Command and Colours: The Great War

The box in all its glory - photo courtesy of Google images.

When the Plastic Soldier Company announced that they were going to produce a WW1 game in conjunction with Richard Borg of Command and Colours fame I was very interested indeed. I avoided the Kickstarter - or rather forgot about it until it was too late - and planned to take a look once the game was on the market. The game was released and my curiosity was piqued - but at the time not sufficiently to invest in a set.

If I am honest I was unsure about the subject matter of the game - after all I had little interest in the Western front after 1914, at least until the tanks made an appearance. My Great War focus has always been more towards the sideshows - the Middle East and Africa being cases in point. My Great War library has plenty of material on those theatres as well as 1914 but nothing at all from Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Trench warfare has little appeal for me - at least I thought this was the case until my reading of much of Turkish military history changed my mind. The Turks usually fought from defensive positions and so the concept of spadework on the battlefield should not really be quite so alien to me! I suppose to an extent it is very much a perception thing - the vast slaughter on the Western Front does not make for pleasant reading nor recreating on a table top in my opinion.

How wrong am I?

I have to say that Richard Borg has achieved something of a coup with this latest version of his Command and Colours system.

I will not go into a detailed overview of the game or the rules - simply because there are far better reviews on the internet - as I doubt I would be able to add to what has already been written. Suffice it to say that there are some subtle differences to the rule system to cater for the impact of artillery, machine guns and trenches. As I mentioned the late war does not really interest me per se - at least not until the Tanks were a regular feature - until you get to the more open latter stages. Having said that, the figures are very nice indeed (aside from the care needed to cut the British infantry from their sprues) although closer to 18mm than 15mm. There is an expansion set due to be released in a couple of weeks which adds tanks - 4 x Mark V (2 each of the male and female versions), a pair of A7Vs and a brace of German 105mm guns with crews. There is also the rules and scenarios and some additional terrain tiles.

The base game uses a 12 by 11 hex grid - the extra depth no doubt to allow for multiple trench lines - and the terrain tiles unsurprisingly feature trenches - a lot of them! Artillery is not deployed on the board (which raises the question why did PSC produce both the 18 pounder and the 77mm) and is fired using a template - this should appeal to the old school gamers amongst us!

The planned expansion - photo courtesy of Kickstarter/Google Images.

I plan to get the tank expansion and am happy to dabble in the late war based on the set as it stands but for me the longevity may be an issue. If we get expansions and models for other theatres then I believe that PSC could be on to a winner.