Cangames - Report #1 - Face of Battle

Howdy folks,

I hope all is well on your side of the internet. This post definitely took me much longer to get out than I would have liked...it is a continuation of my Cangames coverage and post-con contemplation. Of course, there has now been sufficient time past that my memories are somewhat muddled, so this will be much less substantive as an after-action report, and moreso a recap of memorable highlights from the game.

In this post, I finally had a chance to try out Michael Ball's ruleset The Face of Battle...version 2...to be honest, I had never been able to make timings meet so I totally missed out on version 1, and this con was the first time that Michael was taking this version to the Cangames crowd. The game is World War 2 focused, with player activation based on which cards you turn up. Each of the players control a force, a platoon or platoons of infantry and/or tanks, and while each player activates together (i.e. they all flip over a card at the same time), the card determines the action and by whom. 

So in the case of our game, we had 3 players per side. Each player had a deck of cards specific to their allotted force, so in my case I had an infantry squad/section and at a later point in the game I was going to get a T34 tank. Each infanteer had a specific weapons loadout, so I had stats table for them, but the determination of which individual soldier could do their actions was dictated by the card I turned up. In addition, the leader(s) had their specific actions that they could do as well as leadership actions that they could allocate to a soldier when that card was drawn. As well, each specific crew member of the tank had their own individual cards (i.e. loader, gunner, driver, etc.).

Admittedly, I found that there was a pretty steep learning curve as there were several nuances that needed some practice to go over. The overall flow of the game was really good, but given the con setting, it was tough to get the details straight…the mechanics, definitely picked up quickly…but I was fretting over getting the details right.

Anyhow, please enjoy the pics and random commentary.

Initial layout...the Sov's will come in from the top right side of the pic, German troops from the mid left side. Objective is to capture as many buildings in centre as possible.

Our platoon starts moving up. Each player has control of a section/squad of infantry (I think up to 10 troops - 1 leader, 1 light machine gun, up to 8 soldats mix of smg's and rifles). Her you can see a squad that has double-timed up to the stone fence; another squad mid-field; and third squad on left side of the field.

Different perspective as we cant the picture. The squad that was at the stone fence make it to the line of buildings. My squad is half mixed between the other field (near the blue card) and building across from that...they are holding there before double timing to minimize exposure.

Closer look at my squad hunkered down, a couple of soldats have entered the building, I have 2 others waiting to sprint across the road.

The game has progressed a bit, at some point I kinda stopped taking pics of the infantry and focused on the action on the German side of the table...we have infantry at the cemetery walls, a T34 behind the tree...squaring off against a Panther that is next to the building at the top right of this pic. The green field shows some German infantry taking cover behind a fence. There's an MG team out there somewhere, I think behind the tree at centre of pic.

T34 moves a little closer taking it slow.

The Panther taking aim...

The T34 dashes forward and tries to disrupt and ground down the MG team that is causing some hassle for the infantry trying to advance into buildings.

Not the outcome we were looking for, the MG crew get a lot lower down in their position (the crater was deeper than it looks) and the Panther connects and makes it mark. The mechanics and resolution of hits by vehicles takes a bit of time as there are multiple tables to consult and damage is boiled down to damage to each crewmember and vehicle system.

We finally reached the point in the game where the rest of our armour support shows up…3 x T34’s show up in the field and we start pushing them towards our right flank and the cemetery.

The German players score some hits on the tanks and we end up with some slight damage and one of the tanks has to fall back before taking some additional damage. At this point the game is pretty much one…the one building that I was trying to hold was destroyed by tank fire, so that was one less point available. All in all, an enjoyable game but like I said some of the nuances eluded me and the level of damage detail for vehicles was pretty intense.