All Units Engage - Basic Infantry Operations Review

Thomas of Peabody games has put out a free intro for all units engage (wargame vault link). At nine pages, including a roster, this is a nice tight package which isn't too demanding of your printer ink. It's very much an intro with a single basic mission and uses 5 models per side (AUE calls each independently activated/moved 'thing' a unit so in this case it's 5 single model units).

Having seen some of the beta versions of the full rules I have some extra insights, but I'll try and limit myself to review just this document.  It's important to recognize that AUE is positioning itself to be a generic set of rules that is very easy to adapt to your setting/figures/era of modern and forward (near future, sci fi, post apoc, etc). There should be additional books released that help flesh out various settings/eras and give example stats. I know that Thomas is very keen on getting the post apocalyptic setting ready to serve his own current gaming tastes.

TL;DR Summary:
I'm looking forward to seeing more of these rules. While superficially simple they end up yielding a surprising depth of tactical decision making. It wasn't uncommon for my opponent and myself to ponder on how we were going to setup for the next turn or even how to make our plan work the current turn. In turn 5 of our game my opponent noted that I had  pre-empted his own planned series of reactions to achieve his goals.

Considering this is free and will take up about 2-2.5 hours of your time including setup and reading the rules there's no reason not to try it out. Go ahead, the link is right here.

All Units Engage (playtest) - The Raid

Thomas (Peabody here!) is a gamer with many irons in the fire. I was fortunate enough to hang out with him recently and get to play test his set of development rules "All Units Engage". Being a longterm active gamer with strong feelings, Thomas has cherry picked his favorite game mechanisms, rejected the ones he doesn't like, and worked like a dog to lean things down to a fast play easy to learn/remember game set. I think he is well on his way.

We played on a 3x3 table with 15mm figs, but the system is scale agnostic. Having never played I was able to quickly get a handle on the turn flow, and even the tactical implications of decisions within 2 turns. There are a whole raft of missions, but they largely divide into balanced (for the competitive minded), asymmetric (for those who aren't bothered by 'fair' fights), and home/away/neutral (which have a fun mechanic when you capture objectives that make you roll on a random tables to gain...or suffer...effects based on whether you are on friendly, neutral, or hostile battle fields. Great stuff for ladder campaigns.

The turn is alternating unit activation. Both players dice off at the top of the turn and suffer modifiers for lost or pinned units. Units have 2 actions (move, fire, aim, unpin, capture objective being the most common) with each action being fully concluded before the next. Reserve fire and movement allow for overwatch/reaction by the enemy. Unit profiles are quite light with move, will, armour and combat ability. Weapons have their own stat line (such as automatic rifle, heavy machine gun, autocannon). Up to 2 Special perks/abilites allow for more chrome/differentiation of unit, and this can be wrapped up in 'theatre special rules' (this allows you to state all your insurgent troops/Viet Cong have some special ability without filling those 2 slots).

The 'Raid' is one of the asymmetric scenarios where some crack troops are racing in and capturing an objective held by second stringers. They are heavily outnumbered and need to grab and go. The victory points definitely favour the defender in any sustained engagement (who need to secure a random objective as well). The scenario probably needs some slight tweaking to unit profiles and/or vp as it's still pretty challenging for the attacker. It's a great scenario for learning the ropes of vehicular combat and air operations (the attackers get some sort of flyer (helicopter/vtol) while the defenders get some sort of light combat car (armoured car/technical/jeep)).

Thomas is very excited about the wide scope that the rules can be used for and I can quite easily see it myself. Combat is pretty bloody but the escalating morale penalties for lost men causes a lot of pins and lost actions instead of single man units charging to their doom. The VP's in this scenario certainly encouraged hunting and killing of units.

My troops die in close combat to veterans

I'm looking forward to following the development of the rules (there's a facebook group), and hopefully get some of my small number of painted figs on the table for short fast games.