Chain of Command & Qwixx

Qwixx is a Dutch abstract dice game about filling out a scratch pad to get a score, Chain of Command is a WW2 platoon level miniature rule set. What do they have in common? Read on…

 

I played Qwixx as an after dinner game at some friends house this past week. It’s a quick dice gambling, even push your luck game. There is no theme, you are just trying to fill out four coloured rows of numbers by rolling those numbers sequentially. On your turn you roll 6 dice, 2 white, 4 of different colours matching your four rows; red, green, yellow, and blue. Once you have rolled you can add the two white dice for a number to fill any row in the pad, and then add one white die to one colour die to fill a number out of that colour. With me so far? Good. You have to fill out your numbers in sequence for each row. Two rows count down from 12 to 2 and two count up from 2 to 12. So, early in the game I want to roll 12s and 2s. If I roll a 4 I could fill it out in a row that starts at 2 but then I would never be able to go back to fill in the 2 and 3 in that row, and thus lose that score. The catch is when someone completes a row it locks and no one can score there anymore. Thus you can both pass and wait until you get the rolls you want or sprint to lock a row, getting a low score, but perhaps the top score. There’s a few extra wrinkles and you can use the white dice to fill out numbers on other player turns but you get the gist.

Qwixx! Image credit Andre Nordstrand at BGG, used without permission.

It’s surprisingly addictive and if you want a quick dice game to play with people after dinner parties when you are pretending to be interested in a conversation on the price of electricity (pretending to be interested in very dull things is a key skill in adult life) then Qwixx fills that role. It’s not mind blowing but it’s better than awkward silence and people who hate games and stories will play it.

 

What does this have in common with a WW2 platoon combat game? Chain of Command is a ruleset by Two Fat Lardies. A UK indie publisher of slightly pricey rules for model soldiers. I went down to the Sheffield and Rotherham wargame club last night. Really I am more of a board wargamer and roleplayer, but recently I decided I wanted more local opponents and wanted to spend more time playing games than thinking about them. So if you can beat them, join them. I’ll get into collecting miniatures as it has the bigger player base of people I can relate to in the UK. A very nice group of fellas invited me to play a game of Chain of Command as a platoon of Luftwaffe defending a bridge against the Brits in Italy.

 

 

British paras skulk near a hedge row.

The aesthetics were beautiful, great 15mm miniatures and terrain etc.

 

Getting back to my point, Chain of Command is largely a dice game. On your activation you roll 5 dice. Depending on what you roll certain actions are available to you. 1s allows you activate a fire team, or small group such as a panzer schreck team.  2z allows you to activate an entire squad, 3 a junior leader and his squad, 4 your main leader, 5s turn a clock forward on your display board to get special abilities later, and 6s are usually wasted, unless you roll 2 in which case you get a double activation, or 3 in which case the ‘turn’ ends. You can also add dice together when you spend them giving you a good chance of making 4s and occasionally 3s which are if you have positioned your leaders well, mitigate the lack of 1s you need for specific fire teams.

So both games you roll dice, you can add them together and you are usually hoping for certain results. Want to bring on that tank reinforcement, you need the right numbers. Want move your leader and heal shock off a unit, you need the right number. It felt like Qwixx. Do I wait for a better roll, or just add some dice together and lose actions in the process?

Do Two Fat Lardies play Qwixx? Probably not, both games have Yahtzee and dice games in general in their linage.  Chain of Command is really trying to get you to spend more dice to activate your main leader. This is a game about one poor guy sprinting around the board shouting orders at people (no radios here). It’s a gamey and fairly effective way of modelling command friction and giving players that gambling rush when they roll their command dice. It does tell me that Two Fat Lardies are game designers in the boardgame lineage rather than simulationists. They are designing for effect and happy to use cards and dice to create a hook in their game.

 

The Sherman advances! It would fire 1 HE shell in the entire game.

I did really enjoy playing it. It looked great and the positioning and fire mechanics felt about right. Our game ended after about 3 hours with me still in possession of the bridge. My opponent did a good job of covering himself with smoke and making ground early on, he also had a good stab at a double envelopment, attacking the bridge from both sides. Once the fire fight did start the results were about even, despite my hard cover advantage (he rolled a lot better than me).

 

I do however have some thoughts, or even perhaps criticisms. First the game entirely abstracts time. To me this feels like a cop out on the simulation aspect of the game. How long does it take a tank to roll down a road? No idea because time does not exist? When will night fall? No idea etc? A lot of the basic components of war stories we tell ourselves are thrown straight out as there is no time frame to link events to. Despite casualty rates and movement progress ‘feeling’ about right with no time dimension you cannot relate it to anything you read about. It is a generic action of unknown extents.

 

A ‘turn’ advances when someone rolls three or more 6s. This has about a 4% chance of occurring with 5 dice. So about 1 in 20 activations. A turn is not a time unit but it does advance certain things. Most importantly in our game it removes all smoke. The pivot in our game occurred when I spent one of those special actions I mentioned earlier, which my 5s had clocked up, to advance the turn and clear all the smoke. This caught my opponent in the open and allowed me to open up some MG42s on him to brutal effect.

 

It is common in games for interrupt cards to be played with bad weather, or special actions to be taken by one player to move anthers units etc, but it always feels slightly off. Here because it has such a huge impact on play it felt very off. How long your smoke grenades might last should be variable but to allow your opponent to nix them all in one move feels very gamey and hard to plan around. Perhaps he should have used them more realistically to cover gaps for movement rather than sitting behind them for multiple activations. But then again perhaps he wanted to move past the smoke quickly but lacked the right dice to do so. This is a similar problem to the Command and Colours series of games by Richard Burg. They are very fun but the card activations an turn every engagement into a McClellan type manoeuvre, if there is an overall plan your men are not keen to implement it.

 

I said this is a dice game. You roll to shoot obviously. I don’t have much to say about that other than the numbers and odds seemed about right. Cover, lines of fire etc all work well with rules you will find simple enough. You also roll to move. You can sneak 1d6, move 2d6 or run 3d6 taking a moral hit. I’m not sure whether I like this or not. I do think variable movement is good, but it does mean you can’t easily estimate your opponent’s rate of advance or develop much planning of your own manoeuvre. 

 

There’s a scene in one of the Band of Brother’s episodes when one of the American GIs runs through enemy lines straight across a village and then back to relay and order. It’s quite comedic as the Germans sort of just look at him not knowing what he is doing as he jogs straight through their lines. This is sort of what happens in this game. Most of my turns I was moving my Captain back and forth to resolve my lack of 1s and 2s in my dice rolls. This I think is the real design conceit of the game and was probably my opponent’s main error. He was unable to bring his second tank on for 90% of the game and unable to use his Sherman much but he didn’t run his leader around much. I haven’t read enough WW2 accounts at this scale so I don’t know if this is how things worked or not. It does make for engaging game play however.

 

I’d definitely play this again, but I won’t buy into it as I’m not really a WW2 tactical person. I would consider other rule sets by Two Fat Lardies. They have a Roman set called Infamy Infamy! And a muskets set (French Indian War!) called Sharp Practice. I’ve watched some video reviews and they share similar rules for command and control, movement, shooting, and critically abstract time. They are not the cheapest so I’m on the fence.

 

Have any of my 5 or so readers played these games? What did you think? Do they have good campaign or scenario systems in them? In getting back into miniatures I will pick up Mordheim and Necromunda (1995), the GW games I played as a kid and a bit as an adult. As tactical games they are Ok. What makes them really shine is the near RPG campaign mechanics and the huge variety of scenarios and warband set up variants. What historical skirmish sets have this depth of campaign content? My fear in getting into these games is that it will be a lot of expenditure to refight the same skirmish with different terrain in an I go, you go format. I’m a greedy gamer. I want enough simulation to be mostly convinced but 2-3 hour play time and a huge variety of content linked together with campaign context. Chain of Command had some of this.