Ok, so I *finally* got around to my solo playtest game of Five Men In Normandy this morning. My four-man Japanese team had an Encounter with five Russians, who arrived with a truck mounting a machinegun. My phone died as I tried to take the first pic, so most of the game has no photos (really, I only took one picture, because after that I was having too much fun to remember to take more.) But the outcome was that a non-character Japanese soldier was taken out of action by the machinegun on the Russian truck, one Russian was killed byJapanese rifle fire, and the other four Russians were killed in melee by Kamave, one of the Japanese characters.
I made tokens to cover everything I could think of. It may not seem like it would be hard to keep track of which two models out of four have fired or are knocked down, but me and my memory issue you know. The tokens were extremely helpful, even if no one used a grenade even once.
The national rules didn’t come into play at all. The Japanese never tried to shoot past 18″, the snap fire and guard fire against Kamave when he was charging never hit, and he never tolled less than a “3” while in a Brawl. The Russians, being a random opposition force, had no characters with which to use “one with the land.”
After the game, the soldier who was out of action was only knocked out, but came down sick and will miss six days. Daisuke, the other character, had an accident and will be incapacitated for two days. Overall group morale went from 0 to 1. Three new special abilities were earned, so the non-character soldier who did not go out of action was promoted to character with “skilled,” Kamave was awarded “charismatic,” and Daisuke received “shoot and scoot.”
Overall, the game played smoothly. Almost everything one might need is on the summary sheet, I am going to add the rules for Guard Fire and Snap Fire before my next game. I previously have played a more generic FiveCore game of Star Trek Federation vs. Romulan landing parties, and modified the system for Star Trek ship combat, so the system is not new to me. But I really wanted to try the original flavour of the game, and I was not disappointed.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Regarding the terrain and miniatures, the walls are from Dave Graffam models, the ZIS-5 truck is a collaboration by myself and another papercrafter, the rickshaw is from Paperschnitzel, the downed trees are cheap Christmas village decorations that I repainted and repurposed, the Japanese miniatures are Berlin Or Bust and Warlord Games, while the Russians are from Wargames Factory.
