"fast play WWII Rules" Topic

I play Crossfire with my FOW guys and love it! If your FOW platoons are differentiated, it is as simple as using a rifle/mg team for each squad, and the platoon commander as the platoon commander. You will definitely need a few HMG teams, or else a LMG teams with prone gunners for ease of recognition.

The other big difficulty is that you will need more terrain, or else play in a smaller space. I've played a lot of Crossfire on crowded 2x2 foot boards: good games!

I was going to suggest Flames of War….

Bolt Action is very popular, with you as a platoon commander. It's fast and simple (all medium tanks are basically the same, as are lights and heavies). Not my cup of tea at all but it might be worth a look…

Have a look at these…….simple,fast and elegant.

panzer8.weebly.com/rules.html

Another vote for Crossfire! (Tim, I have been following your website since the 90's…)

It is the best tactical game I have ever played, yet elegantly simple. Instead of rules, you are thinking about what you should be thinking about, fields of fire, heavy weapon placement, covered and concealed avenues of approach, winning fire superiority, etc.

If you want to be a WW2 or Cold War full bird colonel on a reasonably sized table, I suggest Brigade Commander from Nordic Weasel Games (Availible at Wargames Vault, cannot pull the link as I am at work) It is figure scale agnostic, you can see some 1/600 Cold War games I have played here: link

Good luck and good gaming!

Crossfire for a good pay set. I'll also second Panzer8 rules for a free set.

As always, it depends what you mean by simple and quick. All of the above are more complex than 1 Hour Wargames, Crossfire is very good though.

Higher level games can be more simple, and once you get to battalion/brigade sized stand you can essentially eliminate all ranged combat apart from artillery. Go high enough and you can eliminate artillery too.

I was pondering how to make Phil Sabins 'Korsun Pocket' into a more general purpose eastern front operational game – brigade/division/corps sized stands, 20km hexes, multi-day turns. A bit like my own Panzergruppe, but simpler and faster.

Crossfire is great for infantry engagements, spent many years playing games with it, though it never really hit the mark with vehicles for me. It does take a bit of time to get used to though…

You do need plenty of terrain though. Will work perfectly with FoW style bases I would have thought.

I will stick an oar in for our Battlegroup rules… Now available as a PDF too. Might be what you are looking for.

I've long enjoyed Blitzkrieg Commander for fast play and feel of Battalion-Battlegroup commander — using historical TO&Es and chain of command, and hosue rule that the first order from every command stand works each turn (if the command roll failed, you don't get additional attempts).

I like both Panzer8 & Crossifire. We did D-Day at a recent con with Panzer8 & it went very well. Crossfire is great for infantry actions with 1 or 2 tanks per side.

JPK

Irregular Miniatures sells a set called "Mechanised Warfare Rules" for 3.00 GBP. A good overview and AAR is on the following site.

link

Lets put it this way, if you haven't played Crossfire, you need to, its as simple as that. Maybe its not the end all you're looking for, but you'll be a better person for it regardless ;)

I'd also highly recommend Fivecore Company Command. Much simpler than Bolt Action, FoW, or Battlegroup, if simplicity is a priority. Fast and fun, with extra details to patch in as you like.

Normandy Firefight sold by Northstar. The rules are set for 1/35 scale miniatures but we use 28mm anyways. Lots of fun and fast.

How does Crossfire compare in scale to Chain of Command?

Officially, Crossfire is a battles are company+ games and Chain of Command is platoon+.

Each stand in Crossfire is a Squad, while CoC accounts for each man individually (though you can play with stands as teams usually move together and just mark casualties).

There are house rules for playing crossfire at lower levels either with each base being a team or even playing with individually based models.

The one problem I have with CrossFire is a difficulty playing with more than one player per side.

The attempts I've seen over the years are either a bit contrived or clunky and thus loose that rapid, back and forth interaction between sides that make CrossFire unique, unpredictable and amazingly enjoyable for such a simple concept. One other method used for multi-player games just has two or three unsynchronized games played side by side.

Are there multi-player versions of CrossFire that you enjoy?

Iron Cross is out soon…
link

Stuart,

Looks interesting!

Stewart

Thanks Tim. I have seen your multi-player methods on your excellent web site a while ago. I will have to take another look.

We've been using Battlegroup **** rules for over a year now and found them very good for fast play too. Considering club nights are a 3 hour time slot +/- 30 minutes set up and tear down time and have we've never failed to get a resolution, this is pretty remarkable!

If you want fast play at a large scale, and the command of a Division suits you then Krieg ohne Hass might suit?
Two models/stands/bases to a battalion, no record keeping, everything on table – even artillery!
Lance.oo

Lets put it this way, if you haven't played Crossfire, you need to, its as simple as that. Maybe its not the end all you're looking for, but you'll be a better person for it regardless ;)

I have played Crossfire and it didn't make me a better person! It is an ok game, but I have 2 beefs with it.
(1) The tank rules look like they were written on the back of a fag packet 10 minutes before the rules went to press.
(2) Is the Usain Bolt effect. A squad out of LoS can sprint to the baseline, then across the table and back down the other flank all without your opponent being able to do anything about it.

So you prefer a game where you are allowed to react to stuff you know nothing about?……right….ok, can't really comment on that.

The armour rules are indeed simple, but crossfire makes no apologies over that, it is an infantry game.
There are a couple of very basic changes that I've found make the armour game a lot more interesting:
The rules as written require you to equal or exceed the armour value to get a penetration, which gives some curious results (75mm shermans penetrate a tiger1 33% of the time), change the number required to exceed only gives a better spread of results.
Give vehicles a rating for allowing more than a single action per initiative, slow vehicles still get a single action, most vehicles give them 2, and zippy stuff give them 3 actions, then give all vehicles an additional action per initiative providing they are on roads the entire initiative. This actually allows vehicles to do something. Works well.

So you prefer a game where you are allowed to react to stuff you know nothing about?……right….ok, can't really

Are you saying you can't react to stuff you can't "see" in Crossfire? Consider the following. Say you have a tank on either flank and I take one out with a bazooka, as long as I am out of LoS I can sprint round to the other flank and your remaining tank just sits there and does nothing. It doesn't pursue its own objective, attacking my forces on that flank. By the time It gets to act again my bazooka team has arrived. As long as I'm out of LoS and have the initiative I can react to anything of yours I can or can't see.

Tim I can see hidden deployment helps, but if I have moved squads along that route before without being interrupted I can do so again. This favours the attacker if I have reached my objectives on one flank I can leave a holding force and sprint the rest round to reinforce my attack on the other flank instantly. Under most rules it would take some time to do that and in the meantime the attack on that flank might have been wiped out by a counter attack before they arrived.

Tim your example implies several missteps on behalf of the tanks, specifically not being supported by any infantry that would likely stop the pursuing bazooka and end your initiative. Tanks off on their own in the dense terrain of Crossfire = dead tanks.

So yes, it's not a perfect game, but it is an important one, one that many in the community hold in very high regard, and is uniquely simple to teach (the entire infantry rules in 5 minutes?). I think thats a very valid reason to investigate it.

Well, to be honest Fred, why not? If you have troops set up that have no mutual support, then you get punished. As per real battles. In your rather extreme example if the tank had another tank or infantry section covering it then it could react, and in the context of the rules, recover the initiative. A single line of unsupported units will get murdered…strangely reminiscent of 20th century warfare.
Funny, that.

It doesn't matter if the tank has support or not. The Usain Bolt effect enables you to switch assets around at will. As long as you can stay out of LoS after taking the first tank out you can switch the bazooka team to the other flank and it is there instantly ready to engage the other tank if unsupported or to wait in ambush for a better opportunity. As to it being unusual I would say not having used it myself in a number of Crossfire games either as a defender to switch important assists like AT teams around or as an attacker to instantly switch the thrust of my attack. I prefer games where there is more fiction, but if you like the sort of flexible control that Crossfire gives you the go for it.

I assume Tim's house rule involves something like splitting the table into zones. So for a 6' wide table you might have 3 2' wide zones and a team crossing from one zone to the next triggers a change in initiative.

"Memoir '44" works well. I play it at conventions on a Hotz mat with 5" hexes and my 15mm miniatures. It is fun and plays fast.

Here is a set of FREE fast play rules.
Kampfgruppe
link

Buck Surdu, author of Look Sarge No Charts, has a new fast play set… I think it's called Combat Patrol. Everything is covered on a deck of cards that you draw from (a lot like Memoir 44, but without the need of hex maps).

On that note, I should add that I really wanted to like Memoir 44, but I really couldn't. It doesn't feel very WW2 to me to drive around the map willy nilly dropping fistfuls of dice regardless of how weakened your unit has become. It also made vehicle combat feel a bit like bumper to bumper tanks (one of the things that really turned me off of Flames of War all those years ago). The weird thing is that I picked up Richard Borg's The Great War and like it quite a bit… Maybe it's the sheer terrain density of that game, or the fact that two armies functioning identical to each other seems somehow more appropriate to WW1 than to WW2.

Rapid Fire is a great set for fast play rukes at a large scale.

As for Crossfire's problematic armour rules, I know of someone who has worked on that problem to develop a variant. If anyone is interested in the rules drop me a line and i will try and forward them to you.

gregoryk, please hit me up at retroboom.com. I definitely would like to see what your friend has done :D

Gregoryk….us too please! We bought a raft of stuff based for Crossfire and we'd really like to have some suggestions for armour – especially since we plan on playing fairly large games.
thathistorybloke@outlook.com