Reply To: Blitzkrieg Commander 4: 1st Game Impression

[Tony S]

BKC has its faults, and some people don’t like them, because of the command system and the tendency to focus all your attacks on a single unit, although the optional rule of making hits permanent helps mitigate that.  I quite like your idea of removing hits based on their troop quality.  For the record, we play by removing all hits at the end of the phase.  Works for us.

I first loved BKC when we played 1st edition for the first time, and my opponent rolled a blunder.  As a result, his T43s had to move directly towards the nearest visible enemy…which exposed his flanks to a battery of 88s I had.   That sort of thing is rarely ever seen in rules, yet blunders and errors like that happened all the time in WW2.  And every other conflict.  The FoW or FFT hundred foot general would never do such a thing.

I also like the command system.  It’s fun, tense, adds fog of war and leaves the player with some decisions to make.  It also, without any special rules, makes defending units more effective than attacking units on the whole.  Defending units can devote all their successes to shooting, whereas attackers need to some of the command rolls to move.  I love mechanisms like that!

I also like the fact the recce vehicles actually perform recce.  Again, a lot of rules ignore the purpose of those vehicles.

Although we played first edition a lot, and then second, I admit we haven’t yet tried 4th.  Man, my list of games to play when I can play face to face is just getting longer!  Thanks for reminding me about these rules.  We also quite enjoy playing CWC for hypothetical NATO/WP wars.

As for the visibility…yeah, we were quite struck with the seemingly odd details of the LoS rules, compared to the simplicity of everything else.  It becomes second nature once you play it a few times, but I’m sure we’ve made mistakes a lot in that respect.   It quite helps that BKC has so many illustrated examples.  In fact, I wish other rules would do that.  BKC will have two pages of rules, and then the next two whole pages are devoted to well illustrated and explained examples of the rules just before.

And speaking of, I am a bit surprised that you call Battlegroup more complex.  I think that system is about the same complexity as BKC.  We play it as well and like it, although admittedly as company commanders which is a scale down from BKC.  It’s definitely more expensive though!  I’d go bankrupt if I were to assemble all the lists available in BKC in Battlegroup’s books (which isn’t even possible as the lists in BKC are very comprehensive; a huge plus).