The Epic Game

My vision is to have a large table laid out to depict a larger section of the front lines, depicting a brigade/regiment footage. Multiple battlegroups would be deployed adjacent to one another, and the results of tactical encounters between a battlegroup and enemy forces would have lasting consequences at the operational scale.

Since I'm interested in the mid-war years, and in the eastern front, I'm going to set up my initial epic game in that period and locale.

The Germans will be strategically on the defensive in my initial game setup, with some mobile reserves for counterattacks or stiffening of other battlegroups.

I've gone back and forth between using a large table for a battalion sized game or using a campaign map to move operationally. Currently, I'm leaning towards using a long table to play a full reinforced battalion on the defense.

What It's About

I have a love-hate relationship with Flames of War. While I think it is a fun and well written set of 15mm company level rules, there are a few “gamey” aspects that bug me, and I miss playing rulesets with more emphasis on command & control. For many years, I played Command Decision, in its various guises, in 20mm scale (1/76th).

Sometimes Flames of War are a little too oriented for pick-up games and tournaments. I mentioned above the gamey aspects – such as the sudden appearance of reserves at so very convenient points, the way the rules mechanisms model the turn sequence so that opportunity fire isn’t available (and some would argue, with some justification, unnecessary), and crewmen “bailing out” of perfectly good armored vehicles. I guess on that I can just think of “bailed out” as “suppressed” and I’m OK with that one.

But I really liked Command Decision’s mechanics that provided a sense of being in command, and influencing the ebb and flow of a battle, and thought of trying to combine aspects of the two systems, in my own home-brew, hybrid of the two. I’m not interested in mucking with the core mechanics of Flames Of War, though I will add some limitations to how reserves can appear. What I really want to do is overlay the Command Decision command system, a bit of morale, and its campaign rules to produce a hybrid that will allow me to play epic fights that aren’t decided by a single tactical encounter, but are the sum of many, with intervening command actions that can model an entire battle at a higher level – roughly brigade in size.