Seven Days to the River Rhine Run-Out

[SJWi]

In the days "BP" ( ie Before the Pandemic), my gaming group were lured into trying 1980s Cold War with the release of Great Escape Games "Seven Days to the River Rhine" (SDttRR) ruleset. Unfortunately two years of fairly limited face-to-face gaming didn't give us much chance to use them, and then the release of PSC's "NORTHAG" gave a new lease of life to our 6mm collections.

Roll on several years. We have played the rules a handful of times, but many in our group have lost interest Recently I offered to buy my mates rather nice Poles and Canadians to add to my BAOR, Dutch and Russkies. Last weekend I decided to give my new acquisitions a run-out on the table plus deploy new building stock and dust-off the rules. The scenario was pure speculation, pitching troops from the Polish 7th Naval Landing Brigade against Canadian's from their "Air-Sea Transportable Brigade Group". I don't intend to write a detailed  AAR but have included some photos. Instead I thought I'd comment on SDttRR and how it works.

The rules are nicely produced, and my copy came complete with the command and "hit" chits that you need to play the game. They are pretty simple and they give a "game" rather than a "simulation" of what 1980s warfare in Europe could have been like.  The various vehicles are all detailed with their various attack and defence stats, but the infantry squads across all Nations are standardised. In the great scheme of things no big issue for me.  The core mechanism is the stack of "command chits" a player has. These allows them to activate vehicles/teams, and even re-activate them a 2nd or 3rd time using more chits, albeit this will mean other assets do nothing in a turn. Hits usually progressively degrade a units morale and combat power ( a bit like Shock in Two Fat Lardies games) until a unit breaks and is removed from play.  There is also a deck of cards with each player receiving  a random selection of 5 cards . These can be played at any time and add "friction" into the game . I thought it fairly benign until the Polish player played a card which removed six of my nine command chits for a particular turn, rendering my force pretty useless that turn. The rules in the main read well, but we did find certain rules tucked away in odd places plus the annotations in some of the stats tables didn't seem to be referenced anywhere else.

After the game the victorious Polish commander and I had a debrief of what we thought of the rules.  My mate doesn't like the fact that there is no artillery . We were both brought up in the '80s reading that "artillery is the Red army's God of War" and so its complete absence apart from as a card event is a little odd. We also think the command and control doesn't differentiate enough (at all?)  between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces. Again, maybe we are products of our own propaganda, but the belief in the 1980s and '90s was that NATO forces had better C3I than the Warsaw Pact.  I think the NATO vehicles are too expensive compared to their Soviet counterparts. We played a 400 point game and my Canadian force comprised  3 Leopard 1s, 1 M150 TOW, 2 Lynx recce and 3 M113s with infantry teams.  For the same points cost the Poles amassed 4 T55s, 4 PT76s, 5 APCs and 5 infantry teams. Yes the Leo 1 is better then a T55 but "combat mass" proved critical. However for me these are minor quibbles, and certainly the points issue can be remedied with judicious scenario planning.

Overall I quite like the rules. Some innovative rule mechanisms and  they cover the basics of Cold War gaming. Maybe not for the purist who wants to game a detailed combined arms action, but easy enough to throw onto the table and have an afternoon's fun pushing toys around a table!           
     

[has.been]

Thanks for posting. I like the rules, but take on-board your comments.

[HESH]

Looks great . I have the rules but yet to play. Thanks for the inspiration.

[CapnJim]

Interesting.  Thanks for sharing it.

My group has played them a couple times (in 20mm/1-72).  We thought they gave a good game, in spite of quibbles we had that were similar to yours (except that we tend to ignore point-based stuff in games...). 

[SJWi]

Capn Jim; I agree about points. I don't slavishly devise points-based games, but as I hadn't played them for a long time I wanted to use points as a sanity check that I was constructing a balanced scenario. My observation was more about the result of what ORBATs I devised using balanced points. I had set up a pretty urban-heavy scenario to use my shiny new building stock, and once again I learned the hard way that AFVs and congested urban areas don't mix. A lot of my Canadian vehicles fell prey to roaming infantry teams, and I didn't have enough of my own infantry to effectively counter them .   

[Ultravanillasmurf]

Thanks for the review.
I picked up the rules at Warfare this year and I am trying to decide what scale to use.

Chieftains and T64As are close in points and FV432s are half the points of BMP-1s so it depends on your force choice to some extent.

The lack of off-board artillery does seem odd, especially as the on board options are limited.

[fred]

We’ve played the WWII version (Iron Cross) a fair bit, and they give a decent game.

I think the game is really aimed at a smaller scale where an artillery barrage is more of a pre-game thing, or from an event card, rather than called in during the game. But the rules are pretty simple, and I hardly think would break if you wanted to bolt some artillery rules on.

[Daeothar]

Thanks for the review; very helpful 

Looks like I'll have to pick this set up as well now 

[SJWi]

Fred, I would agree about artillery, certainly for small scale games.  I forgot that you can use mortar teams as infantry support weapons.

[flatpack]

We’ve used them for middle eastern games and enjoyed the rules.

[SJWi]

We also planned to use them for Middle East as my mates had Yom Kippur forces in 15mm. If I remember correctly there was additional vehicle data and a bespoke set of Arab-Israeli cards available on a Forum somewhere? Sadly our interest in both the ruleset and theatre of war waned . Some of us have now bought Middle East models in 3mm as the concept of being able to field a whole Israeli tank brigade plus support assets on the table and play part of the defence of Golan has a certain appeal.   

[Captain Darling]

Thanks for you post and thoughts! Your miniatures look good!

We have yet to play 7D2TR but it is on our list of rules to play.

We have Played GEGs 1914 and Iron Cross (new more detailed version to come out from a post I saw on their Facebook posts) and like them both. The Command allocations and the ability for the opposition to react (and have a chance to gain the initiative) are the best part to the rules.

[carlos marighela]

Looks good, albeit a little open for urban terrain. Fabulous looking vehicles and buildings.

No off-board artillery and the same C3I for NATO and Warsaw Pact sounds just wrong. You aren't a victim of our own propaganda. By any objective measure, including their own tactical doctrine, WP forces were less flexible than NATO. Must say it puts me off.

Been toying with the idea of re-doing some 6mm Cold War but I think I'd stick with CD which neatly deals with command flexibility by the way it apportions the different types of command stands.

[SJWi]

Carlos, thanks for the plaudits about the vehicles and terrain. A mate of mine painted the vehicles and sold them to me for a very reasonable price. They are mainly Battlefront "Team Yankee" with some Skytrex "Command Decision" plus the TOPAS-2 by Butlers Printed Models .  The buildings are mainly Faller OO railway plus some Blotz modern 15mm.  As you say "urban" is a bit of an over-statement. I should really have clustered the buildings more which may have given a better game. I'm always on the look out for more 2nd hand Faller stuff on E-Bay.

As someone else has posted the SDttRR is quite a low-level game, with really only a couple of platoons a side so abstracting the artillery via the cards isn't a bad solution. However the C3I is an issue and we did come up with a tweak which I need to find again.

We also game Cold War in 6mm but opted for PSC's "NORTHAG" rules. They aren't bad, and as we also use their very similar Battlegroup set for WW2 at least we know the basics. I'm getting to the age where I can only keep so many sets of rules in my head!         

[carlos marighela]

Ah, I hadn't realised it was so low level, I was assuming it was a larger game. The GEG website is less than informative.