19 July 2020

Finally a game of ........Chain of Command!

I finally got in a game of Chain of Command this past week. P-Y wanted to playtest a scenario he is hosting for this coming Saturday's Virtual Lard event. He decided to take scenario 2 from the Rendezvous with Destiny mini-campaign involving a platoon of Fallschirmjägers versus American Airborne. They were both rated as regular with 5 CD. I played the Airborne and had an extra squad while P-Y played the Germans with MMG team and SL.

We did play a patrol phase which was a small challenge and then got on with the game, I rolled a 9 for FM, while P-Y rolled a 10, he had 2 free moves as the attacker.

As usual I am not good at actually describing the game but although I thought it would be a challenge to play CoC over the internet it actually went quite well. The photos below are all taken as screen shots on my side, this is to give a sense of what it was like to play. I think we finished up in 2.5 hours with game completion in just one turn.
This is my view through Zoom, P-Y set up multiple Zoom accounts, one for each camera. Using Zoom it was very easy for me to select the view I wanted. You will note that the first view on the top left is my dice tray and FM chart making it easy to do all my own dice rolling and tracking but at the same time making it easy for P-Y to click on. Using the Manycam Virtual Camera in Zoom on my side,  I was able to click between my FT camera and my dice tray. As you can see P-Y had an oblique view, 2 overhead, 1 mobile and 1 dice tray on his side. This all worked well without a glitch!
Most of the action took place in the NE corner of the terrain, I hope you can see my JOPs, as well as the German JOP's
The dreaded double phase, although I did well on my firing dice throws, I never got 1 double phase  while P-Y got  3 in a row, he also had a CoC Dice, which he used to pop on an LMG team and blast the hell out of my isolated SL.
At this point he had routed 1 of my squads but I was able to gain superiority in the orchard and started to march 2 squads towards his position, the Americans are essentially on the right of the screen with the Germans to the left. My routing squad is in the bottom of the screen.
The Americans marching ahead, unfortunately by now my FM had dropped down to 2 and the Germans were still at 8, I decided to withdraw.
Well I really had a lot of fun and it was great to get in a game of CoC. It actually worked well, a few recommendations came up to improve the game when played virtually but I am confident now that CoC works over the internet. Here are some photos P-Y took on his side. You can see that image quality is just not the same through the internet but a great game none the less.

3 comments:

  1. Excellent! The COVID-19 crisis has brought out the inventiveness in gamers.

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  2. We've managed some board games via zoom, but not something like this. Well done.

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