Christopher Milne - Nov 1, 2005 5:34 am (#27801 Total: 27948) Brandy Station In an attempt to post something on topic, here's a belated OotW report from a game I played last week with Matthew Hayes - my first experience with a Panzerschreck game. We played a little game that came with the latest, all-new Panzerschreck magazine - Brandy Station. This depicts the day's fighting between the USA and CSA cavalry after Chancellorsville; the biggest cavalry fight of the war. I'm happy to report that it was good fun, although we're not quite sure of its value as a historical simulation. The essentials of it are: - Limited unit activations, determined by dice roll each player turn. - Variable victory conditions, known only to the Union player. - Chit pulls that allow you to perform special actions. In feel, it's a fast-moving game. Most of the units are cavalry, and although ZOCs are semi-sticky, it's still easy enough to move around. The CRT also generates quite a few retreat results, both for attacker and defender, which just adds to the mobility. Combat damage is depicted by Disruption Markers, each one of which reduces the unit's combat and movement factors by one. Since most cavalry brigades have 5 movement, and 4 or 5 combat, they take a bit of effort to kill outright, but can quickly become ineffective if overused. In addition, moving your full allowance gives the unit a 50% chance of acquiring another DM counter, so it's very difficult to move units around once they've been in a combat or two. Luckily, for most of the game you can use one of your activations to remove a level of disruption, and there are also chits that allow you to do this in the middle of combat (so factor counters beware!) By random choice, I took the Confederate defenders, which meant I had to try to guess which of the six or so victory conditions Matthew had drawn. Most of them seemed to involve the Union garnering victory points for inflicting casualties and capturing key hexes, so I embarked on a fairly aggressive policy early on, and managed to kill a few Union cavalry brigades by good rolling and surrounding them (retreating through enemy ZOCs inflicts an extra level of disruption on a unit). Still, about halfway through the game, it became apparent to me that the Union was conducting a raid (at least, that's how I interpret the victory conditions). Casualties weren't an issue in this scenario; the Union had to move through certain towns at some point, and prevent the Confederacy from having a brigade on the Union side of the Rappahannock at game end. I immediately moved to get a cavalry brigade over the Rappahannock. Fortunate timing, as I then suffered a string of low activation rolls and poor combat results that severely limited my movement options. Matthew started withdrawing his units to guard the Rappahannock crossings, but at this point the casualties he'd suffered earlier proved decisive, as he didn't have the numbers to do this and hunt down the Rebel brigade. Still, a very close game, and one that I think has lots of replayability. In addition to the variable victory conditions, the magazine provides plenty of options to change things around. A few things that I think were a little dissatisfying: - It's a bit wild and woolly, particularly as it makes sense sometimes to initiate a low-odds combat so that you can get an 'extra' move as the attacker. - The rules could perhaps be tightened up a little. For example, retreating units must fall back two hexes, but there's nothing prohibiting them from moving in a dogleg so that they only end up one hex away from their original spot. - Cavalry units can charge (which doubles their strength) under certain conditions. But there's no downside to charging; I would expect the unit to gain an extra level of disruption after combat. (This might, however, break the game, since charging is usually the only practical way to get decent attacking odds.) In summary, more positives than negatives. A nice, relatively simple game that still forces you to make decisions with limited resources. 6 out of 10 as it's probably too limited in scope to warrant more than 3 or 4 plays.