This week we look at the much-anticipated release of the “At the Sharp End” supplement, updated for the 2nd Edition of Too Fat Lardies’ popular “Chain of Command” ruleset.
As I’m sure any of our regular readers are aware, we freaking love Chain of Command, and the recent release of the 2nd edition of that game (which we reviewed here) only served to deepen that love. Speaking personally, for my money I have not found a game that captures so many aspects of combat in the 2nd World War so elegantly and which somehow captures a feel for historical accuracy that doesn’t require rivet-counting pedantry. It’s simple in concept but offers extremely nuanced game play, presenting the players with loads of interesting, meaningful, and often difficult decisions.
And while individual, one-off games of Chain of Command can produce some really great experiences on the tabletop, playing the game in campaign mode – with a series of linked battles whose outcomes change the tactical situation over time – really elevates it to the next level. I have always been a fan of linked wargames of any genre, so while I immediately saw the potential in single games of Chain of Command, reading through the first edition of At the Sharp End really lit my brain on fire, because that supplement was the key to unlocking all of that campaign goodness. And just like the 2nd Edition of the base game, this updated 2nd Edition of At the Sharp End (hereafter ATSE2) refines, expands, and improves upon the original version.
Aside: There has been a little bit of a production saga with ATSE2; It has been ready for release for some time now, but author Richard Clark was trying to combine the campaign rules that are the core of ATSE2 with “Big Chain of Command,” a set of rules for playing bigger battles with multiple platoons taking part. By all accounts, Big CoC has undergone some pretty radical transformations from its first release (a free PDF available for download on the Lardies’ website back in the day), and it was the trickiness of combining these two ideas into one release while still preserving the layout and flow of the content that was vexing the author. Finally bowing to good sense, Rich decided to keep them as two distinct supplements, each with its own focus. For those of us who have been salivating for the ATSE2 update this was a welcome decision, and once it was made the release of ATSE2 followed very quickly.
First Impressions
Despite their influence in the world of historical wargaming, for all intents and purposes Too Fat Lardies is a two-man operation. Some of their early productions were a little rough, with the kinds of editing errors you would reasonably expect from hobby enthusiasts self-publishing their rules. But since their early rulesets you can very much see a through-line of their output getting better and better in terms of layout, editing, clarity, and readability. ATSE2 continues that trend, and like the base game it is meant to support, everything in the book is clearly presented with a layout that is easy to follow. Eye-catching photos of well-painted miniatures abound and set the tone in various places, and the maps and diagrams convey the concepts put forward in the book very well – especially in the section on designing campaigns.
Some of my favorite bits are the “In Action” sidebars, which give fully fleshed-out examples of the rules in practice. These are always clearly labeled and in boxes with a different colored background, which makes them easy to distinguish. It seems that great care has been taken in putting them together, because (unlike many RPG sourcebooks) there don’t appear to be any errors in the examples. This is hugely important and I’m glad the TFL team has prioritized these sections.
What’s in the Book
Though the book is laid out in a very clear and orderly fashion, I’m actually going to skip around a bit in talking about its various sections, because for people who might not be familiar with the whole concept of the “Pint-Sized Campaign,” I think it’s worth talking about what those are an how they work first.
So named because they cost as much to purchase as a pint of beer in the Lardies’ local watering hole (on the order of 6£), a “Pint-Sized Campaign” details some particular historical action, laying out a series of linked games of Chain of Command to let players game through an important battle. Some cover a few days, whereas others cover intense fighting that took place over a matter of hours. We played through one of these in our Totensonntag series – check it out for a good example of how all this works. In addition to the force organizations, maps, terrain notes, and linked structure of the campaign itself, each of these supplements is chock-full of historical details that give you deeper context as to who was fighting, why this action happened in this particular place, and what its importance was relative to the wider events of the 2nd World War. They really are a treat, and one of the best parts of Chain of Command.
So it is this linking of games together that is the whole purpose of ATSE2. It lays out how campaigns in general work – how campaign initiative is handled, how the campaign turn structure breaks down, what options each player has each turn, and how the outcome of one game affects the next. And it is this last bit that is crucial; if you’re just playing one-off games you might be tempted to go for broke and sacrifice everything to squeak out a win in that single scenario. But if you are concerned with husbanding your precious resources for a longer haul, you might make the decision to cede ground to your opponent in order to fight over more advantageous terrain later. Similarly, if you treat the lives of the men under your command with callous indifference, you might find your abysmal initial Force Morale in subsequent games makes it very difficult to keep your units cohesive and “in the fight.”
The Campaign Ladder and Campaign Turn
Because Chain of Command is a platoon-level game at its core, the kinds of activities that a platoon engages in tend to exhibit a lot of similarities. Your initial brush with the enemy might be as your patrols first come into contact. After that first encounter you might probe your enemy’s position before making an attack on their main line of defense. After breaking through that main line of defense you might need to outflank your enemy to cut off their retreat or power through their delaying actions before moving on to seizing your final objective, where presumably your enemy will stage a dogged defense. As it happens, these activities correspond with the six basic missions in the main Chain of Command rulebook, and taken collectively they outline a “ladder” or logical string of scenarios leading from one to the next.
ATSE2 outlines very clearly how this ladder concept works. Any individual campaign might make modifications to it – omitting, repeating, or re-ordering some steps to capture a particular situation – but the essential idea is the same. If you win a scenario, you move to the next rung on the ladder. Easy-peasy. If you lose, your opponent may have an opportunity to stage a counter-attack to push you back further.
And herein lies the concept of “campaign initiative.” In general, so long as a force keeps winning, they maintain the initiative and can dictate the pace of operations. But if a force is repulsed or if it doesn’t have the resources to continue and must pause to re-arm, resupply, or treat its wounded, the campaign initiative is likely to switch sides. For each Campaign Turn, the player with the initiative gets to determine what their action for the coming turn is going to be – can they advance into ground ceded by the enemy in a previous campaign turn, or will they be forced to attack? Or will they pause to consolidate their gains or bring up fresh reserves? And of course it takes two to tango, so the player without the initiative gets to react – will they stand their ground and fight, or will they cede ground, withdrawing in either a planned manner or beating a more hasty retreat at the last moment? If they have a little time to breathe, will they dig in? Or are they just spoiling for an opportunity to launch a counter-attack of their own?
This section of the rules clearly lays out what each players’ options are and how their choices interact. Most Pint-Sized Campaigns only have a certain number of turns, so the attacker is almost always on a clock. There is constant pressure to advance, but of course that pressure must be carefully balanced against the risk of losing too many men and squandering your initiative. Decisions, decisions, and it is here that we really get our first taste of the complexities offered by campaign play.
Choices Matter
The sections on the ladder and the structure of the Campaign Turn lay out the what, but it’s the rules dealing with the end-of-battle and after-battle phases that really drive home the why. Put simply, the results of the choices you make during each game have lasting consequences. Even your choice of how long to hold out before making a voluntary withdrawal can have pivotal ramifications going forward.
Chief among these are casualties, as most campaigns give each player a limited number of troops with which to achieve their objectives. This section of ATSE2 lays out the concepts of replacements and reinforcements, but even with these capabilities the number of troops under your command is usually finite – and almost always much more limited than you would like! Tracking casualties across multiple missions is enough to radically change how you play a game, but ATSE2 cleverly mixes even more nuance into the mix.
For instance, let’s say you’re playing a probe scenario, where your opponent is trying to move through your initial security perimeter. Their objective is to get a unit off your table edge. If they are making a strong push and you don’t think you can reasonably stop them, you might be willing to withdraw (concede the scenario) to keep from sustaining needless casualties.
But the decision of when to pull back is important, because the farther your troops are from your own Jump-Off Points the more likely they are to be captured during your withdrawal. And this calculation is further influenced by your final Force Morale level at the moment you decide to withdraw. So during the game you might be forced to make a very difficult decision – expend precious Chain of Command resources to avoid taking a Force Moral hit when a “Bad Thing” happens, or save those resources to move a JOP closer to your troops in order to give them a better chance of safely breaking contact. Tricky!
One of the central ideas on ATSE2 is that figures “killed” during a game might not actually represent the deaths of your tiny troopers. Instead, a soldier could be knocked senseless and recover very quickly after the battle – quickly enough to be patched up and hastily stuck back into the line. Or he might have suffered a more serious wound and need some time at an aid station. As such, out of the total number of “killed” troops in your unit, some might be returned to you in time for the next battle, or some might be out for a full Campaign Turn. This blunts some of the worst of losing any individual game and makes it such that you’re not replacing your entire force with a new platoon for every scenario. But it does make you keenly aware of how your casualties in any given game will affect the number of men you can field going forward.
A new element to this in ATSE2 is the concept of “Medic Rolls.” In the previous version of the supplement, the difference in the final Force Morale between the winner and the loser could be used to recover casualties by whoever held the field on a 1-to-1 basis. So if I won with a final Force Morale of 6 and yours was down to a 3 when you withdrew, I’d automatically recover 3 casualties. In ATSE2, this has been converted from automatic recoveries to the same number of opportunities, but with a twist: no single trooper can get more than 1 roll, and it’s more likely that you’ll be able to move someone from the “miss the next game” category to the “returns immediately” category than it is to take them from “dead/permanently gone” to “miss the next game.” So now you have another difficult decision to make between the short term, high-payout chance of getting more men back immediately versus the lower odds but better-in-the-long-term strategy of spending those rolls recovering men you might otherwise lose completely. Decisions, decisions! This system is a little bit more fiddly than the original version, but I really like the options that it presents to the players.
“Yeah? Well That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man”
Also carried over from ATSE2 is the delicious trifecta of the Men’s Opinion, the Commanding Officer’s Opinion, and the platoon leader’s Outlook. These are three characteristics of your force that carry over from one game to the next, and are central to making your in-game choices matter in the long haul. The thing that makes these characteristics interesting is that while they’re not quite opposed to each other, they are definitely orthogonal.
The CO’s Opinion is easy – he’s been tasked by his higher-ups to get stuff done in a timely fashion, and if you can keep to the mission timetable you’re going to make him happy. The CO wants you to win, and is less concerned about the cost. And the more you win, the more resources he’ll throw your way. Conversely, if you are a poor performer who is lagging behind in your objectives, he might just send that support to some other platoon commander who is a winner. Sucks to be you. Do better, scrub.
Your men, on the other hand are less concerned with whether or not you have taken Phase Line Orange before 0900 hours and infinitely more likely to care about whether you get them killed in doing so. They are keenly conscious of the casualties you sustain, and their overall mood is going to have a strong affect on your starting Force Morale for each subsequent game. Force Morale is extremely important in Chain of Command, as it encapsulates your unit’s overall “will to fight.” When that drops to zero, you lose the scenario regardless of the objectives, so the difference between starting with an 8 versus a 10 can be huge.
But here’s the rub: it’s hard to win without taking risks. And sometimes, those risks – even if ultimately successful – will often lead to more of your troops ending up as casualties. As such, it’s really hard to keep both your CO and your men happy. Fantastic!
On top of that is the platoon leader’s Outlook. This is just a fun little way of tracking the effect that the unfolding events of the campaign have on the mind of your avatar in the game. Continued success might make him “Confident,” giving a boost to your starting Force Morale. But you have to be careful he doesn’t blow past “Confident” into “Reckless” or “Arrogant,” which loses any bonus. Similarly, continued defeats and setbacks might see him plunge into “Self-Pitying” or “Vindictive” or the like. And if your platoon commander reaches certain outlooks on the fringe (like “Exhausted” or “Uncontrollable”), he’ll be relieved of command entirely and a new platoon leader will need to be brought in – and this too will have ramifications for future games because that new leader will need to earn the respect and trust of the men in the platoon before he can command them effectively.
ATSE2 makes a further improvement on the Outlook tables. Even the first edition had the idea of some of the outlooks “going green,” which meant that the platoon leader had started drinking more than was perhaps warranted. But in the prior version this distinction didn’t have any mechanical effect. Now, if your platoon leader is drinking, any vertical shift in the table is doubled. This leads to their behavior becoming increasingly erratic, which can in turn lead to wild swings in whether or not they’re conferring a bonus or a penalty to your Force Morale roll in later games. It’s a small change, but I can see it imparting a really interesting effect over the long haul.
Another fun element of ATSE2 is the concept of the Winning Draw and the Losing Draw. These have always been a part of the game in terms of the conditions which affect the Men’s and CO’s Opinions, but now they are explicitly tied to the ending Force Morale of your opponent. Put simply, if during the game you can cause your opponent to suffer a reduction in Command Dice, you can claim a draw. Small change, but it gives you something to shoot for in games where things might be close. And of course it’s another potentially important consideration for deciding if you want to withdraw now to limit casualties, or maybe risk one more phase to try to knock your opponent out of a clean victory. Decisions, decisions!
The Characters
One of the aspects of the original version of At the Sharp End that struck me as odd when I first read it was the section devoted to adding character to the various officers and NCOs in your force. Background, place of origin, age, physical build. I remember thinking, “Role-playing elements? In a wargame? What fresh hell is this?!?” But the more I read, the more it struck me as a flash of “you got your chocolate in my peanut butter” kind of brilliance, and it came to be one of my favorite parts of the supplement.
The reason for this is simple: giving a little bit of life or detail to your force really helps “forge the narrative,” so to speak. Good wargames provide an enjoyable, balanced game-play experience. Great wargames tell a compelling story. And when you can connect the experiences of your tiny troopers across multiple scenarios, those narratives often write themselves. With their focus on the actions of leaders TFL games in general are very good for this, and the Character section in ATSE2 elevates this to the next level.
The very first campaign I played saw a platoon lieutenant from Northern Ireland, a fiery ginger who had worked his way up through the ranks. His enlisted experience and easy camaraderie gave a positive first impression to the men under his command. But after a string of extremely costly engagements with Axis forces, the men’s opinion of him had soured. He had been awarded a medal, which happened to come after a particularly bloody battle that saw a popular NCO wounded – clearly the men felt that their leader was trying to make his military career off their dead bodies. By the fifth game in the campaign his men had taken to referring to him as “The Red Menace” due to his propensity for getting them killed, and his commanding officer had given him a furious dressing down for failing to address cratering morale. His outlook had gone to “self-pitying,” and unit morale was at rock bottom. It seemed it wouldn’t be long until he found a live Mills Bomb lobbed into his latrine. The narrative elements provided by the rules were so strong that the “after action reports” for that campaign almost wrote themselves.
ATSE2 deepens and expands these elements. The original had a table for officer and NCO backgrounds for the British, Germans, Americans, and Soviets – the four nationalities with forces in the basic Chain of Command book. But the ability to randomly generate a place of origin for your characters only had entries for Britain and America. Now all four have randomization maps and a fifth combatant nation – Japan – has a complete set of tables and a homeland map as well. My one disappointment with this supplement is that the poor Italians didn’t get a set of their own.
A new element in the background tables is whether your officers or NCOs are “the right sort” or not. That is, someone who fits into their military’s idea of what is “politically reliable.” As an example, here’s an entry from the Soviet Officer table: “A proud Cossack by birth, you serve the Soviet State loyally. Your father did not, riding with Deniken and Wrangel in the Civil War. He paid the price. You are efficient but never trusted.” Yeah, you are not “the right sort.” Where this additional wrinkle comes into play is in helping improve the COs Opinion (they are more likely to be tolerant or forgiving of your shortcomings or failures if you are seen as politically reliable), as well as in the awarding of medals or promotions. It’s just another example of a little detail that can make for great storytelling in your linked campaign games.
If you have any interest whatsoever in “forging your narrative,” this section gives a great example of how to do it. With a little work you could easily port this same idea to other games, even grimdark wargames set in the far future. It seems a little bizarre at first, but there’s a lot to love here.
Rolling Your Own
If you want to play through any of the existing Pint-Sized Campaigns put out by Too Fat Lardies (all are available as PDFs for purchase through their website), I highly recommend it. They are absolutely worth the price.
But let’s say you want to create your own campaign? Well, ATSE2 has you covered there as well. This new edition is chock full of useful advice for putting together your own campaign, from how to structure the various rungs of the ladder to how big to make each force to how to set a number of campaign turns. Of particular interest is the section on how to set up and orient the maps for each scenario and how those choices can influence how any individual game will favor the attacker or defender. There is even a helpful section with URLs to a variety of historical map resources, which can be invaluable when putting together your own campaign.
As someone who has gone through the process of writing a published PSC, the advice in this section is worth its weight in gold. Again, even if you’re not playing a WW2 game there’s so much good stuff here that I’d recommend to anyone, not just Chain of Command gamers.
Reduced-Strength Platoons
Closing out the book is a section on fielding reduced-strength forces. Playing through campaigns is often interesting simply because after the first game or two you’ll be fielding an under-strength force whether you want to or not! But what if you wanted this same experience in a stand-alone or pick-up game?
Well fear not, ATSE2 has you covered. Chain of Command has always handled asymmetrical scenarios very well, and this is another tool in that toolbox. The way it works is disarmingly simple – you roll a handful of dice (typically 5 or 6 depending on the structure of your core platoon) and assign those dice to the various elements of your force. Lower numbers yield degraded capabilities. So here too the player is given a bunch of tough choices: do you max out your platoon’s leadership at the expense of fielding fewer men in each of your squads? Do you forego having any integral anti-tank or sniper support in favor of fielding a full complement of LMG teams?
Though each die is applied separately, in order to keep things from being too dire there is a minimum dice total (12 for five-element tables, 14 for six-element tables), and there are additional optional balancing mechanics baked in to help ensure that the level of support is fair and doesn’t leave one side completely doomed from the start. But for those players who really like a challenge, I think having both sides roll their dice in sequence and apply them to the table as-is would make for a fantastic game that reflected a clash between two worn-out forces.
This section provides yet another way to enjoy Chain of Command and is a welcome addition to the supplement. I can’t wait to put these reduced-strength platoon rules into play!
Final Recommendations
Available immediately as a PDF download direct from the TFL Website, this one is a strong “buy immediately” from me. If you have any interest in campaign gaming, creating your own campaigns, or incorporating interesting variations to game balance, there is so much to love in this book that it’s 100% worth it. And at a cost of just 15£ it’s hard to go wrong.
Have you tried a Pint-Sized Campaign? Or have any questions about how to approach campaign gaming in general? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
