RogerBW's Blog

I invited some friends over for a day of V-Commandos, a cooperative boardgame of WWII special operations. (I'd planned for six but two couldn't make it.)

We started with Operation Celcius (a Kickstarter extra), with three of us on one side and one on the other. It started off well, but we got bogged down in the Blockhaus and surrounded.

Moved on to Operation Time Pencil, where again we got bogged down in the second stage of the mission. Half of it came out well…

At this point I noticed a rules error I'd been making, and we went on to Operation Freyja. Packing one of the transepts of the church worked fairly well, and we were able to scoop up a fair bit of equipment before leaving.

On to the Forest Road, where Scout and Medic (with silenced Sten) were able to pull off the wire trap quickly and cleanly and get out without even setting off the alarm.

And we set up the Fuel Depot for the next game while the others were making heavier weather of Hotel de Luxe.

Finally it was teams of Scout plus Medic, and Officer plus Sapper, working together.

The mission accomplished, we realised that three of us could get out… but it would be interesting to see if we could rescue the Sapper too. So we did, with the Scout appearing out of a wall to finish off an enemy in close combat and administer first aid, while the Officer hosed down an enemy entrance and we all bailed out.

Finally, after one player had gone home, we took on the three linear stages of Operation Victory (from the Résistance expansion). Scout again jumped in to reach the pilots (supposedly "hiding", but the standard setup rules put guards on them and there's nothing in the operation card to make an exception)

Just occasionally the event cards align completely with what you want to do. The Scout stuffed the two pilots into the sidecar, roared across the open ground, hosed down the exit tile with a captured MG42, then got out.

The prison break went smoothly too, and then it was on to the airfield – which again was a reasonably clean mission, ending up getting all the pilots out as well as all of us (only one of each was necessary for a successful operation).

All in all an excellent day in fine company. And I continue to be very enthusiastic about this game. (But you really shouldn't be making any more stealth checks than you absolutely have to. The dice are unfriendly; do your best not to roll them.)