Our Intro to COC: an AAR

last night my friend Dan and I got together. we began the evening by doing a tiny bit of painting, and then we migrated to the dining room for a small introductory game of Chain of Command.

 Dan played French, and I played German, using Rich's 1940 army lists.  we both had a platoon of 2 squads, with approximately 10 levels of support(effectively 3 support teams and a tank). We went about the patrol phase, got our jump off points set u and then begun the game.

Most of the first few phases were simply used to get the majority of out troops on the table.  one notable action was me charging a full German squad around the corner into a full squad of sand.  the Frenchies beat me 6 kills to 5 and my squad fell back. at the beginning of the next turn, Dan would charge back around the building at my squad, and kill it. my 38(t) then came on hte table and broke the remainder of the charging french.

On the other side of the table, Dan deployed his troops directly into the building, and surrounding courtyard, while his hotchkiss MMG deployed to the hedge directly across the street.. i deployed my 2nd squad into hte feild, along with  my 50mm mortar team.  across teh raod behind teh hedge i deployed my 75mm infantry gun and my tripoded MG34. teh next few turns ended up with a haevy exchange of fire between the 2 forces.  eventually i broke his MG team(which his paltoon LT was attached to) and used a chain if command dice to end the turn, sending his LT routing off table. I'm mean.

a few phases later, I managed to wear kill the 2 remnants of the french close combat squad, and soon after that I broke one team of Dan's 2nd squad in the house, and the game ended.

this was our first game, and although Dan and I are familiar with too fat Lardies rules, it did take quite a while. we looked everything up.  it also didn't help that although both Dan and i could hit, we could not have any effect to save our lives. this seemed to draw out the game artificially. in the advanced rules they have a suggestion to make tanks more bloody, basically add a +1 to penetrate for all tanks for all tank. after a few more games, if the trend follows, i may do the same thing with the effect for infantry combat.

I'm also not thrilled with the differentiation in tanks speeds. on open ground/road, going "flat out" is about 1 inches per d6 per speed class.  if that's all, why bother having speed classes?  I'm considering making these a little more differentiated. doubling the increase would mean that fast tanks are only going 12" faster than infantry at full out. which is not exactly speedy. but it still gives the feel of fast tanks going actually fast.


still, I have to give it a few more tries before making a decisions about changes and the like. I like a lot of the mechanisms though.