Now you in the back of the room, yes you, perhaps you don’t feel that magic. It’s one of those moments where the experience of play is elevated beyond the sum of its parts and magic occurs. The real treat is in how this combines with those simulative wargame elements, and particularly your strategic thought process, to produce such a sublime combination of chaos and control. Instead of dice you use cards – which are efficiently multi-use asymmetrical decks in this case – and baked in are random outcomes of narrative significance. It’s exciting and every turn of the cards brings you right up to that edge. This is how those quirky little hero counters are brought into play, how traps are sprung, and how random outbursts of artillery and carnage are sown. Events will trigger, sniper fire will pierce bocage, and your Maschinengewehr 42 will jam. The result of your action is really secondary to the mechanisms effectiveness, as its true accomplishment is in parceling out more helpings of that drama. When you fire at an opponent you draw the top card of your fate deck and refer to a dice result on the bottom corner. This is excellent because it’s dramatic and in turn cinematic. If I make a break out of the treeline will you toss out that OpFire card and mow my poor men down? Maybe you don’t have a fire card at all and I can safely seize the opportunity to push the right flank. I don’t know what’s in your dirty Rusky mitts. First, it provides a wonderful fog of war. You can’t move or fire unless you have one of those cards in your hand. Each nation has their own mixture of cards which players draw and subsequently play to execute orders. The true magic of this design is in the fate decks. T-Swift is telling me to calm down and I ought to listen.īut let’s get at it. This is Combat Commander: Steel, blood, and sex. Story is not sacrificed in the name of realism, rather, the two intermingle like lovers shut away on honeymoon. Yet it never lets those elements of verisimilitude dictate the tempo of play. This feels like a proper wargame with an emphasis on fire groups, command, and leveraging terrain and troop quality. What makes Combat Commander so compelling is its philosophy on combining simulation with moments of pure cinema. “But it doesn’t have tanks!” shouts a tall man in the back of the room. This is a company level simulation of infantry combat whose innovative take on the card-driven game (CDG) is evocative and shiny. ![]() That’s a very complicated way to say that this game is still relevant, and damn excellent.Ĭhad Jensen’s classic feels as fresh in 2019 as it did in 2006. Surprisingly, the party is still raging and being late is just as good as being on time. I’m the dude showing up at three in the morning, slightly drunk with bottle in hand and ready to throw down like it’s 1999.
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