Old School Tactical

 My fellow club members are a very bad influence on me.  Well that's what I tell my lovely yet fierce wife when packages arrive at the homestead.  Sorry to throw you guys under the bus, but one must survive the quarantine somehow.

The latest addition to the game inventory is Mark Walker's "Old School Tactical" (OST) series of WW2 squad level combat games published by Flying Pig Games.  Ages ago, I used to play a lot of Squad Leader - note that's Squad Leader and not Advanced Squad Leader, so that may give you a time frame of how long ago.  I really liked the game but the complexity wore on me.

After seeing some very complementary youtube videos on OST.  I decided to give it a whirl and well, mistakes were made.....

The games showed up last week and I must say the components are beautiful - a very large set of mounted map boards - really nice, large sized counters and a crisply written rulebook.  One difference from Squad Leader is the board comes as one big board rather than a set of small geomorphic boards.  Most scenarios only use a section of the game map but it does take a little getting used to.

 This morning I played my first game using Scenario 1 from the book.  I will not go into to any details as Im sure I messed a lot of rules.  I did enjoy the mechanics and found the game very intuitive and fast to play.  I think it will also translate very well to the tabletop.

There area lot of really unique features to the game that I'll go into during future posts but one fun is the concept  of "Luck Cards".  Each player draws a single luck card right after setup.  These are kept secret until played.

Some are pretty good - like this "Artillery Strike" card the germans drew.  Of course when played I failed the accuracy role (5 or 6 on a D6) and the artillery went way off map!

Others are more limited in value like the double time card the Russians had - still in a close game having this right at the end might allow you to grab an objective marker that your opponent thinks you cant get to.  Luck cards impact all aspects of the game but aren't really super strong.  Some effect vehicles only which in a scenario where you don't have any can be a bit problematic.  The rules cover this occurrence by indicating that if you draw a card you cant use  then your luck is just bad (and it's what you get).

Once I know the rules a little better, I'll do another turn by turn game report and will also do some hard thinking about bringing this game to the tabletop.  If only I had a way to make hex terrain......