I've played several WW2 games so far with great joy - it is a points based game, and is a much more gritty game than Bolt Action - with moral, pinning and injured troops being incredibly important aspects.
Our playtest games have been mainly based in World War 2, and have been making great playtests, with lots of memorable moments. It has been agreed between most of those testing the rules that the stories and moments that happen during gameplay really make the game. The game is based on every model having 4 actions, with which they can move, climb, fire weapons, open doors and so on. With tanks this balances out the quite formidable firepower such machines bring to the tabletop wargame, as the game accounts for multiple crewmen, who bail out and physically are shown and act as normal troops on the table if they survive and escape the vehicle's destruction or voluntarily leave it. The 4 actions are for the whole vehicle not each crewman, so a tank doesn't move 4 actions and fire 4 times in one go. We've tried WW2, modern and Science Fiction, with my futuristic soldiers and Warhammer 40k Space Marines in different games trying to hold back Ork hordes. The futuristic games differed with more high rate of fire weapons, armoured soldiers and different morale effects! The modern game (played in April) was set in Afghanistan, with two fire-teams of British soldiers, supported by 4 Afghan National Army soldiers and SAS patrolling a road through a village. The game was brutal, with insurgents knocking out the Supacat vehicle before the game really started, meaning my troops were sent scattering for cover behind a wall on the right of my flank, and the rest took cover in brush and rocks on the roadside, and attempted to advance onwards.
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| The board from a modern game |
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| British soldiers take pins and casualties in a firefight |
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| Insurgents hiding in the woods during the modern game |
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| My Science Fiction futuristic soldiers, made using Dreamforge Games Eisenkern Stormtroopers |
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| An Ork truck, mid-game and damaged by weapons fire |
A few of the best games have been an all tanks game played at the start of June 2016, along with a huge river crossing game, with its background based in Operation Market Garden - the huge airborne assault in the Netherlands in September 1944 to take bridges, so our game was called Operation Water Garden in link it in. The game followed on with my British and Canadian combined force trying to take and hold a bridge from German defenders in order to rescue a force of British Airborne troops who were stuck on the wrong side of the bridge.
Muzzle flash uses pins, although these are much more dramatic in terms of results and effect on troops than the same system in Bolt Action, with the average soldier being unable to do virtually anything other than hide or run for cover, whilst higher moral troops can take moral tests in order to finish their actions first. Models that are hit, on a 4+ on a 6 sided dice unless modifiers alter it, are either pinned, injured (and laid on their back) or dead (and laid on their front). Morale tests are taken if a section or squad member dies, but this can be difficult as their is no unit coherency rule (e.g. staying within a set distance), so you need to remember who is with what unit.
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| WW2 Germans defending a river bank in Operation Water Garden |
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| British soldiers take cover in a graveyard, my favorite terrain piece due to it's size and multi-time period setting. It appears in alot of my games. |
Alot of games have been played of this in the last few months, and plenty more are to be played. So keep an eye open Folks, my gaming club Facebook group page, Dice and Decks Gaming Club (look for an orange dice symbol and writing on a black background) has plenty of write-ups of Muzzle Flash games!
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