Scoring CoC

 I said I was going to review/score my favourite game next so let's make good on that and score Chain of Command from Too fat lardies;

*this is a second attempt at this as it turns out writing is hard. However as someone who is taking more pride in what they write than the average modern Marvel writer I'm going to rewrite*

Presentation  8

Pretty good. The cover is meh, grey on grey with a picture of half a soldier in feldgrau. Not so much a visually arresting cover as a "visually let off with a warning" cover.

The layout and phrasing of the contents is clear and concise as well as efficiently written which is very handy for looking up things mid game. And it has an index! That's worth a point by itself. Unfortunately it's slightly flawed so not worth 2 points. For example try looking up what smoke does. (I'll give you a hint - it's in the section on "who can shoot").

There's been a fairly consistent area of confusion for new players in the phrasing of how particular teams are organised which although there isn't anything particularly wrong in the way it's written this should probably be considered.

Playability  9

Yep, very playable. Slight learning curve due to the unique ideas but the day I mark a game down because it has (good) unique ideas and mechanics is the day I buy a cardigan and start watching soaps.

Mechanics  9

Oh yes. This section is remarkably close to scoring a "10". From force morale to the patrol phase to activation dice to the use of "shock" the game is full of good to great ideas. Just be aware that if you like regularly adjusted points costed lists for tournament play and knowing exactly who and how far you can move in your turn this may not be for you.

Flavour  9

It's supoosed to be a World war 2 infantry focused game and that's exactly what it feels like. Everything is built around how it worked out on the battlefield and converted to bring about similar results with dice and toy soldiers. Tanks and armoured cars are still present and are as much of a beast/liability as they should be at these ranges.

Support  10

There's lists from authors and community for just about any theatre or nation you might want to play in PDF form as well as a print version of the 1940 handbook for detailed early war gaming in the West. Each year the "Lard mag" special comes out with all kinds of content for their games and CoC invariably gets a couple of articles.

There's the campaign supplement "At the sharp end" which is the high bench mark for me on campaign play in terms of depth as well as accessibility. Then there's one for organising larger battles with multiple players in "Big CoC".

That campaign supplement is backed up by "Pint sized campaigns" again made by the authors and community with tremendous levels of information and variety in them and they just keep coming!

Despite the dedicated setting alterations have been made to the core design so you can play WW1, the Spanish civil war, Vietnam or even Star wars with the game.

Got any questions? The Lardies have a dedicated forum, Facebook has multiple groups where the only drawback is it's on Facebook and there are a lot of players on Twitter. Yes, I still call it Twitter.

*And something I forgot to mention is that the "CoCulator" is available so you can calculate the relative strength of any platoon you care to make which is a huge bonus for making additional options in your games.*

Basically the best supported game I've ever encountered. I said in my first post that a 10 would have to be genre defining and this is as close to that as I've seen. I mean, what else could you ask for? Clean answers only.

TOTAL  90

So yeah, it's pretty good. One of the only games I know of that can make an attempt at accurately depicting what it'd be like if Imperial Stormtroopers fought the Viet Cong on the Somme. Which now that I write it down I quite want to try!

So that's my top rated game, but what to do next as a contrast? Well I have an idea...