William Terdoslavich  - Jul 3, 2007 10:57 am (#19039 Total: 19395)  
I'm tired of playing Euro games. I want to kill!!! 	 

On the Table Last Night: Tide of Iron.

JR opened up the big box. It was filled with new board sections and lots
of little toy soldiers, tanks, halftracks and trucks. Dave Fox and Dan
Raspler sat at the table to make it a four-player. Stands come in two
shades of OD and grey to allow for this. 

Each stand has four peg holes. This allows you to place up to four
soldiers per stand to make a full unit. Crew-served weapons like MGs and
mortars eat up two holes but are treated as one piece. 

The scenario had the Americans holding a line with wire and
entrenchments with about 10 squads, two mortar sections and two MG
sections. Germans got one tank, two MG teams, one mortar team, about
four squads of engineers (evenly split between elite an dline
einfantry), and another six squads or so of infantry. 

Things got off to a bad start for the Germans. We kept the units
concentrated, makign them ideal for air strike cards, which the
Americans have lots of. The assault suffers about 10-15 percent losses
just getting to the tree line, where it bogs down. 

Dave made a game effort pushign teh tank up the hill to claim good
ground flanking the Americans, but JR took out the tank with two squads
in close assault. The Germans tried for another push on that hill,
pushing one fresh squad and a depleted squad to do the job, but again
facing US forces hardly scratched by battle. There wasn't enough there
to do the job. 

I tried pushing up along Dave's left, trying to lend some support and
trying to concentrate our two forces against JR's position. Flanking
fire from Dan's mortars and MGs complicated the set-up towards assault.
I tried suppressing the crew-served weapons several times with lone
mortar and concentrated firepower, but the die rolling gods were not
allowing me to roll a few sixes on 6-8 dice. 

The game works, but there is a lot to get through. Player aids were
dispersed. A cheat sheet gave you the component strength points and
movement factors, plus combat procedure and "round" procedure order.
(The game has turns inside rounds, not rounds inside turns. Gack.)
Terrain effects were posted on the back of one book, while special unit
rules were found here and there in several places of the rule book. 

I'd play Tide of Iron again, but my preference is for Combat Commander.
Rules and player aids are closer to the surface for easy reference, even
though the card-driven gamer mechanism can be annoying. There was some
enthusiasm for ToI over Memoir '44 as a better depiction of small unit
warfare in WWII. I'll let the others go into detail over what they
thought about the game. Their take on it differs from mine. 


J. R. Tracy - Jul 3, 2007 11:22 am (#19040 Total: 19395)  
"I no drive just for drive. I drive for to finish in front." - 
Milka Duno, Le Mans 	 

I'm not sure my take on it differs all that from yours, Bill (unless you
think Mem'44 is the better game). ToI encourages combined arms, has a
more sophisticated combat system (though it's still roll to hit/roll to
save), and is card-augmented rather than card-driven. I think it
supplants M'44 as the gateway game of choice for tactical and WWII
wargaming. 

ToI should live comfortably alongside CC:E, being roughly equivalent in
complexity with the choice, if you must make it, coming down to your
taste for chaos. I certainly agree CC:E does a much better job of
presenting information and it's vastly superior ergonomically. That
said, the CC:E scenarios are little jewel boxes, necessarily constrained
by the system as it now stands - ToI is a sprawling monstrosity with a
greater accomodation for scenario design and multiplayer gaming. 

JR