First solo playthrough of O Group. This is a copy of my post on the "O Group" Facebook group. Apologies for the duplication but I know not everyone uses Social Media.

I won't bore everyone with photos of my table, I guess you've all had enough views of Cristot for now. I'll limit myself to the points I've learned and my view of the rules after a single game.

First of all, congratulations to Dave Brown for a cracking set of rules. They play smoothly and pretty quickly, considering how much I had to keep looking up. There's a lot of meat in there and it's easy to overlook something like the interdiction roll for deploying units on table. After the first 3 turns I was pretty confident on much of the basics. I really love the intertwined combat phases, where you have the ability to reply to many of the moves your opponent makes. It's a challenge whether to reply with opportunity fire, or keep your orders for your own phase.

Now my observations. First, it does seem to mirror combat more closely than many other WW2 rules I've played. And I've played a lot of them over the years. Combat tends to result in shock and suppression more often than not, with actual base losses fairly scarce at first. Artillery is a different kettle of fish, more of which later.

Movement can be frustrating, just as it was in battle. I like the dicing for movement. If you really want to get somewhere, use a rapid move and forego firing. You should have other platoons covering your advance anyway.

Keep an eye on shock levels. It's easy to become suppressed if you start with 1 or 2 shock and you're in range of the enemy. They can respond in your phase too! I had several cases of failing to rally any shock off at all, leading to a forced retreat of a 2 or 3 units. It's chilling when your platoon is forced back 3xD6, especially when it hasn't advanced very far yet and ends up not far from your table edge.

I didn't see too many times when I had too few orders. Only used one HQ order in the whole game. Both sides kept their HQ tally as high as possible. The prospect of gaining initiative and an extra order is too tempting. Even if you have fewer orders from your O Group dice roll, you can still win the initiative when your HQ orders are similar.I also used the Company Commander order sparingly.

Artillery. Mortars got used much more than higher level support, for obvious reasons. Mortars however, don't inflict a lot of losses. they do inflict shock and suppression though. Save your heavy guns for use against the built up areas, where the extra firepower is needed to inflict damage. The larger burst radius also catches more adjacent units. Not a good prospect when you're defending a town.

Fubars are where you eventually wear your opponent down. I didn't make any close assaults, except for one against a lone, suppressed company commander. Lesson learned, if your on your own, fall back!

Armour didn't play a big roll neither. The Shermans did almost nothing and the Panther, coming on near the end, killed a tank section before succumbing to medium artillery and causing the final Fubar marker that ended the game.

Altogether a really enjoyable experience and I look forward to playing against an opponent soon.

Regards
Andrew HOLMES