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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Official Word: Command Cards

The official DoW blog has been updated with a post about the Command card system. There’s nothing particularly new here for players of other Commands & Colors games like Memoir ‘44, but we do get a first look at some BattleLore Command cards, and they look beautiful.

While in M’44 the two outer board sections are referred to as the Flanks on the cards, in BattleLore they are called the Wings. As we heard in the last interview, Scenarios are called Adventures.

Section CardsThe two Section cards revealed are Scout (order 1 unit on the Right Wing) and Advance (for each Command card you have issue an order to one unit on the Left Wing). I haven’t seen the latter type of Section card in M’44, though perhaps it exists in the other C&C games.

The two Tactic cards are Blue Banners (for each Command card you have issue an order to one Blue Banner unit) and Darken the Sky (all units with ranged weapons can battle twice, but cannot fire at point blank or move). The latter card would certainly be handy in an Agincourt adventure … Apparently these two tactic cards have equivalents in C&C: Ancients.

Tactic CardsThe red crown icon identifies the cards as being Command cards—linked to your Commander in the War Council. It’s been pointed out that the icon matches the icon on the ‘Outpost’ tile you can see here—does that make the tile a command outpost? More news on this as information on the Lore cards and War Council is revealed. Click the images on the left for a closer look at the cards.

While waiting for BattleLore to arrive, there’s still the other great C&C games to enjoy of course. A friend and I played the ‘Guam Landings, July 21, 1944’ scenario from the Memoir ‘44 Pacific Theater expansion last night. What a fantastic game! It came right down to the wire—with one Victory Point to win and no other options left, the Japanese made two suicidal charges on a tank unit in the hills—and they would have won too, if not for an unlucky roll …

Update: It’s been confirmed that the borders of the cards are white, which should reduce the minor edge damage that occurs with black bordered cards such as those in Memoir ‘44 after extended use.