Combat Captain (the RULES) - Nashcon 2009
As the song goes: "Saturday Nights All Right For Fight'n." Well, at Nashcon this year, we will have the premiere of Combat Captain - WWII tactical combat with as few charts as I could contrive. The game has been playtested and will involve a might-have-been invasion of Great Britain in 1942. You can download the rules for free. We hope you will join us this year at Nashcon and give this a go.
Designer's Notes:
My earlier rules - Charge of the Light Brigade - were primarily devoted to the Crimean War with significant numbers of battalions roaming the battlefield. More recently I toyed with Pirates and even Ironclads when I was in my "water mood." An impetuous acquisition of some early WWII British and German troops put me square in the need of some tactical rules for that period. I looked for some suitable rules and found most were vastly too complicated. Others compelled the use of assorted-sized dice which have never appealed to me. And so, like most of us, I rolled my own: rules, that is.
The limitation of six-sided dice dictated a host of charts and variables which made my first attempts as complex as all the other tactical games on the market. In a dream, I suppose I hit upon the full, even, odd dice convention that plays prominently in the range and movement rules. I then decided that dice could represent not only distance and fire combat, but that dice could substitute for time itself. "Paying" so many dice to conduct an activity would permit a delay in movement - for example, while the unit engaged in some other event such as seeking cover. This took a long time to conceptualize but, once I understood the relationship, the various factors became more apparent. The incidental benefit was the elimination of as many charts as possible.
Hitting on "three" as the "magic number" of dice per turn was by default. Fewer dice made things too slow and more allowed a side to get too much of a jump on the other side.
The fire rules are an evolution of my musket-era charts, albeit with far more variables that seem to be required in modern-era games. We can agree, I suppose, that "shooting"is what WWII games are all about. A single chart would be tolerated if it was devoted to the killing of enemy units from afar.
The morale rule is a variation of that used in my other games. It is gradual, and if you want to run about with morale markers affixed to your troops, so be it. Again, there are no charts, and anybody can subtract one pip from every die as a penalty.
The "cover" rules flowed naturally from the need to avoid complex terrain modifications. Instead of you going to the terrain, the terrain comes to you as a function of the time it takes to get into the several degrees of cover.
At the end of the day, the game is designed for fun at our wargame conventions or where some stalwart souls want to engage in a favored pastime of our hobby.