Future War Commander And Maurice

Last night Geoff and I gave Future War Commander a try. Neither of us had played it before, and had both really only skimmed the rules as well. I'd played Blitzkrieg Commander a couple of times about five years ago, so had a little more experience, but not much.

Geoff had thrown together two armies using various figures (including Epic 40K) stuff, the lists being based on two factions from GZG's 'Tuffleyverse'. I had the NAC (Anglo-Americans) whilst Geoff had the Communist ESU.

Geoff's forces consisted of three motorised infantry companies, an artillery company and some scout walkers.

I had two motorised infantry companies, a light tank company and a heavy tank company.

My tanks advanced slowly - they fired a lot (to little effect) but never seemed able to move.

My light tanks were positively static a lot of the time.

Especially when they started blowing up.

Meanwhile Geoff's infantry swiftly seized the objective whilst mine hung around outside, afraid to advance.

At that point we called it a night. We'd made loads of mistakes with the rules, but having sorted them out now the next game will be faster and, probably, bloodier (now we know how to do firing properly).

Meanwhile Caesar, Ralph and John played Maurice. Note that I still haven't painted the Riskovians ...

I have Caesar to thank for the Maurice report:

"Thanks Ralph and John for another enjoyable bash at Maurice, where Prinz von Sparker obligingly mopped up the battlefield with my precious Pink Grenadiers.

It started to go pear shaped when my Riskovian infantry, cunningly deployed for an aggressive march in column, saw a Sans Coleur battery unexpectedly wade through some rough terrain to park on my flank. While “the Pinkies” ably charged these guns down, aided by musketry support from John’s Blackshirts, I had to pivot my entire line of advance to do so. Sans Coleur infantry took little prompting to advance their neat lines into the staggered confusion that was the Riskovian force after dealing with the enemy artillery.

The ensuing fire fight was predictably one-sided as oblique lines of Riskovian infantry crumbled to superior fire power. At one stage Ralph threw in the “Confusion” card to break up my force, which made rallying much slower, as pay back for my use of the “That’s not on the map” card to materialise a swamp to halt his artillery flanking manoeuvres.

Lessons learned:

Changing from column to line is slow without the “Cadence” national advantage.Keep artillery at a safe distance from enemy charges.
Don’t let an enemy flank march distract your main line of attack.
Keep your forces intact whenever possible to economise on orders and aid mobility.
“Rally to the Colours” is a handy national advantage, up there with “Lethal Volleys”.
Still plenty of fun surprises from spoiler cards in the deck.

The closing stages saw Comte de Cesare’s command being overrun and narrowly avoiding capture, absconding the field in a carriage reputedly belonging to one Milady de Winter…"