Quite a while back I picked up Iron Cross from Great Escape games, and in the usual Anton manner it simply sat on my rules shelf until quite recently.
weridly enough I had Kris from Coalville and Phil from the Cats both gain intrest in the game at about the same time. So after a few games under my belt I thought I'd give my thoughts on it.
well its about time I got a pic on me on this blog!
The devious British side
Turn one, the german tanks hold in the tree line and the mighty infantry advance on the right flank
the view from the infanty, nothing too exciting really
until a couple of turns later and I've shermans and bloody scout cars to deal with, however one slight over sight was I didn't arm my guys with infantry anti-tank weapons.... Opps...
the armour gun line was taking a right pounding from the fireflys!
and the lone stug was holding its ground lovely!
the objective well secured by the British!
so the game ended two objectives to one for the British but it was a brutal game with burning wrecks either side!
Gameplay:
Each unit generates a command token that you put in a pool, you start the turn with rolling for who can activate first and you simply pick a unit and declare the action with the unit, the non active player gets a chance to react and nominates a unit and its reaction, spends a command point and rolls over a certain target number depending on how many pins the reacting unit has. If the reacting player is successful they then become the active player and the non active player can choose to react. This enables the game to swing quite wildly so you could go mental and try and react to the enemy or stay cool as a cucumber and save it for yourself!
The other thing that makes this a little differant from all the hundreds of systems out in the geek world is that units can activate multipule times but you have to roll over the amount of command tokens and pins that are on the unit, so you can go "rambo" with your tiger is your lucky enough!
Killing stuff can work in a couple of ways, you can either pin the unit until it exceeds it moral value and simple removed from play or in the form of armour if you get a penetrating hit then you have a chance to pop the tank rather than pin it to death!
Lastability:
well its WW2 so its a fair scope of theaters to choose from the rule book come with late war lists for Brits, Germans, Russians and US, already they have addational lists on the website so hopefully the other nations will get some loving! Already the mighty Italians are up on the website.
As long as you have people intrested in WW2 then they will continue to play this system with you,
Models:
Well this is the brucey bonus! you can use what ever you like choose a scale and go mental! You have a fair few people who make WW2 stuff in various scales so the choice is fantastic!
Overall system wise its a great game and doesn't take itself too seriously, the rule book is about 12 quid so nothing in the grand scheme of things could be better laid out with some of the sections but once you get you head into it you will only reffer to the stats of your force rather than the actual rules.
Well worth a try! and you can get it from Great Escape here...
http://www.greatescapegames.co.uk/
