WWII Micro Armour:
The Game

Wargame Rules Review

WWII Micro Armour: The Game by John Fernandes Jr. and Bandolier Games.

WWII Micro Armour: The Game is more than a set of miniatures rules for simulating tactical armored warfare in the mid-twentieth century. It’s a “research engine” that allows you to experiment with the technology, tactics, and doctrine of all the important players in the real world. Training, experience, and “cohesion” are important factors in deciding who wins and loses.

Everyone's forces are represented: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Rumania, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States: over 60 pages of organizational info. You get twenty pages of weapons data, a complete scenario generator, plus full color graphics for artillery impacts, minefields, smoke screens, even wrecked vehicles. Also included are 8 ready-to-play historical scenarios.

Contents

  • Title: WWII Micro Armour: The Game
  • Period: World War Two
  • Type: Tactical Wargame at Battalion to Division Level
  • Time Scale: 1 turn = 3 minutes
  • Ground Scales: 1:3935 (1 inch = 100 yards / 100 m)
  • Troop Scale: 1 stand = 1 platoon
  • Basing: 1″ × 1″ stands of 1:300 scale miniatures
  • Armour penetration benchmarks
    • Sherman vs. Lingèvres Panther: 9 % per game turn
  • Author: John Fernandes Jr. and Bandolier Games
  • Format: 133-page rule book
  • Language: English
  • Publisher: GHQ, Minneapolis, MN
  • Published: 2001

Chapters

  1. Introduction
  2. General Description of Play
  3. Equipment
  4. Cohesion
  5. Sequence of Play
  6. Spotting
  7. Combat
  8. Movement
  9. Terrain
  10. Special Weapons
  11. Engineering, Flame, and Fortification
  12. Further Options
  • Designers’ Notes
  • Weapons Data
  • Aircraft Data
  • Tables of Organization and Equipment
  • Designing Scenarios
  • Scenarios
  • Templates and Markers
  • Combat Table Card

Evaluation

Easy to learn, the actual rules cover only 15 pages. Another 74 pages are devoted to weapons data and tables of organization and equipment for twelve nations involved in World-War Two. The rules are similar to board game rules, but without the hexes.

À la guerre les trois quarts sont des affaires morales; la balance des forces réelles n’est que pour un autre quart. - Napoleon Bonaparte

Discipline, training, experience, motivation, and exhaustion are subsumed in “Cohesion”, the single most important aspect of play in “WWII Micro Armour: The Game”. Gaining the initiative, recovering from adverse combat results like suppression or disorganization, moving a single platoon or movement group, mounting or dismounting, creating dummy minefields, firing, calling direct or indirect artillery fire and air strikes, are the critical tasks which require a cohesion test based on the individual Army Cohesion Level.

Combat results may change the status of a platoon to suppressed, disorganized, or eliminated, but there is no need to track individual figure or vehicle casualties in the game. Green, white or black beads are used to mark stands as moving, suppressed or disorganized. The only other bookkeeping devices are barbed wire, smoke, artillery impact, minefield, wreck, light, medium and heavy improved position markers, as well as the artillery deviation template, firing arc and target front templates.

Platoon stands must be in base contact to qualify as a movement group, which makes them easier to activate, given the limited number of movement orders per turn. The resulting formation is tighter than a typical German infantry platoon, which attacked on a frontage of 100 to 200 meters, s. German Infantry Tactics. To fix this, consider platoon stands to be adjacent for movement group purposes if they are up to one stand-width apart.

The rules are well written, easy to get into, and they realistically cover all aspects of a division-sized engagement with refreshingly simple mechanisms. As a result, players are less likely to shy away from off-board artillery, air attacks, engineering tasks, parachute and glider landings, and other interesting aspects of World-War Two warfare, which are often considered too complicated to actually implement in a game.

With the exception of the German attack against Stark Force in Kasserine Pass, all scenarios are played on a 24″ × 48″ playing surface. Gamers using 1:100 scale miniatures may increase the stand size to 3″ × 3″, and triple all ranges to play this game on a 6′ × 8′ table.

Wargame Rules