The latest in the excellent series of Honour games by Sam Mustafa Publishing has been released! Sam sent me a message that I was the first to download the PDF and did it go smoothly. I replied I was reading the rules and life is good. Evidently life was real good as less than an hour later the website crashed from user demand. With all the excellent releases, including the long anticipated Blucher, this was a first!
Sam always provides sections of his rules for download so we can get sneak peeks into the final product. I was excited to see a higher level command WWII design in the making and the teasers looked promising. After reading through the rules the first few times, Sam, as always, appears to have delivered another simple, elegant design capturing the feel of the period and the level of command you undertake.
Providing a basic and advanced set of rules, Rommel gives you everything you need including unit values, army design, a starter scenario and 8 other scenarios using a unique bidding system to allow for uneven force sizes while still providing scenario balance. Also included is a chapter on open architecure where you can adjust units to your historical battle preferences and design units not represented in the Rommel manifest. This allows for great flexibility in your armies.
Advanced rules for engineering, pioneers, beach landings, airborne drops, etc. are all there in, again, a simple, elegant design.
The core of Rommel is the Command Post and Operation Points. At this level resource management is key. Everything costs OPs from road and tactical movement to reorganizing worn units. Each Command Post also provides Events and Tactics - both offensive and defensive. These also cost OPs! While all CPs have similarities there are National characteristics factored in making each army unique. How do you spend your OPs? Like Montgomery and hoard them until you have superiotity of troops for your big push or be a Rommel and spend them for subsequent tactical advances putting constant pressure on your enemy and exploiting breakthroughs at the risk of isolation and stretched supply lines? All this in a simple design begs playing time.
Basing conventions are open as long as you can stack your maximum of 3 bases in a grid along with any identifying terrain. This allows for basic to mini diorama bases and no two armies need to be based the same in order to play.
The next question is one of scale. I still have a ton of 15mm used for FOW which I haven't played in years. I can use them for starters until I sell them which leaves me time to rebase and expand my 6mm collection. Rommel screams for 10mm in my opinion but given everything I have already another scale is not in my immediate future plans.
Stay tuned for pics of my mid-war 6mm Germans!
Until then...
Happy gaming!
Franko
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