First Great War game

[Musketeer]

I was lucky enough to get a game in at Gripping Beast this weekend using there full Battalion size armies. Considering this was the first time my mate Mike and I have played it it went really well. The stat lines are very easy to remember with us only having to refer to the rules when it came to tanks and buildings in the main. The game plays very quickly and is as bloody as you would expect. Tanks while very hard hitting at times, are rather brittle and can be easily knocked out if your opponent has the right kit.
Although our game lasted about 5+ hours it was a huge game with lots of figures which we recycled as reserves, but was fun all the way through. One of the objectives was captured and lost 5 or 6 times due to counter attacks which was a familier scene during this period.
Some tips:
Stormtroopers are deadly but need to be reinforced or will suffer huge losses in the long run. A good spotter for the Brits is worth the 30 points! Make sure you have troops that can reinforce a breakthrough or you gains can be quickly lost due to enemy counter attacks. Don't let flamethrowers near your tanks. 
One other tip would be to not base all your figures individually if you are doing big games as it takes a while to move them all, so some double basing is a good idea.











All in all they are a great fun set of rules and I am officially hooked on them. I even grabbed some of GB's Turks while I was there to get a head start before the Middle East suppliment comes out.

Cheers

Bill

[Helen]

Nice one Bill 

Love the photo shots and glad you picked up some GB Turks too.

[Gallowglass]

Okay, I'm sold.

[carlos marighela]

Ah one of those points based affairs.... quelle surprise

Nice pics of the game  gorgeous layout. but I can't see myself buying WarHammer1918.  Leaving aside the bais of the rules  1:3 seems a very odd scale choice, that's at least 40-50 figures per company or up to 200 figures to field a battalion. As I principally see the war in terms of divisions and brigades I can't see this appealing much. For trench raids there are plenty of suitable sets of skirmish rules.

[Musketeer]

Just because they set a scale doesn't mean that you have to stick to it. You could happily call a platoon a company or a battalion and have it at Brigade/Div scale. It have very little baring on the game. Also we didn't use point values in the game in any way. The sides were not matched and the scenario was altered mid way to let the game flow for longer. As my first introducting game into WW1 they played really well and gave results that were believable. I guess it best to use whatevr floats your boat though.

[Prof.Witchheimer]

a really nice report, Bill, thanks for sharing it, this town is stunning, it that tower a scratchbuilt one?

[Musketeer]

The building are mostly Grand Manor.

[Poliorketes]

A nice one, thank you

[Arlequín]

Ah one of those points based affairs.... quelle surprise

Nice pics of the game  gorgeous layout. but I can't see myself buying WarHammer1918.  Leaving aside the bais of the rules  1:3 seems a very odd scale choice, that's at least 40-50 figures per company or up to 200 figures to field a battalion. As I principally see the war in terms of divisions and brigades I can't see this appealing much. For trench raids there are plenty of suitable sets of skirmish rules.

The rules don't specify a scale as such. But yes it is fairly obvious 1-3 is what it is based on. It may feel odd, but at 28mm you have to consider a ground scale to match your figures. If it was 1:50 for example, trenches would be very close together and look odd with the figures close enough to spit at each other. You would also have anomolies with regard with representing battalion level support weapons.

Larger figure ratios are what put me off mainstream wargaming in any case. Ground scales are fudged and units of 1k men whizz around the battlefield changing formation from line to column etc with unbelievable speed and dexterity. I've lost count of the games where you see battalions formed in a two-deep line on the table because it looks right, but represents a real-life formation eight men deep instead of the two to three deep line it is supposed to be. Or a single cottage represents a small village. So seeing a company 50 strong looks far more realistic to my eyes.

As Musketeer points out though, you can call your units what you like and it doesn't change the game. As for Trench raids you would need a set of skirmish rules, which these aren't nor claim to be. You don't buy Monopoly and expect to see the Rev. Green get his with the lead pipe after all.

[Musketeer]

Here is a link with a more detailed report of the game from my mate Mike.

http://www.mikehobbs.co.uk/?p=875

[mariebuchel]

Ah one of those points based affairs.... quelle surprise

Nice pics of the game  gorgeous layout. but I can't see myself buying WarHammer1918.  Leaving aside the bais of the rules  1:3 seems a very odd scale choice, that's at least 40-50 figures per company or up to 200 figures to field a battalion. As I principally see the war in terms of divisions and brigades I can't see this appealing much. For trench raids there are plenty of suitable sets of skirmish rules.

As I'm partly responsible (guilty would others say!) for the choice of the scale of the game, I'm feeling that it desserves some explanations.
Note that I don't want to convince anybody about these choices (gamers have all different expactations and no game will ever please the whole community) but at least it might help the understanding of the approach chosen.

Back in the early days if the development of TGW (in 2006) the game was aimed at a 1:1 scale with your force depicting a company. Dave Andrews and myself were not really convinced that this was the right choice. As written in the rules, our readings of accounts have suggested that the smallest formation able to act independently on the battlfield was the platoon. I never came across (on my readings of the Western Front at least) of any 'Easy Company' style story. On a command level, the Batallion was the first command level to be assigned with a task or mission (though I agree that -for the German army aty least and the British as well if we agree with P. Griffith- this evolved in the last months of the war).

So playing a Battalion made sense, with platoons being the main tactical components.

Also, this has the benefit of solving 2 main problems we were facing:
- the use of support. If playing a company, using more than a single support weapon (trench mortar, HMG or field gun, not even speaking of tanks!) did not make sense. These were not available in huge numbers (again the Stosstruppen in 1918 were an exception), and when it makes sense that a battalion could be supported by say, a HMG section, a Mortar and some specialised unit,  it looked weird for a single company. But as gamers we wanted to use these toys so we needed a scale that allowed them to be fielded without breaking the rules of common sense!
- it made the ranges of the weapons more manageable. The 24'' of the rifle can be seen at 400 meters, the maximum practical distance at which the troops opened fire.

Finally, to get back to your first comment, we chose the Battalion level (and not the regimental or divisional one) as a starting point because this was a good one to have dynamic actions throughout the war (even in 1915-1917). This is the scale of the achievement of local successess, daring actions in the overall scheme of the stalemate (the 'all is quiet...'). We were keen to have a game that could be played in any year of the war without necessarily involving trench actions, and if we had chosen a higher scale (ie divisionnal) it would have been more complicated if not impossible.And face it, Bloody Picnic is a very good game for this scale!

A final word about the number of figures needed. I understand that the idea of painting 60-80 figures to start the game (though you can actually have good games with less than that) can be daunting for most gamers. But I don't think that you can have a flavourful game of WW1 (trench raids are a different thing, and though I love them, I don't want to restrict my WW1 games to these actions) without using a large number of figures. This war involved millions of soldiers and the main battles and images of this war involved hundred of men crossing the no man's land, large companies of Mk IV moving to assault the enemy trenches, etc... 

My belief is that the skirmish approach is great for WW2, but WW1 desserves to be represented by a fairly large number of figures. If you want your HMG to behave like it behaved historically, then the 1:1 scale is definitely a dead end IMHO.


As mentionned earlier, I don't try to be convincing nor do I pretend that my opinions are the only valid ones. Just felt that it desserved to be clarified.

Cheers
Alex

[Plynkes]

I don't really have regular access to a table big enough for those kind of games. For me it's skirmish or nothing (I'm not interested in changing to smaller scale figures). Plus the fact that I don't paint fast enough, and I would never play anything if I needed that many figures for a game.

But I'm okay with that. A "flavour" of the Great War is all I'm after. A fun game with Great War toys. I was never in the camp that thinks they are running some kind of accurate simulation in the first place, so I'm not really bothered if individual squads running about the place is totally unrealistic. I just want to have fun.

[postal]

I havnt done any great war yet.but those pics make me want to.

[mariebuchel]

I just want to have fun.

And that's what we're all after! 

FYI Trench Raids will be featured in the first supplement, and well... in a very much 'Charley's War' approach!

Alex

 

[Plynkes]

I would really love it if somebody made some Charley's War character figures.