Normandy Firefight Game Part 3

This is the final part of the series of posts on the recent games my brother-in-law and I played using the Normandy Firefight rules from Artorus Games. Part 1 describing the setup is here and part 2 covering the games is here

Apologies for the length of this post. The gist of it can be got from reading the opening and closing sections and ignoring the rambling in between.

There are a few random pictures included. They don't have any relevance to the review, they're just photographs that I didn't use in the earlier posts.

Rules discussion

Overall, the rules provide a fun beer and pretzels game. The production values are high, although there are a number of spelling errors (including at least one that would have been caught by a spell checker - "niot" for "not"). The pictures are excellent and really give a feel for the game - the photography is mostly from figure eye-level, and some of the photos can almost be mistaken for "reality" at first glance.

During the games we hit a number of (minor) problems with the rules, covered below in no particular order.

Movement

For the most part, movement is fine - 3" for walking and 6" for jogging make sense, but we had more of a problem with sprinting. Sprinting is calculated by 9"+1d6, giving a spread of 10" to 15", with the median 12". Given that the table is normally 48" x 48", this means someone can sprint the length of the table in between 3 and 5 turns (give or take).

Each turn is meant to represent 2 seconds in real life. If you scale up the median sprinting distance, this is 408" or 34' (11.3 yards) per turn, or 5.6 yards in 1 second. This gives 100 yards in under 18 seconds (just over 14 seconds at the full 15" speed). According to Wikipedia, the world record time is just a shade over 9 seconds. So here you have a fully laden soldier, potentially carrying a bulky machine gun, sprinting over bocage terrain in a time that would make an olympic athlete happy. Not only that, they can still shoot, and the person can go prone at the end, making it very difficult to return fire and have any chance of hitting him (basic 50% chance to hit a prone figure, minus 2 x distance run - which is at least 10"). They do need to spend two moves going from prone to kneeling to standing (something we missed completely in the rules), but then they're free to sprint again.

If they shoot after they've run, they lose 5% points for each inch they sprint, but that can be largely compensated for by firing enough bullets. In fact, they can end up with a base chance to hit the same as, or slightly better than, someone shooting at a prone figure in the open who didn't move last turn.

I think sprinting should be trimmed back a lot, and there should be more penalties, e.g. no shooting while sprinting, can't sprint two turns in succession, possibility of tripping etc.

We didn't use the climbing rules much, but using a ladder to get down from the roof seemed far more complicated than it should have been. I suspect the rules were designed for climbing up things, rather than down them, but they weren't very clear on that point.

Shooting

Shooting is quite straightforward: there's a base chance to hit based on your target's stance (100% if target standing, 75% if target kneeling, 50% if target prone), modified by things like how far you moved, how far they moved, range to target etc. For the most part this works well, but shooting at a prone target becomes very difficult, especially if you or they moved during the turn.

As a slight aside, we got somewhat confused about which movement to use for deductions. The rules say "last turn", which we took to mean we had to keep track of each person's movement. It also meant it was actually bad sometimes to be activated first. For example, one of the Germans activated and took a shot at one of the British figures, who hadn't activated yet this turn. The German had a base chance based on the Brit's stance (decided at the end of their previous move) and how far they moved last turn (which happened before the current stance was adopted). Once the German had fired and moved, the British figure's chance of hitting was based on the German's current stance and how far they moved this turn.

I'm sure it's meant to give a nice flow to the game, but having to remember what happened the previous turn was annoying. I think if we do this again, we'll just base it on the current move, so winning activation may actually be an advantage. Either that or we'll try simultaneous movement and shooting. This usually just comes down to declaring "I fire at the figure as they cross the road" and remembering to do so, so it's not a huge burden.

Savings throw

To hit, you have to roll under a target value. However, if you're hit, you have to roll above the damage amount, otherwise you're out of the game. While the mechanism is nice, it's a jolt to suddenly have to roll over a number. For future games we may just subtract the number from 100 and try to roll under it, just for consistency.

Shooting at prone figures

As mentioned above, shooting at prone figures is very difficult, and I think the deductions are too high. Even trying to hit a figure 6" away with neither shooter nor target moving only gives you a 44% chance of hitting. Subtract 5% for every inch the firer moved and 2% for every inch the target moved, and it quickly becomes darn near impossible. Some of this contributed to the point blank shooting and missing from our second game.

Not sure what the answer is, but possibly a bonus for being higher than the target, or having deductions based on range bands (e.g. 1" to 10" - minus 1% for each inch, 11" - 20" - minus 2% per inch) might help - although it would increase both the amount of paperwork and the time to calculate the required score.

Automatic fire

The base chance to hit on automatic fire is calculated as 50% + 1% per bullet fired, but is not affected by the stance of the target. This means that it's often considerably more effective to fire fully automatic at a prone figure than to attempt a single shot. I suppose it's meant to simulate a lot of lead flying about, but it still felt annoying.

Another thing with automatic fire is that the question of what happens to all the other bullets isn't dealt with. I'm not sure if the extra complexity would add anything, but rounds either hit the target or disappear completely, so here may be an argument for rolling to see if anyone nearby gets hit by the stray bullets.

Overwatch/snap fire

There are no rules for this in the game. Given the amount of cover, it can lead to figures running from cover to cover and nobody able to shoot at them. It would be nice to see something allowing for the possibility, even if the person on overwatch can't do anything else that turn.

Hand to Hand

We only had one instance of this, so need to test it some more. However, it does play very strangely -  in that, if you survive the initial attack, you can just walk away and shoot the person. Bit weird, but we only had the one fight, so it may have just been teething troubles on our part.

Overall thoughts

The games were good fun overall, and I've already picked up some 54mm British figures for it. I'm going to convert and paint them at some point (there's a lot ahead of them in the lead pile), hopefully to a higher standard than the ones from 30 years ago. I've also been considering 28mm, so I'm looking at converting some of my Bolt Action British into standing, kneeling and prone figures. The end result may not have the same visual impact, but I already have a lot of 28mm scenery.

The game doesn't require much in the way of vehicles, which is a big plus. I can see me buying a tank and possibly an armoured car/jeep, but the vehicle rules are quite simple, and it's very much focussed on being an infantry game.

We will definitely be applying house rules - the most immediate needs are to do something with simultaneous movement and to fix sprinting.

Parts of this post probably read more negatively than intended. It is a fun game, and one we do plan to play again (and if I can paint up the 20mm Germans I have, I may even try it solo in that scale). Some aspects of the rules work well, while others are quite distracting, but the game (available from Northstar in the UK) provides a novel view of the WW2 battlefield and is well worth investigating.