28mm WWII. Hmmm...

Despite the name of this blog (which started to chronicle my 28mm sculpting) I'm not a fan of WWII in 28mm. It is my firm belief that 1:72/1:76/HO/20mm is the right and proper scale for WWII wargaming and none shall sway this belief because is one of the foundations of the universe. It is one of the fundamental laws of physics and no other scale should be allowed to exist as far as WWII wargaming is concerned.

Now that that's said, I played a game of Chain of Command in 28mm at my last club meeting. I wanted to try the rules and John (who made the 1:1200 trireme wreaks for me) walked Richard and I through a basic game. That's the same Richard with whom I played the ancient naval battle with a couple of weeks back. It seems that our ancestors must have had a long running antagonism running throughout all of history. We wondered if this feud also runs into the far flung sci-fi future.

The game was very basic, a platoon each - Richard played Germans and I played the U.S. I liked some aspects of the game but I don't think this is the WWII game for me. It's too small and doesn't seem like it will handle vehicles well. I prefer WWII at company to battalion level with small AFV and support formations (tank platoons, AT batteries, etc.). There's no way that I could justify spending $40 per tank and $200 on a single platoon.

Having said that, I did enjoy the game and the 28mm figures do look nice. I do like the Patrol Phase in this game but I would really like to find a set of rules that handles hidden troops and movement well so that recce units and patrols can be used effectively with figures/models on the table. I'm not sure that CoC does this because the Patrol Phase seems to do it in a abstract sort of way. Maybe I'd be happier if small bases of figures were used instead of markers. Who knows?

As it is, I've ordered a set of I Ain't Been Shot, Mum. I'm keen to see how these rules suit what I'm after.

Anyway, we did the patrol thing and I tried to lock down the Kraut patrol markers into a central area whilst trying to spread out my own deployment area. It kind of worked.

There was plenty of cover on the table and we pretty much got into position and then proceeded to shoot each other up. The result of this was that the Krauts took a lot of casualties spread out amongst his troops whilst my Dogface's took minor casualties but quite a lot of Shock. This entailed constantly trying to reduce it through the use of Command Points. My section on the right ended up with lots of Shock and got pinned due to those nasty MG42's constantly targeting them.

The game ended as a stalemate and we finished without a conclusion. But it was a good intro and we got the hang of the basics pretty easily.