BKC 3: First Test of the New Rules

U.S. Armored Attack

Having played the first two versions of Blitzkrieg Commander, we were of course anxious to try the latest version, which most of us recently received a few weeks ago. Although eveyrone had read or at least looked through the new rules, you never know what is going to happen until you actually get to playing them! For our test battle we used one of the scenarios in the book that would see several battalions of U.S. armor backed by mechanized infantry attack a German held line. The objective was for the U.S. forces to create a breakthrough gap in the German lines by the end of the game. Both sides had plenty of armor, infantry, AT assets, recon, and artillery as we wanted to see how things worked compared to the earlier versions.

If you look closely at the pictures there are no U.S. vehicles on fire! Yes, that was a theme throughout the night where the Germans just could not score hits, suffered a large number of bad rolls (I once scored three hits on 36 die rolls in one turn!), and basically got run over by a train! The U.S. forces just kept moving and firing, knocking out the German defenses bit by bit. The Germans could not call artillery, reinforce success of any kind, and basically it was a bad night to be part of the panzerwaffe. After about seven turns the game was called as there was no point in going further since the Allies had the required breakthrough and it was just going to get larger turn by turn had we gone on.

What to make of the new BKC 3 rules? Well, there's some good and bad. We didn't use the full suite of "unit abilities", which is a new feature and we saw that we are going to have to spend a lot more time preparing the scenario than we have in the past. The army lists are easier to use and read, but we had a lot of questions about the rates of fire and changes to the armor ratings of several units. Artillery is simpler, but it looked to be far more devastating. In fact, the pendulum may have swung too far, going from being hard to destroying armor to simply obliterating everything in sight. Only time will tell and we'll give this another go sometime soon.

The Friday Night Update is sponsored by Trenchworx.