Seven Days to the River Rhine

In a spur of the moment decision during our lockdown last year, I purchased the PDF version of 'Seven Days to the River Rhine', a WW3 ruleset by Great Escape Games, and this week I played my first game of it with local blogger Pelarel.

The game is designed for 15mm and to suit Team Yankee basing. It's a smaller game than TY: set at reinforced platoon level, with activation by team.

The rules are brief at about 30 pages. The Facebook group has a FAQ/errata sheet, which is essential because there are a couple of places where the writing is a bit loose - particularly with shooting. There are embedded QR codes that link to tutorial videos on Youtube, which I think is an excellent touch.

Points are provided for a wide range of teams and nations, but apart from that there is no structure to support list building. Unit stats are relatively homogeneous across all of the nations, e.g. all infantry teams have the same stat line except some nations have slightly better morale.

A few scenarios outlines are provided, but these leave a lot to the player. Deployment zones and the process for placing objectives need to be agreed with your opponent.

The best aspect is the initiative rules. Each turn, both players get one command token per team (excluding APCs/IFVs), plus an additional two tokens for the battlegroup commander. The players dice off to see who starts with the initiative, then spend these tokens to activate teams, or to react to their opponent's actions. The initiative can pass from player to player during the turn, a process which continues until all the tokens are spent, at which point the turn ends. You can activate a team more than once, but each activation makes the next one harder to achieve. The chance of activating is also affected by the accumulation of morale markers, generated when the unit takes fire. 

We played 500pts on a 6x4 table, and completed the game in about 2.5 hours. This gave me six infantry teams, six BMP-1s, three T-64s, and two BRDMs. Pel had two Chieftains, two Swingfires, two Scimitars, three infantry teams in FV432s, a Milan team, a Marksman, and a Lynx. This was a good amount of equipment for the table size. Having more variety in his list seemed to work out well for him, and next time I’ll definitely run fewer infantry and a wider range of units.

My thoughts from the game are:

• The initiative rules create a fantastic ebb and flow across the turn.
• Tanks die really easily.
• Infantry on the other hand are hard to kill. They can only be removed through the accumulation of morale markers, which takes either a long time or a significant concentration of fire.
• You never really have enough command tokens to do everything that you want, particularly when you start to lose teams. You need to think really carefully about what you want to do in the turn and concentrate your command tokens on doing that, rather than spending them reacting to your opponent.
• It gets really hard to do things mid game, as the accumulation of morale markers makes activation harder. Things just don't do what you want them to, which I think is a great mechanic.

I really like it. I don't think the game would replace TY as my WW3 game of choice, but it is a very different experience and an enjoyable change.