… and it was superb! I’m sure myself and Paul got a load of rules wrong, but I think we got the basics right. It’s a fantastic game. We played the Patrol scenario which saw a German Grenadier platoon face off against their American counterparts.

The game started with an interesting and fun patrol phase. This part of the game (which is practically a mini-game in its own right) is used to determine the jump-off points for your force. These are the points from which they’ll deploy in the main game. Essentially the patrol phase represents the positions that have been reconnoitred by scouts and it ensures the opposing armies don’t simply line up in regimented deployment areas.

The benefit of this part of the game is that once the game starts the action can kick off pretty quickly as the opposing forces may ‘jump off’ relatively close to each other.

The opposing forces
The battlefield
Mid Patrol Phase
The section on the road is about to assault the farmhouse on the hill
A German section proceeds with caution
… before opening fire on the Americans in the corn field

I’m not going to give a blow-by-low account of the game, but we saw a number of interesting things. We saw the benefit some lucky rolls of Command Dice can have. I ended up with three phases in a row and this enabled me to put a large amount of fire into a house occupied by one of the German sections, wracking up some kills and a lot of shock, before assaulting it. The random nature of Command Dice rolls, which represent what teams, sections and leaders may be activated, represent the fog of war really well. We also saw the value of leaders (No surprise! ‘Command’ is in the title of the game). Senior leaders accompanying sections could really get a lot out of them. One of my jump-off points was along a flank and was quite a distance from the Germans. A Senior Leader enabled me to move them at the double while removing the shock, which represents the troops getting disorganised, they would have picked up. This brought them rapidly into the game and ensured they were still in good fighting shape when they arrived.

Chain of Command has you making lots of tactical decisions while rolling dice and having fun!

I won the game, but both Paul and I had a blast. I look forward to more games of what is probably the best platoon level WWII game I’ve played.

Until next time,

Owen