The Play's the Thing

 

The existence of the most recent edition of Combat Commander made me wake up to two startling realizations.

First, my favorite game in the entire universe is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Already! And second, I’ve never written a proper review of this extraordinary opus.

Sure, I’ve penned a handful of articles about other entries in the series, but I never got around to typing an honest-to-goodness review of the game that started it all.

And I’m not going to do that today, either.

Rather, what I want to write is a love letter to the game I cherish most.

Why is it that, under normal circumstances, there’s a more than fair chance I’d rather play Combat Commander over anything else? What makes the contents of that box so appealing and so addictive? Why, oh why, after close to 600 plays (and we’re talking about a two-hour game, here), do I still anticipate with trepidation my next foray into those cardboard bunkers and hedgerows?

The answer to all of those questions is both simple and delightfully convoluted.

I met Chad Jensen—the man who would later give us Combat Commander—back in 1998, when I’d just set foot in northern California for a two-year stint at Lucasfilm. We lived in neighboring towns and our common passion was boardgames, so we were bound to run into each other before too long. We became friends; how could we not? Strangely enough, I showed him a prototype of mine the following year. (That game was Proteus, eventually published by Steve Jackson Games.) In return, Chad did—  well, nothing. He never showed me one of his designs, never even mentioned he was working on a handful of games. Nothing against me: Chad was just not the kind of guy who would have you taste a half-baked lasagna, even if it might be the best half-baked lasagna in the history of humankind. And so it was that I discovered that well kept secret about my friend along with the rest of the world in 2006, when GMT Games put out the title that would overrun so many others in my collection.

As of this writing, I have played well over 1,700 different games over the years, and I enjoy all kinds, from the purest of abstracts (something like GIPF) to bloated plastic dungeon crawlers (think Nemesis), and everything in between. But wargames hold a special place in my heart, for a wide variety of reasons. I had already played many of them by the time Combat Commander came along, but I had never experienced something quite like it.

So what is Combat Commander? It’s a tactical, WWII clash between two players that generally involves a low number of units operating across a constrained area. You move a bunch of units on a hex grid, attempt to take valuable objectives, eliminate threats, sometimes assaulting across lush fields in broad daylight, other times clearing one house after another in a bloody night raid supposed to be worth it all when the sun comes up.

Did you see what happened there? I started with a clinical description of basic game mechanics, but the story quickly took over.

THAT is Combat Commander.

The game tells a story. It also does many other things and does them well, but the story is what stays with you after the last gun was silenced and all the pieces have gone back into the box.

How does it tell that story? An excellent question.

And I believe the answer is to be found in three specific places.

They'll never take that hill... right?

1. ACTION RESTRICTIONS

Games allow players to make decisions in different ways. Some wargames allow each unit to act every turn, installing the player as ultimate master of their domain. Other systems provide a number of action points on each turn, leaving it up to the player to allocate said points amongst selected units, as they see fit; units thus activated can then perform whatever action is deemed necessary, but not all units will act on every turn. In yet other cases, the game will dictate which units can act, but allow the player to decide what actions to perform with them.

With Combat Commander, each player is dealt a hand of cards: those are the orders units can be given on that turn, usually one card to a unit or a handful of units. The order you had in mind doesn’t appear on any of your cards this turn? Tough.

This level of restriction is one of the highest in the wargaming realm, and yet—ironically enough—it’s from those shackles that true creativity can emerge with the most grace.

Picture a game of chess. Before your move, through the roll of a die, knights are rendered inoperable for one turn. Suddenly, the attack you had planned can’t proceed. Will you decide to maintain that attack? If so, how? And if you change your plan, what will it become? Will you opt for a holding pattern until Lady Luck paralyzes a piece of a different nature? Or settle for a retreat, hastily put together to compensate for your neutered forward thrust?

That’s how it goes with Combat Commander. The terrain ahead is ideal, your units are in place, one of the enemies in sight is already broken (making for an even better target)… You draw your hand of cards, and—thanks again to that mercurial Lady—you don’t hold a single Fire card. What do you do? You can skip your turn to throw away your hand of cards and hope you get some ammunition on the redraw, or you can try to make the best of a bad situation. Perhaps there’s a way to use your Rout card to push that wounded enemy soldier some spaces back, which would enable you to play one of your Move cards to get your own units even closer to your goal. Perhaps you decide instead to move a single unit towards a different objective, hoping to draw the enemy’s fire and make your opponent waste a precious Fire card—a card they will no longer hold should you move your men around at a later time. Or you could elect to hold fast and discard just those cards that wouldn’t be of any use against a counterattack that your opponent, faced with your inaction, might decide to launch.

Without anyone noticing, the story is taking shape. Instead of being “and then my guys started firing at the opposing squad,” it morphs into a more engaging “my guys wanted to shoot but couldn’t, so instead they had to resort to…”

See how memorable this is shaping up to be?

Some players detest the vagaries of such a system, stating that they prefer more control—fair enough. Combat Commander aficionados, on the other hand, relish those spur-of-the-moment challenges the game throws at us. In a way, we also feel it makes the proceedings a bit more realistic (to the extent that a tabletop game can lay such a claim), in the sense that in the heat of battle, not all of your orders will reach their intended recipients, and then not all orders that do will get executed without a hitch.

2. RANDOM EVENTS

This stands as another apple of discord amongst wargamers: Once in a while, a random event will throw a wrench in the proceedings. You or your opponent might receive unexpected reinforcements; a blaze could start in a building, spread to the nearby woods and cut off your main access point; air support might kill units you believed safe; off-board artillery could create a brand new foxhole for opposing units to exploit—the list goes on. While a category of players cannot stand this state of affairs, I (and many others) absolutely love it. Yes, I’ve been robbed of an inescapable victory—and been saved from certain defeat—more than once by those random events, and they’re still one of the main draws of Combat Commander for me. There’s something thrilling in the knowledge that the game will throw you a curveball, something you couldn’t possibly prepare for, and force you to deal with it. 

Again, this contributes to the story the game is writing. The lone team bleeding out in those northern woods and that everyone assumed was done for? Turns out a hero emerged, patched them up and led them out of those woods to fight another day.

You might not have planned for this, but now you need to reckon with that reality. Revise your analysis of the situation, edit your mindset, and contribute a new chapter to the narrative.

3. HISTORICAL SCENARIOS

Each game of Combat Commander runs on parameters established by a scenario, which specifies the forces involved, the number of turns the game will last, hand size for each player, and so on. GMT has published over 100 official scenarios, almost all of which are based on actual WWII engagements. Reading the historical summary before the opening salvo is a ritual we rarely skip: it pries open the narrative door and lets in the winds of fate. 

Which makes the entire experience even better: not only does each game craft a story that both players contribute to, but that emerging tale is also based on true events. How amazing is that? True, most wargames reenact a historical situation, but none of them allows you to add your own ingredients to the story with such dramatic flair.

(And if you’re still not sated, the system’s robust random scenario generator will spit out period-appropriate skirmishes to keep your imagination engaged until the cows come home.)

A typical Combat Commander scenario

The level of creativity made possible by the combination of those three elements is not a frequent occurrence in gaming, and even rarer of a phenomenon when it comes to wargames. Combat Commander provides players with a sandbox and hands over quite a lot of freedom as to how players will interact with it, but it also litters the sandbox with a bunch of mines that force players to be creative, lest they don’t survive the experience.

That’s how stories emerge, and that’s how we can’t help but remember them.

(I still vividly recall a session from a decade ago where a hero kept calling for artillery support, only to see those shells drift back far enough to fall on his own troops. Again and again, at least half a dozen times. Laughing so hard we needed to grab the table so we wouldn’t fall off our chairs, it was clear to us the story was running wild: we wondered if some strange and powerful wind had anything to do with the repeated shell malfunctions, or if our beloved hero was just the most inept soldier ever to grace a battlefield, transmitting erroneous coordinates every time he contacted HQ. We still debate the issue to this day, with a grin the passing years have not yet begun to erode.)

And the game keeps on giving. I mean, after over a thousand hours spent playing Combat Commander and interacting with its myriad systems, I still witness stuff I’ve never encountered before: a bold new use for a card, a surprising tactic born out of pure desperation, a concurrence of events that give birth to an astounding situation, or just a unit that—against all odds—refuses to give in and ends up carrying the day.

* * *

My friend Chad died in 2019, after a valiant battle against cancer. Because I had moved back to the other end of the North American continent, I never got a chance to sit down to a game of Combat Commander with him. Sure, online options had surfaced by then, but we kept putting it off, convinced we’d get a chance to sit face-to-face for a lively match one of those years. Alas, that opportunity never presented itself.

Despite everything, I’m thankful I was afforded the chance to tell Chad, over a long overdue phone call, how much happiness his creation (one of many!) had brought into my wargaming life. At that he responded by being Chad, simply saying “you’re welcome” with a smile I could hear in his voice from five thousand kilometers away. 

Every time I crack open my box of Combat Commander I can still hear that smile, clear as a bell, crisp as that spring morning back in ‘45, when the days were growing warmer and the evenings longer...

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