Battlegroup : First Playtest

Eric, Raymond and I got together at D6 in Rochester last night and finally gave Battlegroup a go. I’d had some time to read the rules and the more I’d read the more I was hoping to get in a trial game sooner than later.

Battlegroup is put out by the Plastic Solider Company. From the core rules there are several source books for various parts of WWII. Within each source book there are contained lists that are point costed. I’ve not asked on the Facebook page how translatable those lists are across source books. Kinda hard to not have the EW/MW/LW mentality from flames of war to try and group things up a bit.

That’s where as a player you need to yank your head back because Battlegroup isn’t about tournament play. It really is more on the historical side of gaming that goes from squad to battalion level actions. Bigger takes long and you’ll need a larger table but it’s totally possible.

For our game I picked an action from the Overlord book that’s modeled on an Aug 44 battle that involved the Polish and the Germans. The Poles were itching to get into combat after D-Day to do their part and this was one of their first actions against the 12th SS.

Eric setup his infantry force with PAK40s on the edge of town overlooking some rolling fields.

Ray came in from the north playing his first platoon closer to town and the second further out, to go for one of the objectives. With Eric on essentially 3 of the objectives from the top of the game Ray is down about 7 or so in his Battle Rating.

So when you assemble a force in Battlegroup, you have your list of a certain number of points and a certain number of officers teams etc. You also have a battle rating number. For many things that happen (like the loss of a unit, loss of an objective) you take a chit and this counts against your battle rating. Some chits have specials like get an extra action or be able to call in an airstrike or run low on ammo, so it’s not all bad. Once your battle rating goes to zero, you’re leaving the field. The chits are kept secret so your opponent doesn’t know how close you are to breaking.

Raymond’s first and then 3rd troop of shermans with a firefly decided to concentrate on the town. The main gun fire on the PAK 40 wasn’t super effective on turn one. Given attacker moved and the PAK hadn’t opened up yet it made seeing harder.

HE rounds into the buildings likewise scored some casualties. A couple of riflemen and the loader on a MG team being the victims.

In Battlegroup you roll a certain number of die at the top of your turn. The number of die depends on the size of the scenario. 1 to 4D6. This added with the number of officers you have and that’s the number of orders you can issue.

It’s the usual move, move and shoot, shoot and move, kinds of things you’d expect. The order selection also includes overwatch! So you can use that in your opponents turn to shoot if something presents itself. Likewise there’s an anticipatory move with the same idea, you do it in your opponent’s turn not in your own.

The German Pz IVs arrived and the “long” distance tank battle ensued. What’s fun is that Battlegroup harkens to games of yore where the distance determines the shell effectiveness. Longer range, less change for an AP round to penetrate. The orientation of the tanks is on a 45, so front, side, read hull armor sure matters quite a bit more as compared to other games.

With the -1 for attacker and target moving, long range fire is difficult. Makes sense, it should be when on the move.

Raymond having taken the crossroads sat back. Off in the distance towards the south, reports of a couple of 88s meant he didn’t want to get too crazy.

There was a PAK40 there.. it sorta got machine gunned to death.

We played about 4 turns, lots of looking up rules and going slow to get with the mechanics. We had an air attack. We had some artillery come down. A few burning Shermans to top it off. It was way too many forces for an intro game with time limits due to the store closing at 10pm.

While I didn’t play and just ref’d, I liked what I saw. It’s still a back and forth type game when shooting, (aimed fire is roll to see, roll to hit, etc) For armor resolution on penetration for AP rounds, that’s well done using 2D6. Likewise having actual ammo limits for tanks is refreshing.

There’s a lot of flavor in the game tho there are a few odd spots.

Artillery is kind of weird in that it’s a universal 10″ radius area of effect for all types of artillery. On the face of it that shouldn’t be the case, but where it makes up for it is you have to roll hits based on the effects of the HE, so higher HE more hits, less HE less dice and thus less effect. Hits are applied from the center on out so it’s not a case where ALL units in the AoE are in peril.

The game does need a list builder. I’m not sure if there is one so I’ve some googling to do on that. People just don’t want to have to manual put that all together because we don’t all have hours and hours to put into prep time tho we’d sure enjoy it if we did.

Will be playing more in the future!