Back in my teenage years I had a habit of buying monster games and never playing them. It had never dawned on me that the storage for World in Flames'6000+ counters was a prerequisite to actually playing the game, so it languished on a shelf next to Victoryand Columbia Games' Eurofront. After getting hooked on WWII video games (enough to write an honours thesis on them), eventually I got into Flames of War, which I played for a few years. By this time I was over grand strategic, and pretty hooked on tactical games. Eventually Flames stopped interesting me, and I started to look at tactical hex-based games.
The first one that caught my eye was ASL. I'd been aware of it for at least 10 years by this point, but had always been turned off by the size of the rulebook. I picked up the starter kits and played through them, and before long was moving up to the full rules. Then I hit a bit of a plateau where rapidly-increasing rules overhead and play length overtook fun, and it was then I bought Combat Commander: Europe. I tell you all of this so you understand where I'm coming from, and why my opinions on CC:E are what they are.
CC:E was not my first choice for a couple of reasons. The main one was that there were no tanks - I felt I would miss them. ASL also appeared more comprehensive, and the starter kit was cheaper. In practise, I didn't miss the tanks, and there were a few things Combat Commander did so well that I thought for a while it would eclipse ASL for me. This is the story of how it didn't quite manage it. My journey through CC:E started off really well, so too my review will start with the good parts.
The good
CC:E has a lot going for it, and it was its innovative features that grabbed me and didn't let go for the first ten games. The single most impressive addition it makes to the genre, and one I wish every wargame could somehow have retrofitted, is its random scenario generator. It creates balanced and fun scenarios quickly from scratch, and every step of the way you can decide to simply choose a component of the scenario rather than allow fate to do so, without unbalancing the game. It lets you choose and customise your forces, and decide through those choices whether you will attack or defend. 52
The game is effectively infinitely replayable.
The RSG works because of the second major innovation in the game - the extremely easy to use and easy to read scenario information sheet. The RSG interacts with the main piece of this, which is the tug-of-war style victory point track. Whenever you get a VP, your opponent loses one, and vice versa. The defender is always the person starting with the VP track on their side, and the number of VPs acts as a cushion for inferior forces - and it works.
The scenario tracking sheet also contains another really innovative device - the time track. Time in CC:E is very fluid - it advances in fits and starts. Sometimes you will get a lot done between time triggers, other times you will get almost nothing done. The game also doesn't end at a set time - it just has an increasing chance to end after a certain number of time triggers. This mechanism creates an incredible level of suspense, though it also generates some gamey tactics (which I don't necessarily have a problem with) - you often find yourself taking lots of shot that will do nothing just to hopefully trigger a time advance (which occurs on the play of certain cards, or when a deck runs out of cards). Regardless, it's really clever. Reinforcements are also tied to the time track, and come on when the time counter hits them.
I also like the command range of individual leaders - it's neat being able to command a lot of troops with one guy, and it saves on order cards (which is an important facet of the game). But the glow of these two startling innovations and the slightly different take on command when compared to ASL faded pretty quickly...
The bad
After a while, a number of things just started to get to me. The major one was the card-driven nature of the game. I understand that it's meant to model chaos, but that's just the problem - nothing you do really changes the way the chaos model works. As <PERSON>
<PERSON> fond of saying, the chaos model is flat. What he means is that the board situation has no bearing on the cards you draw. You are as likely to draw a fire card when you have an SMG team in a building next to an enemy team, as you are at the start of the game when you need move cards. You can only get into the very deadly Close Combat with an advance card, but being ready to use one doesn't add to your chance of generating one. 237