Sigh.
It's time to put my tax return in. It's not a disaster, it is just a massive ball ache. And like all things I don't like doing I get distracted and look for something else to do.
Did I mention I got Undaunted Stalingrad for my birthday?
I had heard "good things" about the Undaunted series, and I have a thing for Stalingrad, so it's not a stretch.
The problem is, it is lacking in almost everything I like in a game. You know, models, historical weapons, historically accurate orders of battle, tabletop terrain etc. Lets look at these in turn
Models - it's a board game. Doh. Each unit is basically a counter representing a team of either Rifles, an LMG or Scouts (you do get more but that's the basics). No need to model and paint your troops and vehicles. (Hold on, is this a plus??) Actually not as I get a kick out of the building and painting, knowing my squad of say German Infantry will always look different in some way to the next player's. There is a little piece of me in each of them I suppose :-)
Historical weapons - not really - the German Machinegun team, with the legendary MG34\42 has the same stats as a Soviet DP "Record player" team. Basically a Rifle Squad is a Rifle Squad, etc etc irrespective of nationality, and they share the same stats.
Orders of Battle - again nope. A Squad consists of a Scout, Rifle and (Light Machine)Gun team. German or Soviets, it makes no difference (also US, UK or Italians if the other games in the series is anything to go by). Similarly a platoon is two of these "Squads" plus NCOs. OK at this point I'm going to say this isn't a total fail. I'd wager very few if any platoons went into combat at full strength, and the extra guy here or there in organisations doesn't really matter. In fact if I have a gripe about Chain of Command it is the way the Orbats are pretty much assumed to be at full strength. Obviously this is a convenience for CoC when working out Platoon values, but it could be different and we have often played with less than full strength Orbats.
Tabletop terrain - another nope, the battle area is made up of a series of heavy duty card tiles each representing a bit of terrain - what scale I'm not sure but in Stalingrad as far as I can Pavlovs House is one tile, which makes them quite reasonable in "real" area - I would expect the same building in CoC to be three foot long for instance. More on terrain later.
So is it worth a look? After a couple of games I will say a resounding YES.
Why this is will probably take a while to explain. Undaunted uses a card activation system. You build a deck of cards from which you draw a hand each turn, and playing them allows you to activate a unit - "Rifle Team A" for example. This reminds me forcibly of the dice activation system in Chain of Command, with all the attached frustration and friction. There are blind cards in there too called "Fog of War" cards, which basically bugger your plans up. The card itself displays a named member of the Team in question - which becomes important later. Each unit can only carry out one action per activation as stated on the card - so Move, Attack, etc - lots of variation here, particularly in the expanded game, but each of the three basic units has it's own unique ability. Rifle Teams are the only ones that can claim objectives, LMGs are able to suppress targets and have two attack die where everyone else has one, Scouts can scout (doh! - I know, but this is critical.) You can only advance other teams into areas your scouts have checked out. This really is an eye opener. Yes it is a bit artificial, but it does force you to scout your approaches in exactly the same way a historical unit would have done, and it does it in a cleaner and simpler way than any other rules I have seen.
Combat is quick and easy - each unit has a defence value, you add any cover modifiers for the terrain they are in, plus the range, and that gives you a D10 target to equal or exceed. The real kicker is when you hit, your opponent must discard a card associated with that team - run out of team members and the team routs. Also because the cards are named, it's no longer just a kill, it's Rifleman Yuri Gregorovich who just bit the bullet. And in the campaign version of Undaunted Stalingrad they can be gone for good. Gulp.
There is a lot of hidden depth here. The number of guys (and sometimes Gals in Soviets team) in each unit is different - so a Rifle team has five members, but a gun or scout team has only three. This means rifle teams will soak up casualties easier, but as you cant control ground without them, you cant use them as total bullet sponges.
And I have not touched on the main selling point of the Stalingrad edition - the Campaign, a fully playable linked campaign where not only your platoon changes based on losses and scenario results, but the city you are fighting in and over gets worn down and blasted away over time, with several different versions of the same buildings, each progressively more damaged than the last.
There is so much here I will probably have to do another post , but for now the TLDR is the game is well worth a look, and if you are a bit put off by the price of the Stalingrad set you can pick up Undaunted Normandy for about £30 which is basically the same system minus the campaign.
Recommended
No comments:
Post a Comment