Rich has finally opened up for pre-orders of Chain of Command. Yea! These have been such fun to participate in play testing. The changes to the rules are rather a dramatic departure from their card driven system - on the surface. Honestly it took me a bit to get used to the mechanisms. Once I did, I really, really enjoyed them. Do I miss the cards? Yes. Are there some things that you can't do because the cards are not present? No. It makes scenario design more challenging but it has not really prevented any actions I was looking to see in the game.
For example, in Troops, Weapons and Tactics, to trigger an action, you have a card in the deck for that. I use a blank card that when it turns up 'x' number of times, an event will occur (reinforcements, troops are allowed to withdraw from a defensive position without penalty or any number of things). With Chain of Command, this is still doable. One just has to be more creative. Using a count of the number of Full Chain of Command dice that get generated is one option.
The advantage of the Dice activation is that the game moves much faster. Even my bumbling first attempts worked themselves out quite quickly.
The rules work great with 15mm miniatures. Every game I have played with has used 15s. The rules come with some canned scenarios to try out and hopefully, I will have my scenario pack out with about 10 to 15 scenarios tailored to these rules. Anyway, Chain of Command are definitely worth a look. I am looking at ordering the "Big Bundle" at some point. The prices on just the PDF are not up yet but they are a great value and an easy way to check the rules out before committing to a bigger purchase.
I've seen these on a couple of other blogs, they do look rather interesting!
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