Average Dave

It’s not often I get to see John and Mike, two buddies from school.  What with the family, job and now distance considerations, what used to be an every weekend lan party/board game session has now lapsed into a once a year social weekend trip.

We did however manage to squeeze in quit e a lot of gaming in a couple of days. First up, friday night, 5pm: Tide of Iron

I’d eagerly awaited the release and had hoped that my copy would arrive before I had to set off to Norwich - in the end ToI arrived with 3 days to spare and so I had a chance to read most of the rules.

Mike had also arrived on the Friday, which worked well as ToI suits 2-4 players, the side with multiple players simply splits forces and pretty much play is unchanged other than some minor rules on transferring troops, etc.

We picked “The Crossroads” in as much of a random choice as was possible.  It took us the best part of 2 hours to set up, get the rules down and ready to start. That’s the trouble when you haven’t seen each other for so long - the chat gets in the way of the setup, no bad thing, but you tend to be less focussed on both the setup and the conversation.

Mike had the defending Germans, John and I took the role of the attacking American troops.  The scenario gives the Americans a large set of troops (12 Shermans and a bunch of infantry) to capture 3 main objectives and the Germans barely enough to defend a couple of them - they do have a rather mean Tiger tank, but he’ll only fire once a turn.  Mike chose to defend the location at the forefront of the attack which meant his screening force met with the majority of our attack very early on and was quickly decimated by it.  It was tough going on the beleaguered Germans, as true to form the Americans could bring down sufficient artillery and had the luxury of ignoring the ability to bring on reinforcements to win the game 3 hours later.

Tide of Iron is a nice game, it’s a little fiddly and sometimes counter-intuitive - for example, you roll the same number of dice irrelevant of range, scoring hits on different numbers  which are affected by the range (4,5,6 short range, 6’s for long range).  The mechanic, whilst perfectly functional goes against what I seem to expect - I seem to want to roll half the number of dice for long range shots (perhaps it was my early warhammer days or my expectation to half the firepower from ASL for long range shooting) - but you certainly have to keep focused to remember what each unit has in terms of attack dice, adding some for height advantage, checking the target type to get the total number to roll.  Nothing too taxing, but it’s a little long winded.

Anyway, we had a good time, although Mike had thrown in the towel before the game had even started when John commented on his setup.  That was enough to put him off his game and awaiting the coup de grace, from turn 1!

I’d like to play it again sometime, but not sure when I’ll get the chance. It’s certainly bigger in game time and space requirements than Memoir’44, and although I think it’s the better game, it may suffer from its size.

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