More SSOM playtesting in HQ Club

The scenario objective.  The initial assault was easily rebuked.

Ben and Urbain had a go at the rules, version 0.51 or thereabout, and we used more units than the usual 3 squads a side, with the German player fielding a mix of regular troops and FSJ, supported by some StuG and Panzers, including a Panther.  The US player had to defend this headquarter for 9 turns, and fielded 6 squads of Airborne, with LMG and 60 mm mortar support and 3 tanks in support.

The battle did not last very long, with the German player giving up rather quickly due to what I considered limited losses during a full on charge without any smoke cover across a 100 m long field.  The rules, on the other hand, held out all the way.  There were quite a few constructive comments, and the dividing line between what the rules should cover and what they should not is becoming clearer: it's useless to talk about markers, bases and so on, these are things that depend on the players and their gear.  Another thing that I have to start thinking more about is a first scenario pack.  The rules in themselves are near finition, even if the manuscript is not.  The manual remarks, corrections and improvements now need to make it into the v1.0 rulebook.

However, for the rules to have playability, we need a scenario pack too.  The first pack will definitely treat the 1944 Europe theater, with Normandy, Arnhem and Bastogne as the three turning points.  We have already seen how much balancing a single scenario requires, so there will be a lot of playing in the near future.

Another project that has to be tackled in parallel is the Build Your Scenario book, which lists armylists and rarity of equipment and will propose a method for building scenarios in any scenario.

A new terrain piece from Crisis

One of the items I got at Crisis 2012 is this ruined factory n 10 mm scale. I think it'll turn out a very useful piece, and the main objective for many a scenario. I quickly slapped on some color with my drybrush, models like this don't need much to look the part. The bottom is not very straight though, I might have to look into that, either sand it down to a lesser thickness, or slope the edges a bit with spackle and chicken wire, I'll test it in operation first.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Playtesting v0.51 again

Everything was about the bridge...

The US advance was easily thwarted

We had another at ironing out errors yesterday, with a small - and frightfully unbalanced - ruined city scenario we ran. Teun ran into an iron German defence, and did not have the troops to do the job. His platoon leader's early demise did not help. The amount of feedback generated was plentiful. Lots of work ahead there.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Making tokens for SSOM

I have been working on som new markers for SSOM. From left to right, here are the fire session counter, with kept rate of fire on the back. Then the pinned / cowered markers. The third ones are not yet clear, and the 4 times 4 on the right are the gun malfunction / broken down counter.

Still working on them, but here they are!

a new test game is planned next Saturday after the Crisis exhibition, and that will be the official relaunch of the development, which has been in hibernation for about a year now. I need the repeat test of v 0.5, because I want to have a clear image in my head, and my notes from last time are not good enough for that.

 

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012