintaining battalion and brigade-scale overviews of the fighting, rather than the minutiae of each element.

We’re also testing out a new method for handling artillery, involving simple planning sheets.  Previously we’ve tried to get players to remember things and scribble notes, but using artillery requires some planning and integration with the rest of the combat – particularly for the Canadians, who’ll typically have more resources than the Germans.  We’re testing a planning sheet that  lists the batteries, which FOO they’re allocated to, and their planned fire by turn (if any).  This is a bit like a simple Eurogame player board (yes, with black cubes!) for the artillery commander to use.

Although these developments look like added complexity, I think they’ll make the game management (by umpires and players) more streamlined.  Speaking of streamlining, we’re amending armour classes, so that each vehicle element has one AC only – side armour is simply front armour -1.  This reduces the need to look things up in tables and fits in better with our scale (1 vehicle equals 3 to 5).

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be finishing off all the briefings, command cards, etc for the scenario.  It’s definitely flesh on the bones time!