A first Rommel playtest

[Phil Dutré]

See my blog: http://snv-ttm.blogspot.be/2017/11/rommel-first-playtest.html

 

During our post-game debriefing, the following issues with the rules and tactics came up:

• The combat table is very dependent on the die roll. For some combat factors, the spread between rolling a 1 or a 6 can result in 1 or 4 hits – a significant difference.
• The combat mechanic uses 2 different types of modifiers: a change of combat factor pre-roll, and a shift up or down the table post-roll. That seemed not so elegant to us. As you can read on our Wargaming Mechanics blog, such mix of modifiers should be avoided.
  Most of our units clustered in groups of 3 in a single hex. It didn’t seem very smart to send out lonely units.
• An attack should be carefully planned. Usually, you cannot eliminate the defender in a first tactical operation, and you will get pushed back and “tipped”. That means you are now at half combat value, so the defender can easily hit you back next round. We had some trouble with understanding this mechanic early on, but later in the game we managed to coordinate our attacks and use several “follow-up” attacks in subsequent tactical phases.
• One other thing we noticed is that the Ops Sheets were a bit awkward to work with: small letters, and counters got shifted around. So perhaps we should use a hand of cards instead – using a tactic then means discarding a card. It also facilitates choosing tactics in secret. This idea is also floating around on the Rommel forum, and I guess some people have used this mechanic already in their own games.

We might have gotten some things wrong, so we should reread the rules and give the game another try. But overall, it was a pleasant experience.

[MartinR]

I’ve also solo played it and agree about the extreme spread of combat results. I dumped the Op sheet early on and made cards up, which work much better.

The main problem I had with it is that there are lots and lots of decisions, but few of them bear much relation to military command decisions, they are more about playing the game mechanics. There are some nice ideas buried in there though, I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate tactics cards into various games for a while, but I’m not generally a fan of command point type games of the multiple impulse variety. There are simpler ways to produce the same effects of eg mobile VS set piece attacks.

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

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