Tom Kassel - 02:26pm Jun 3, 2003 PST (#17025 of 17085) 

More on Lost Battalion Game's Battlelines: 

I've had a chance to do a bit of solo now. It looks pretty good. 

The main units are battalions, with company attachments, leader
attachments and hq units. A unit deck has these units plus action,
battlefield (mines/entrenchments/etc) and fortune cards. 

A mission is drawn randomly which specifies a location layout (between 5
and 9 locations with various connections) with half the locations used
for each side's initial deployment. The rear-most location is
base/objective - the place where you add new units and the place to
capture. Also speficied in the mission is the number of units that you
initially select. You have completely free choice of starting units but
the mission also specifies that one or two of your starting cards are
randomly discarded at the start of the mission. 

Each turn start with an orders check (flip your top card over and read
how many orders you get (1-4 but mainly 1 or 2). An order is used to add
a unit to the map, draw a card from your deck, play an action card but
most often to activate the card text of a unit already in play. You can
use as much or as little of the text as you wish. For example, a panzer
battalion from 9th Pz div has the following text (explanations in
parentheses): 

march 1 and advance 1 (move to friendly/unfriendly location) 

<4> flank (<4> is a chance check - flip a card and check the result -
range is 1-7 arranged as a bell curve (loads of 4's) - perform the check
and if successful move to the flank position on the location card
(better cover and defence than frontal attack)) 

Combat (direct fire combat against the topmost unit at your location ) 

<3> Advance 1 (move to unfriendly location - only appropriate if combat
just cleared the current space) 

Your unit deck is used for many random events:chance checks, order
checks, combat strength and combat results. One of the cute features is
a hq/leadership function that enables you to look at n cards from your
deck and replace them in any desired order. Who says combat has to be
random? Of course, it helps to remember the combat sequence properly. I
kept arranging nice large fire effect numbers and forgetting that first
I needed to draw a chance number to resolve who fired first. 

So what happened when I played? 

First mission was the baby of the bunch, just 5 locations (2 german/3
soviet) and four initial units each (with 1 randomly discarded). On the
first turn the axis must have drawn about every action card available to
gain extra orders, getting about a dozen and simply powering through the
unprepared soviets. Objective captured before the soviets took a turn.
Oops, didn't look so good. 

The second mission proved that a fluke. With more locations and initial
units, it wasn't so easy. Having lost their initially selected arty
battalion for the second mission running, this time the germans missed
it. Without the extra orders of the first game, the soviet resistance
increased substantially. The germans ground away, killing a couple of
motorized infantry while one of their panzer battalions had an attack of
nerves and withdraw from the action (just for the current mission - back
healthy for the next unlike the dead russians). Eventually they ran out
of time (card deck ran out). Missions finish either when a
base/objective is seized or anyone's deck is depleted. This creates some
pretty severe time pressure (defender gets the VP for his objective if
he manages to hold it). 

The third mission was a real blood bath. With just a single path to the
objective, the soviets piled a whole motorized infantry brigade and
loads of artillery into the single covering location. A handy
entrenchment helped too. They only forgot some anti-tank weapons. This
time the german artillery arrived and in combination with the panzer
regiment, they ground through the soviet hordes. Only not quite quick
enough. With just the soviet brigade hq left holding the objective, the
germans were just one card short of virtually certain victory. 

With two objectives held, the soviets nearly had the 100 vp needed for
winning the operation, though their dead pile was building up and no
germans had been permanently eliminated (a good thing for the germans
because their high quality unit are worth far more vp than soviets). 

I was quite pleased with the game. I expect I've got a few rules wrong
and have posted a few questions on the publishers forum. And I ordered
the Streets of Stalingrad set too.