Saturday 4 May 2013

First Play: Disposable Heroes

For our next game we decided to give Disposable Heroes & Coffin for Seven Brothers from Iron Ivan Games a try.  Whilst Nuts! remains our favourite WW2 skirmish rule set they aren't perfect so we're always on the look out for alternatives.

Lenin set up a game, based in Italy, using one of the basic scenarios with a few minor changes to suit his available figures.  We used my collection of Eslo buildings for some factory ruins.  These were to be occupied by Lenin's US force and I had to throw him out and occupy them with a similar sized German force but with a Panzer IV in support.


My first concern was obviously the fact that I didn't outnumber him - I would normally work on a 2:1 at least for this sort of action and whilst I had the tank the rules didn't help me use it to improve the odds!


I initially massed my force in the woods on my left to try to create enough of an advantage and try to turn the US flank.  But my attack was slowed down somewhat with fire from the US forces in the centre of the table.  I wanted to try to use the tank to suppress the enemy in the centre; however, I just couldn't get the tank crew to spot them.


Eventually I managed to suppress the US on the left which would allow me to advance but Lenin was moving the men on his left across the board so it all I had managed to do was to pivot the battlefield.


In the end we decided to abort the game rather than carry on as we weren't warming to the rules.  Disposable Heroes uses an alternate unit activation system which we found a little cumbersome and was prompting some rather gamey thinking rather than encouraging proper tactics.  The rules also seemed not to address or have abstracted a number of areas which we felt meant Nuts! provided a better experience for the type of game we wanted to play.

6 comments:

  1. Nice looking game.

    I found the same thing with DH, I just wasn't happy with them overall either. I have FNG, which I gather is pretty similar to Nuts!, so I would say it is the better set too, although a platoon is beginning to push it for FNG in my opinion.

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    1. I have FNg too but haven't played much Vietnam recently. They are very similar to Nuts! being built around the same Chain Reaction engine. A platoon is rather stretching Nuts! (another reason for looking around at other sets) but we've found if you standardise the Reps across the squads it's workable (differing Reps slows stuff down and requires bookkeeping too).

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  2. When using Nuts! I tend to use the updated Final Version Chain Reaction rules for the insight, which speeds things up at platoon level.

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    1. That's interesting as I hadn't thought the new mechanism would have speeded things up as every one can act? Neither Lenin nor I were keen when we saw it as it forces action when the Nuts! 2 In Sight allows for a figure not to act (which we've always treated as they didn't see the active figure first time around) plus it makes In Sight different from all the other rection tests and that makes it a bit harder to teach (and remember for us oldies!). Interested in your experiences with it...

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