Battlegroup: NORTHAG - First Thoughts

Last year I jumped on the kickstarter for Plastic Soldier Company's new Battlegroup: NORTHAG system, and this week they very generously sent a PDF of the rulebook to backers, ahead of the general release.

The game is set in 1983, with lists provided for GSFG and BAOR. It has been suggested that the West Germans and Americans will be covered in a second book at some point in the future.

The game has been designed for 10mm to 15mm miniatures, and is being supported by a range of 10mm products from PSC. It could definitely be played in 6mm without any changes.

There are three standard sizes of game: "Platoon" at 500pts on a 6x4, "Company" at 750pts" on a 6x8, and "Battalion" at 1000pts on a 6x10 or larger. For context, a troop of three Chieftains costs 129pts and a Soviet motor rifle platoon with BMPs is 80pts.

Infantry basing is largely compatible with TY: the Soviet Motor Rifle Platoon has three AK74 Fireteams, three RPG teams, and three BTRs/BMPs with options for adding AGS17, SA7, PKMs etc. A British Mechanised Platoon has seven Fireteams and four FV432s, with options for adding a Carl Gustav team, GPMG, Milan etc.

Activation is by team. You give a team an order, resolve its activation, then move onto the next team until you run out of orders for the turn. There are no command distances: teams function independently. A pinned team cannot be given orders, with rallying occurring at the end of your turn.

There are two types of shooting: aimed and suppressing. Infantry can only be targeted with suppressing fire. Each team shooting gets one D6 to hit, targeting one enemy team.

• For aimed shooting with HE, the sequence goes D6 to observe the target, D6 to hit, and D6 cover save.
• For aimed shooting with AP, the cover save is replaced by a penetration roll: 2D6 with a target of 7 modified by the difference in AT and armour ratings. There's a table for this, but I imagine it wouldn't need to be referred to after the first few times.
• For suppressing fire, no observation roll is needed. ROF and HE rating modify the score to hit, the target gets a D6 cover save, and if that's failed, a D6 casualty save to destroy the team. Failing the cover save results in the target team being pinned.

All indirect fire is from off-table. Anything heavier than mortars is only available as a "timed strike" - before the game you decide what turn the barrage will arrive, and write down the location where it will land.

Force morale is managed through the Battle Rating system. Each platoon in your list is worth a certain number of BR, independent of points, adding up for a total BR for the force. Each time you lose a team, you draw a counter from a common pot. Most of these counters specify a number of BR, and your force breaks when the BR from counters you have drawn (the details of which are kept secret) exceeds the BR of your list. These counters also include random events, so drawing a chit could result, for example, in being allocated a free helicopter gunship. A number of other situations also require drawing a counter, e.g. you draw a counter to rally D6 units.

There is only one scenario in the book, a meeting engagement. The first two turns are played with the recce screens, on the third turn the vanguard unit arrives, and the main body arrives in turns five and six.

Bearing in mind that I haven't been able to play a proper game, just a few test situations to try out the mechanics, here are my thoughts as a TY player who has never played the WW2 version of Battlegroup:

• It seems like a much more thoughtful game than TY, and I imagine that play could be quite slowly in comparison.
• Mid game you will a lot of individual teams to keep track of, and many more teams on table than orders available to control them with. You will need to decide which units you are going to activate each turn, because you won't be able to activate them all.
• I priced up a 500pt Soviet list from my collection, and it came to 41 teams, which I would somehow have to control with eight orders. A sample British list came to 26 teams with nine orders. There is actually no way you can have everything doing something once you move out of the recce phase, and order of activation becomes very important.
• This could make it very tactical, and having the initiative could be incredibly significant: if your opponent has to burn orders responding to your moves, then they're not going to be able to do the things that they really want to be doing somewhere else on the table.
• There is a bit of record keeping required (e.g. ammunition tracking for ATGMs, the target points for any timed bombardments), which would take a bit of getting used to.
• Platoon orders are going to be important. These cost two orders, but apply to every team in the platoon. Only two of them are available: Move and Hold. The "Platoon - Hold" order is worth noting. This places every team in the platoon into Ambush (i.e. overwatch), and able to shoot in the enemy turn. Take a British Mechanised Platoon of seven Fireteams. It would cost seven orders (out of nine if it's a Platoon level game) for each team to fire during your turn, leaving just two orders for the remaining 400+ points in your force. Or you spend two orders to place them all in Ambush, allowing them all to fire at any point in the enemy turn.
• It will be interesting to see what overwatch means for the amount of manouever in the game compared to TY.
• Ranges are much longer than what we are used to in TY. A MBT gun has a maximum range of 70", and small arms usually have a range of 30". Careful terrain design will be needed to close off lines of sight, because otherwise there's nowhere to hide. 
• There are some nice differences between NATO and Warsaw Pact. For example, losing MBTs is a bit of a doom spiral for the British. The loss of each of the first three Chieftains requires one BR counter to be drawn. The loss of numbers four to six cost two BR counters each, and so on, meaning the British care a lot more about the loss of their tanks than the Soviets do.
• It would have been nice to have an example attack/defence scenario as well as the meeting engagement.
• There are a number of opportunities for conversions of kits to create equipment that doesn't have a role in TY - Chieftain bridgelayer, anyone?

I definitely think it's worth trying, and I'm hoping I can persuade one of the local TY British players to give it a go with me at the club once the lockdown is lifted.