Sunday night and with the smell of varnish hanging heavy in the air saw the first outing for the Cornered Wolf Rules. It's fair to say they are somewhat bloody.
The table represents the outskirts of a Chechen town where farm land starts to give way to the industrial centre, plenty of cover and boy do you need it.
They have some quite neat rule ideas, you never quite know what you will have to play with or the scenario you are playing.
You will need a deck of cards as this decides the forces on offer and turn sequence.
Dane pulled a lot of Face cards - Kings, Queens and Jacks which gave him plenty of Russian Armour, whilst I pulled low number cards which gave me infantry with the occasional RPG apart from an Ace which gave me some armour support...
On face value the Chechen's looked hard pressed.
Deployment is an unstructured affair, you deploy your first unit near one table edge and then place units anywhere on the table but you have to be in minimum of 12" away from any other unit, which means you could quickly end up with isolated units as your opponent places units in the same fashion, which gives quite a unique challenge bearing in mind at this point you don't know what the scenario is.
Once deployed you pick an objective each, The Russian's picked clear each sector of the board, whilst I picked raid a Russian held building, any easy choice given they only had one infantry section in this game and they were some way away from the supporting armour.
With the forces and scenario picked the deck of cards becomes your activations, a face card gives you the option of armour and a number card mostly infantry, Black for one side, Red for another.
We soon realised that the chances of Russian armour rushing round the table blasting anything in sight was somewhat limited especially as the Chechen's can't be shot at if they get close enough to a tank.
The Russians with limited infantry cover were exposed to sneaky infantry running from building to building.
Pretty much everything hits on a 4+ on a D6 and RPG's get three shots so we soon had smoking wreaks all over the place.
The single Russian section could not stand up to the numerous infantry against them, which mean't the Chechen's could nip in and steal the supplies.
The tank hunting certainly gave the feel of the armour being vunerable to sneaky infantry which is what the rule read up suggested but it feels like a few tweaks are need to separate AFV's to Tanks and perhaps limit the number of rounds or AT hits (As I type I have received an update which looks like it does exactly this.)
I fun evenings gaming but I suspect people will add house rules to reflect their own view of the conflict.
