More Great War

We had another go with The Great War last night, playing a Vimy Ridge scenario (I think). In the first game Geoff took the Germans, whilst I took the British. Geoff looks bemused as Gary's arm explains a few things.

Like most games in this stable, most of your victory points come from eliminating enemy units, but in this scenario there were points to be had from occupation of the German trench-line as well as control of a hill on one of the flanks. I managed to push through the German defences quickly, and take the hill, eliminating enough German defenders that a counter-attack wasn't viable. The combined kills and terrain occupation points were enough that I then only needed a toehold in the German trenches to pick up the victory.

I swapped to playing the Germans against Caesar taking the Canadians, but had to pull out through illness a couple of turns in (part of the reason that there aren't too many pictures of anything). Gary took over, Caesar managed a lightning advance across the board, and easily grabbed all of the objectives in decent numbers. However his gains were via manoeuvre, and he left most of the German units active. This allowed Gary to prepare an effective counter-attack, and Caesar was not only driven from the hill, but took sufficient casualties to give Gary the points he needed for a victory as well.

This game obviously uses the basic Command and Colours system, but has a lot of extra rules and chrome, such as the combat cards and artillery dice. It works well for such a narrowly focused system. I admit I am still a fan of the more basic games in this series - Memoir '44 and Battle Cry, the former with as few of the expansions as possible. It's very easy to take a simple system, and then overload it with ideas to the point that you create the complicated game you were trying to avoid originally. Yes, Carcassonne, we're looking at you ... However The Great War has the advantage that the chrome has been incorporated from the start, so is relatively seamless, and it does offer the players a lot of options in what could otherwise be a fairly uninteresting or frustrating setting for a game of this nature.

As I say, illness - another migraine in fact - prevented too many photos. There was also a Flames of War game on the go, with some lovely terrain, but you'll have to take my word for that.

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