New Iron Cross army list PDFs

Great Escape Games have released additional force lists for Iron Cross. These cover NW Europe 1944-45, including British Airborne, US Airborne, Waffen SS, Volksgrenadiers and Soviet Assault Battalions. The pdf can be found here.

They also have a couple of other PDFs that may be of interest which can be found here.

Iron Cross WW2 rules first playthrough

As promised here's my thoughts on the rules after my first solo play through. I set up a 4'x4' table as shown below, the hedges I used as bocage. (Sorry about the poor quality of the pictures I couldn't find the lead to charge my camera.)

A crossroads somewhere in Normandy

I grabbed what 15mm figures I could find and made two 500pt forces. The Americans (shown below) had 3 Sherman 76mm, 2 M10 tank destroyers, an M20 scout car, a mortar, an MMG and 6 infantry units 3 of which had bazookas.

The U.S. forces

The Germans (below) had 2 Panthers, a Pz IV, a Stug IV, 2 Pak 40s, a nebelwerfer used as a mortar and 4 infantry squads.

The German force

I'm not going to do a full AAR as that wasn't the point of the exercise. My aim was to try out the rules and see what happened.

I didn't use any of the supplied scenarios but set up was straightforward. The game uses activation tokens as its main resource, activating a unit to move or react to an enemy move costs you one token. You start the game with one token for each unit plus one extra from your command unit. In this game the US had 15 tokens while the Germans had 12 tokens. I was a bit worried that this activating and reactivating wouldn't work too well solo but I was wrong. The US won the initiative and after I'd activated a few units I was starting to look at how many tokens I had left and how many the Germans still had and decided to pass the initiative over to the Germans while I had enough tokens left to react if needed. Also this allowed the US to see what the Germans were going to do and maybe adjust their plan accordingly when they got the initiative back. This planning your tactics and deciding when to react and when to pass the initiative over is the main part of the game and is great fun even solo.

In the Meeples & Miniatures podcast the authors commented that taking a force just comprised of a few Tigers or Panthers although it seems powerful is a bad idea. I wasn't so sure about this and nearly took five Panthers (100pts each) as the German force. However after a few activations I understood what they meant. Obviously as you activate and reactivate models you have fewer & fewer tokens left. The US with 15 tokens could do a lot of things but if I'd taken all Panthers I'd only have had 6 tokens to start with and would soon run out meaning the US could activate without fear as the Germans would be unable to react allowing the tank destroyers or Shermans to push forward and go for shots on the flank/rear unopposed. But that's not the only reason. If you have enemy infantry within 12" you're penalised when firing (maybe because your commander is buttoned up reducing visibility), unless you have your own infantry within 12" as well. So you need infantry support for your tanks which I thought was a nice touch.

I'd didn't find the lack of artillery a problem as I had mortars for indirect fire. Also one of the scenarios allows a preliminary bombardment which inflicts morale markers to weaken the enemy before your attack. I didn't miss air support either, obviously the airfields were shrouded in fog or the planes were tasked elsewhere. I didn't use smoke as I never really felt the need for it as I had plenty of cover on the table.

(What follows is mainly what I felt was wrong with the rules. This doesn't mean I don't like the rules or that they're bad. Quite the opposite I think they're excellent but with some problems that should have come up in play testing and been fixed. It looks like when they were streamlining the rules they went a little too far in places. None of the problems I encountered were game breaking or even difficult to fix. But may cause problems for inexperienced gamers.)

I did start to hit problems as the game progressed. The first was with line of sight. There is no mention of how you deal with LoS anywhere in the rules. Now in most cases this isn't a problem as you can reasonably say that units behind buildings or bocage are obviously out of sight. But then we get to woods, do they allow clear LoS as you can see through them on the table or do they block LoS completely. If you have a unit in a wood can it shoot out and be shot at in return? None of these things are that difficult for a pair of friends who are experienced gamers to agree on before the game. But these rules with their simplified approach while still having good tactical depth would be an excellent starter set for new players and I think they would struggle to know what to do. This isn't a big fix, a few lines could quickly clear this up and I'm surprised it hasn't been included.

My next problem follows on from this and relates to buildings. There are no rules for buildings in the game. A few activations in I wanted a few units of infantry to enter the church but I couldn't find how you do this. After a bit of thought I decided that taking an action to enter a building (units have two actions they can use each activation) would be reasonable. After the game as I was checking a few things in the rulebook I noticed that buildings were mentioned in the movement section as being counted as rough going, that is the same as a hedge or area of rubble.
Looking at how rough ground affects movement I saw that it has no effect on infantry. Fair enough the game is a bit abstracted in certain areas and I can live with that. Except looking at how rough ground affects vehicles the rule doesn't work. For example scout cars can pass through rough ground if they roll a 2 or better on a D6. I'm sorry there's no way a little scout car can enter one side of a terraced house and easily pass out the other side. An intact house is very different from a hedge or area of rubble. Again this is a reasonably easy fix and one wonders why it wasn't picked up in playtesting.

But that's not the only problem with buildings and here we go back to the lack of LoS rules. Lets say my US infantry enter the rear of the church and I have a Pz IV in the field on the other side of the church. Can the Pz IV react to the infantry moving into the church and shoot them, does it see them? Yet again this is an easy fix and I can't see how this didn't come up in playtesting.

The last problem I have with the rules is how certain things are explained. I'll give you a couple of examples.

One of the rules for mortars says that you get a +1 bonus to hit as long as some part of the target hasn't moved more than 4" from where it was first targeted. This seems straightforward, it's 8+ to hit the first time and as long as part of the target is within 4" of it's original position the next time that turn you shoot at it it's a 7+ and then a 6+ etc. Except the rule goes on to explain this by saying "This means that a player cannot activate the target unit, shuffle sideways 5" and then claim its not in the target area." Now I'm not very good at maths but I think that 5" is more than 4" so it is outside the target area. This could be a typo but it might not be, it might mean something else that I'm missing.

Another example is with Reactivation. The rule says the reacting player has to say what his reaction is and pay the token cost 'before any dice have been rolled'. So what happens if the first player then fails his activation, does the reacting player still lose his token for reacting even though he has nothing now to react to. I decided that if the player fails his roll the activation didn't happen so there is nothing to react too. This maybe what was intended I have no idea.

There's other areas where things aren't as clear as they could be but these rules aren't alone in that respect.

The only other thing I would say is that these are not 'fast play' rules. Both of you will spend ages each turn deciding on what to activate and whether to react or not. Especially with games where you may have 30 or 40 tokens each like at 1000pts. You could get round this by setting a time limit for each turn and using a chess clock app on your mobile.

Overall I like the rules despite the problems I mentioned. I spent most of my time during the game working out which units to activate and whether it was worth spending a token to react to a move or not. Should I risk it and try push forward multiple times with a unit and hope I made the activation rolls and not waste limited tokens or not. In other words I was thinking about tactics not rules which is the overriding strong point for these rules. I'll be using them again now I've got my 'house rules' sorted for the things I mentioned and I expect to have lots of fun doing so.

Quick Review: Iron Cross WW2 Rules

Time for another quick review. This one features the new WW2 wargame rules 'Iron Cross' from Great Escape Games which cost £12 inc p&p. So onto the rules (here I should say that I just received my copy today so haven't had time to play an actual game.) I have now had a play through of the rules and the post can be found here.

I'd seen mention of these rules on TMP but didn't know anything about them until I listened to the Meeples & Miniatures podcast 156 which featured an in-depth interview with the rules creators.I had no real interest in a new set of WW2 rules as I felt I was pretty well catered for with Chain of Command and Battlegroup: Fall of the Reich. However listening to the podcast got me interested in them and I ended up buying a copy. What got my interest was a combination of the 'simple' mechanics/approach and the tactical depth to the gameplay.

The rules fast play approach is something that I've found more appealing lately. I've been playing a lot of Kings of War Napoleonics (a home brewed variant) and a set of rules that you can quickly explain to a new player that has them thinking about tactics rather than mechanics after a couple of turns has become more and more appealing. This is what led to buy the rules after listening to the podcast.

Some of the stuff in the rules is fairly standard, for example the rules use a D6 for morale/activation and a D10 for combat and markers to manage activations. But what is unusual is that there are no weapon ranges. If you can see it you can shoot it. Also there is no separate melee phase. At 6" range and under firing is more deadly and the close combat/grenades etc is assumed to be part of the combat at that range. This may make the rules seem too simple but they're not. The big thing that sold me was the tactical depth presented by the activation system.

You get one activation marker for each unit you have plus two from the commander and these are used to activate your units, again fairly standard stuff. Where the fun happens is how you use these markers. The player with initiative activates one unit with a marker. He can then decided if he wants to activate another unit or activate the same unit again. If the same unit is activated again he must roll a D6 and get one more than the number of activations that the unit has undertaken e.g. activating a 2nd time he needs a 2+ on a D6. But wait, there's more. His opponent can interrupt the activation and spend one of his markers to activate a unit to react to the move (for example to shoot with an anti-tank gun) but needs a 3+ on a D6 to activate the unit. So your opponent can react to your moves by spending his activation markers but the more markers he spends in reacting the less he will have for his own turn. Plus the player with initiative can at anytime pass the initiative over to his opponent who can pass it back after he has completed at least one activation. So you have a cat & mouse game with resource management. Do you risk spending a marker on reacting or do you save it, if you spent one on reacting with your anti-tank gun but it misses do you spend another or cut your losses. Do you spend markers on the same unit and push ahead to grab an objective or will it get isolated and cut down in your opponents turn. Maybe you've planned ahead and saved some markers to react and protect your advanced unit.

Although it's a bit of a hackneyed cliche the game is like chess in that the basic rules are simple but the tactical gameplay is complex. The rules only cover 11 pages of the 32 page rulebook. The rest is taken up by the four scenarios and the four late war army lists (which cover a page each) and some gameplay examples. Units are 4/5 individual figures to a unit for 28mm or 4/5 figures on a base for 15mm, tanks are based individually, support weapons have 2/3 crew per base so you can easily reuse your existing stuff without rebasing.

Other stuff to cover, a hit inflicts a morale marker on a unit (think pins from Bolt Action) infantry can have 5 markers before they are removed from play. You can spend an activation marker to try and rally a unit and remove some morale markers. Individual figures can have any weapons you like as they are not taken into account. Firing is done with a D10 and a 5+ hits modified by moving, number of morale markers etc and that's about it.

If you want some more details then I suggest you listen to the podcast I mentioned above. I'm really looking forward to giving these rules a try. Now all I have to do find which box my WW2 stuff is in, moving house really messes up your storage system. Once I've had a game I'll post an AAR and link it here.

Wargaming Overload Part 3

In addition to the ACW and ancients games I mentioned yesterday I've also played some Napoleonics and WW2 games.

Having made a start on assembling two 15mm Napoleonics forces 18 months ago I decided it was time to finish them up and finally get a game using the 'Napoleon at War' rules. I'd made the decision to buy painted figures rather than paint my own for two reasons. Firstly it would be quicker and second my poor eyesight and shaky hands make painting all the detail on napoleonics almost impossible. eBay buys of painted French and British armies had given me the bulk of what I needed but I was still short a few cavalry and quite a few infantry battalions. So I ordered a bunch of painted units from Stonewall Figures who offer a good range at great prices. They arrived quickly and they were soon based up ready for our first game.

Back in Feb 2013 I had a look at some options for Napoleonics rules and settled on 'Napoleon at War'. They're pretty straightforward and easy to pick up and we got a game with about 8 battalions of foot, 4 regiments of cavalry and some artillery completed in about three hours. It was fun but there were a few things I didn't like, particularly that there's no point in attacking in column as you get no bonuses and you get fewer bases for shooting so you're better off attacking in line. It sort of struck me as a Napoleonic lite game. Fun, easy to pick up but not a particularly accurate simulation of Napoleonic warfare. I think I'll go back and have another look at FoG:Napoleonic.

Talking of not particularly accurate simulations I was persuaded to have another run out with Bolt Action. Time to dust off my 28mm Russians.

It was a 1000pt game and I was facing some Germans supported by a Jagdpanther (at least my Churchill had decent armour, although its pop gun six pounder had little chance of hurting the Jagdpanther) with the mission to recover some intel from the centre of a village. After some initial sparring for position the main action started with both sides trying to recover the intel only to be cut down by fire or wiped out by an assault. Time ran out with the intel still in the village but surrounded by a mass of German & Russian corpses. The result a draw.

I can see the attraction of Bolt Action but it just doesn't do it for me. Chain of Command is still my favourite small scale WW2 rule set.

Tomorrow, amongst other things, I'll be looking at my participation in, of all things, a Heroclix tournament!

New 20mm MDF buildings from PSC

Just seen this on Facebook. Plastic Soldier Company have released a range of 20mm pre-painted MDF buildings. No details on the price yet but it looks like they'll be on sale at Crisis so maybe more info tomorrow. Anyway here's the pics they posted.

Laying out the marshaling yard for my 1/72 WW2 terrain board

As most of the stuff I need for the railway marshaling yard part of my WW2 board has now arrived I thought it was time to lay it all out and see how it looks. I intend to base everything on a hardboard sheet with the 'rough' side up which I will paint grey and weather to represent the rail yard itself. I will then permanently attach the track to the hardboard but I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to base the buildings or just place them on the board as they are now.

What's on the board now has cost me £76.84 but I still have some buildings and fences to add which will make the total for the 4' x 2' board £116.34. However I may be able to recoup some of the cost by selling some spare track from the job lot I bought on eBay. Even so I will have just about funded both boards anyway with the proceeds from selling off a bunch of GW stuff on eBay!

The shot below shows the layout I'll probably go with (model railway enthusiasts will probably be aghast with the errors I've made). I will be adding a station and a goods shed so may move things around to fit. Of course I can move the rolling stock wherever I like to get some variety in the layout for each game. I also have a couple of sheets of vacuum formed shell holes so I'll be sprinkling a few of those around to add flavour. This will also let me use a couple of the damaged rolling stock wagons with the shell holes as bombed out wrecks.

A station will be added to the foreground and a goods shed in the back right corner.

Side view

Rear view

 

In the photo below I've added an EWM 20mm Vickers Mk VI tank and a few Valiant 1/72 British Tommies to give you some idea of the scale.

 

Finally a few low level shots to give you a flavour of how things will look.

 

The buildings still to arrive are the Metcalfe Goods Shed and the Parcels Office & Waiting Rooms, both shown below.

 

My next task is to lay out the roads for the city half of my board, add the buildings I already have and then decide on what else I need to add. I already have an idea of how I want things to look, I'll just have to see if it works out in practice.

Progress on my WW2 terrain board continues

My terrain board is going to be 4' by 4' with one 4 x 2 section being a railway marshalling yard and the other being a part bombed out city. My latest task has been assembling another cardstock building for the marshalling yard. This time it's a Coaling Stage from Metcalfe which cost me £7.25.

As usual the pack consists of sheets of pre-punched thick card plus instructions and accessories.

The instructions are easy to follow you just have to read them carefully and you'll be fine. The first task is to assemble the main walls and their inner supports as shown below.

Next you glue in the first floor and then the inner rear wall which locks things in place.

Add some interior details, the lower level coal heap and then the roof and its done.

This is a very simple building to construct and took very little time to build. However things weren't quite finished. There was the 'simple' matter of adding the external staircase. This was a nightmare to do. You have a series of cardboard tabs you have to glue together that build up into the treads for the staircase. These are then glued to to side wall being guided by a 'fomer'. Well I followed the instructions but my staircase ended up being too short. Luckily you get extra steps in case you lose any and adding these just about fixed things. But I had glue everywhere, things didn't line up properly and until the glue set it was far from rigid and needed careful bracing to stop things moving around. This simple addition took about twice as long as making the rest of the building!


The wonky staircase

Anyway here's a couple of shots of the finished model, the second one has some Valiant 1/72 Germans to give you an idea of the size of the building.

With it's height this looks like it will make a nice spot for snipers or maybe an HMG team. I just need to weather the building and paint the exposed edges of the card to improve it's looks. Despite the fiddly staircase I'm very happy with the finished model.

Some people have asked me what glue I'm using to assemble the kits so I've added a photo of the glue below. It's made by Scotch and is called 'Scapbookers Glue'. It's nice because it dries hard as iron and has two applicators, a thin nozzle and a pad for large areas.

Another card building for my WW2 city board

Although I haven't posted for a couple of weeks I have been busy working on my terrain. So here's a look at another card building I've made for my board. This is one is the 'Market House' from Superquick and cost £6.70 inc p&p.

The contents of the kit.

As with the Metcalfe kit I did previously the kit comes as sheets of pre-punched card which are glued together. The card isn't as thick as with Metcalfe buildings and the instructions, although adequate, are not as good as those you get from Metcalfe. So on to the build.

The walls and arches ready for assembly

The first job is to cut out the acetate windows and fix the to the walls. On the Metcalfe kits there's lots of spare acetate to apply glue to, making it easy to attach the windows. Here there's very little acetate 'spare' which makes gluing very difficult. In the end I used a small amount of glue on one edge to hold them in place and then ran Sellotape over the window to hold it in place.

The next job was to assemble the arches. You have to bend and glue the arch structure which is then glued to the outside walls. This was very fiddly and as you will see in later pictures it was difficult to get things to stay lined up while the glue set. Although the windows & arches were not insurmountable problems I can't help feeling that the design has been done down to a price and that it would have been done better if it was a Metcalfe kit.

The assembled arches

The front view

The next step was to add the floor to the upper level. The floor piece is too small for the opening but as it's designed to be covered by a fixed roof for a railway layout I suppose it doesn't matter. But as I am leaving the roof separate to allow figures to be placed inside it does bother me.

The ill fitting first floor

I glued the model to the supplied base and then moved on to the roof. The roof was easy to assemble but the clock tower was fiddly and I'm not totally happy with it. At this stage the model is more or less finished except for some optional details. I decided to block up the arches at the rear of the building and I added a plaque on the middle one to add some flavour. With that the model was finished

The rear of the building showing the blocked in arches and plaque

Side view

The front of the finished building.

Overall I'm happy with how it turned out. It's a decent size with the building itself being 5" x 4". It was more of a pain than the Metcalfe kits to build plus the card has a satin sheen to it, that I'm not keen on, rather than the flat matt finish of the Metcalfe ones. I may try a spray of matt varnish to tone it down. On the plus side the bricks and roof already have a weathered effect which looks quite nice. I may buy other models from Superquick but only if Metcalfe don't have what I need in their range.

First try at weathering my card buildings

I'm fairly happy with the completed my card stock buildings for my WW2 city board except for one thing, they look too clean. So I dug around a few model railway sites and picked up a few tips on weathering. I was a bit nervous at first as I didn't want to ruin the buildings but then I thought what the heck just give it a go.

Before weathering

 

I tried out a few techniques on some scrap card and I was fairly happy with the results so I moved on to weathering the roof of the sand house. I decided to do the run off stain from vent stack first. I was using a brown wash with a dry brushing technique so very little of the wash actually was applied but I could build it up as needed. The results are shown below.

 

I felt that the stain was too dark so I used a wider brush on the other side of the roof to get a more diffuse stain. I much preferred how that turned out. The result is shown below.

I also did a random dry brush of vertical strokes over the rest of the roof to give the whole thing a more weathered look. The aerial view below shows the finished result.

At this point I'd accepted that I was going to make some mistakes and just went for it. Although the dark stain lines were too prominent they didn't look so bad from a distance on the table. So I used my light dry brushing of the wash to simulate stains from window sills, the general darker stains that you find at the base of the walls and doors on older buildings and a general dry brush of the walls to break up the clean look.

 

The stains at the bottom of the doors

The walls after being toned down.

 

Being fairly pleased with the sand house I moved on to the water tower. The first thing I did was make a rust coloured wash to use on the water tank. Pictures I'd seen showed lots of vertical rust streaks so that's what I tried to emulate. The results are shown below.

 

The stains aren't so obvious in normal light and I'm happy with how they look on the table. I also used the dark brown wash to tone down the walls and add stains under the windows. I wasn't so happy with that turned out but its ok.

Although they're not perfect I'm happier with the weathered versions than the originals as they look more 'real'. What's more I feel much more confident about weathering the rest of the buildings when they arrive. As with most things the more you do the better you'll get, hopefully!

Second card building for my WW2 city board

The card building set I bought contained two buildings a water tower and a sand house. I posted about the construction of the water tower earlier now here's the sand house.

The pieces for the house come pre-cut on one sheet of thick card. Again if you read through the instructions a few times and identify the parts on the sheet you should have no problems.

The instruction sheet has clear diagrams to help explain how things go together and I had no problems assembling the model. I didn't find any part too fiddly to assemble which was one of the things I was worried about. Again the construction of the building makes it very sturdy with card walls 2-3mm in thickness. The design of the model gives it a nice 3D effect with the doors and windows being recessed.

The final model looks great if a little 'clean'. I'm going to try weathering the buildings using some techniques I've found on model railway sites. From the looks of what they have achieved you can get great results if you know what you're doing. (Whether I know what I'm doing is yet to be determined!) Also, somewhat surprisingly, what I built looks exactly like what it was supposed to which says a lot for the quality of the kit and its instructions.

The above photo shows the finished buildings with some Valiant 1/72 Tommies. The Valiant figures are over-sized for 20mm coming in at about 25mm tall but as can be seen the buildings look nicely to scale for 20mm.

I enjoyed building these as they were a lot simpler than I had expected and look great. I'm going to buy more kits from the range for my marshalling yard board. The ones I'm thinking about are shown below.



A coal stage, looks like a nice spot for snipers (£8.75)

Goods shed, (£13.99)

Signal box (£9.00)

Got to have a station (£16.99)

The total cost of these buildings will be £56.98, including what I paid for the water tower & sand house, which I think is pretty good. If I wanted something similar in resin it would probably cost me well over £100 and I'd still have to paint them.