Arrowstorm and FiveCore Company Command (ft. Undaunted: Normandy)

I am actually two AARs behind on our Savage Gamma World campaign, but since it is faster to wrote a wargaming AAR than an RPG AAR...

We were planning to play another Napoleonic game on Sunday, but due to unforeseen circumstances only Fg and myself were able to meet up for the session, so we decided to instead play something I have been planning for for a while, and something that just came up recently.

The first game we played was Arrowstorm, a recent release by Dan Mersey. I was actually a playtester for the game in its previous incarnation many years ago, so I was excited to get a copy of the rules when they were released this month. The rules cover the period from the Norman Conquest to the Hundred Years War, and I was hoping to use them for Wars of the Roses too, but given that this was October, I decided to take my Dark Ages collection out and fight the Battle of Hastings.

The rules utilise a tile system, which allows me to use my Undaunted: Normandy tiles. They are a tight squeeze with the 15mm figures we used, but I like the look. In the original game players placed order token onto a shared order chart, but I thought it would be easier to just print the order chart out, glue it onto a piece of card, and cut it into counters which the players can take instead.

The game is rather, well, game-y. You take turns to choose a limited menu of orders from a common pool, which you can then use during the upcoming turn. However, you may choose orders which your troops cannot actually execute just to deny them to your opponent - in our game I (playing the Anglo-Danish) chose the Shoot order on many turns even though I had no missile troops simply to deny them to the Normans, who had missile troops.

The game flowed well enough. In our game the Normans charged the English left flank, but then their cavalry was defeated when they charged up the hill. Fg sent his spears round the English flank, but as I held a unit in reserve they were able to hold them off until I could deploy more units from the main line.

I will see if I can make up scenarios for Wars of the Roses for these rules in the future.

For the second game we played FiveCore Company Command, a game by Nordic Weasel, but not exactly. You see, I have been looking at the Undaunted: Normandy tiles for a while, hoping to use them with miniatures. They are unfortunately a little small, being only 9cm x 9cm, and while they are printed on both sides, there are only 18 tiles in a box, and I had to wait until Amazon Prime Day to order a second set to have enough tiles for our games.

Anyway, back to rules.

Our group were playing the Chain of Command rules several years ago, and have between us accumulated four 20mm armies. While we enjoyed the period, the CoC rules were not the easiest to play or remember. After trying out a few of the other Nordic Weasel games, I decided to give FiveCore Company Command a try, and thought that its depicted my idea of WW2 combat well enough. With some tweaking, I converted the rules to being grid-based, using a rough conversion of 1 grid = 6".

As you can see from the photo above, the tiles are even more crowded when using 20mm figures, and all the more so when vehicles are used. But the grid format made the game easy to play.

We played a scenario from a Chain of Command Pint-sized Campaign book, twice - the first time with just infantry, and the second time with a Sherman on the US side and an anti-tank gun on the German side. The Germans won the first game, and the US the second game. In both games the victory came after one side suppressed the other side and made a dash to/from the church on the upper side of the map across the open ground (tile 12B). The tank and the anti-tank gun we used in the second game did not actually end up having much influence on the outcome.

I enjoyed the games a lot, but the small size of the tiles was an issue for me. After the game I explored the options of recreating larger versions of the tiles, or even making similar larger tiles using the RPG maps I have been using, but there was no perfect solution. I think we will probably stick with the Undaunted tiles for now, and hope that they produce a deluxe edition with larger tiles someday.