I recently received the latest ruleset put out by Reisswitz Press, a TFL affiliate. This is the 3rd ruleset written Dave Brown for the publishing company. I really have enjoyed playing Général d'Armée and Pickett's Charge, although I have not had a chance to play these 2 games during the pandemic.
I was not initially planning to play this game but I usually buy everything put out by TFL to support the company. The pre-sales videos and chatter however did entice me into having a look and I said to myself if I can play this at a very small scale, I might be interested. Once I got the book and had a good read through, it seemed that it might be easy enough to use centimetres rather than inches. Doing some simple calculations and knowing that you could get a good game in using a 6x5' terrain board with inches, I found that it might be playable on a 20" (60cm) by 30" (72cm) terrain using centimetres. I had already planned to use 6mm vehicles and figures. I had never done any realistic terrain for 6mm figures, so this was somewhat intriguing to me. I had done some terrain for Rommel, but for this game the terrain is more schematic than realistic. I like Rommel, but it feels like a boardgames converted to the tabletop.
To start testing my assumptions, I started to research making terrain for 6mm gaming. There was a lot out there. I should mention that I plan to focus on Early War Ostfront, so I was more imagining large forests and undulating steppes dotted with small villages and farms. A much more open terrain than Western Europe. I found an old piece of mat of which was 20x40" so I started with that. I made some forests as well as some buildings on a resin printer in order to construct some variable sized BUA's. I had a 6 mm river and some hills that were scale agnostic so I put together a terrain for our first game. I already had some 6 mm vehicles left over from my Rommel project.
Next up was what to do for figure bases. I had already decided to not base any vehicles, so that was easy enough. Most people appear to be placing their infantry sections on medium FOW bases (50x32mm). Some calculations were performed and I decided 20mmx15mm would be an appropriate reduction. I set up my FDM printer and out popped multiple bases. I already had some 20 mm round bases and some 30mm square bases, which I will use for attached heavy weapons/company commanders and unattached heavy weapons respectively.
I then went ahead and painted these bases in their respective army colours with splashes of green, blue and yellow for A, B and C companies. Our game was going to be virtual, so visibility is pretty important. Next I had to address the need for markers, I had bought the mdf token set from TFL, but I felt these were a bit large. P-Y came to the rescue here with his design capabilities and before you know it we had STL files for the Combat Patrols and Status Tokens.
So it seems we were all set to have our game, which we played this past Wednesday. I had watched both the TFL and Storm of Steel videos, which were both quite helpful. The game actually went much better that I would have thought. The scenario and the terrain appeared to work well and we had no problems with visibility over Zoom. I took the Russian defenders while P-Y played the German attackers (he won the toss, but I do prefer being the defender). We played for about 3 hours and got through 6 turns, we made a lot of mistakes but the game is quite intutitive and as we went on we really only needed to refer to the QRS. We had a lot of questions after the game but after a scrutiny of the rulebook and a rewatch of some of the videos, I was all set and only had to ask one question on FB. We plan to give it another go this Wednesday, same scenario. I now feel confident, however, that the game is quite playable on a small terrain, using centimetres with 6mm figures. So confident, that I have placed a largish order from Heroics and Ros for Soviet and German battalions.
OB Used
Some Photos
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