Recently Stéphane Acquaviva invited us to test his new OCS design: Hungarian Rhapsody. Last month our team including Igor Luckyanov, Max Komendant and myself made a titanic efforts to prepare the physical materials for that game: counters and map.
In this post I want to thank Stephane for giving us the chance to be the first wargaming group in Russia testing Operational Combat Series game and thank my teammates for the incredible achievements in the field of design and production.
Let me explain some of the design decisions that we made relying on some OCS experience:
1. Hedgehogs printed on map are often hidden behind the counter, so the counter should be lifted to check if the hedgehog exist. We marked the on-map hedgehogs by the red outline, so it will be visible even with unit on it (check Budapest photo).
2. In our previous OCS games we lacked homogeneity of the frontline. This kind of homogeneity was broken by the big pool of unit colors, like SS, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine and Soviet Guards, besides the standard German and Soviet colors. We “stitched” SS and Guards information in the color of unit symbol.
3. We identified all the units with Heavy or Light AT effects with the color of combat strength. So we don’t need to remember all the unit types that may have an anti-tank effects – just look at the counter.
4. We designated the artillery range into the hex-like frame, so it will not be mixed up with Action Rating no more.
I’m happy to share what we have done and we are going to begin the testing soon. We hope you’ll like it. Please feel free to share any feedback. Let’s rock the Hungary!
And here’s our Set Up Chart:
Great improvement in design of the counter. Seeing your proposal is wanting it for oneself!
Thank you, Daniel!
Can I ask: when will this game be ready to go on preorder?
Thanks
Bren
Hi, Bren!
As I see it: it looks like the game is almost finished and should appear on the preorder following several months.
Hey, thanks for that. So many decisions to make regarding what games to get. I’m pretty new to wargaming, played many years ago but just getting back into the hobby now as kids are getting older and stuff. I really want to try ocs and I love the eastern front of warfare, but maybe I should get one of the smaller games first (like Sicily or Tunisia) to see if I like the system.
Have you tried GMTs Barbarossa/East Front Series? Is it as good as OCS in your view? Sorry for all the questions…
Brendan
Bren, thank you for questions! Glad you have an opportunity to get back to the hobby 🙂 HR will not be the easiest OCS game for sure. If you like Eastern Front, I would recommend to get Baltic Gap, as it has good manageable scenarios of reasonable size or Reluctant Enemies – the smallest OCS game in terms of counter density and map size. If you’d like to push the counters in VASSAL, we may try some PBEM games. Tunisia is a great title, too!
Unfortunately, I still didn’t try GMT EFS by myself, but from what I saw and read – it’s a very solid system, at least as good as OCS.
Cool, I was actually looking at Baltic Gap too. Its my birthday next month so why not….
I dont know what ‘PBEM’ means…
I am Irish, live in Dublin and don’t know any gamers. My wife (shes German) is heading to Germany for 2 weeks next month with our kids so I will have some time to play. Hopefully I can get some ocs experience then.
You are Russian yes? Goddam I love Russians, not sure why, maybe because I am a huge Fedor Emelianenko fan.
Thanks again for the tips and advice.
Bren
Thanks for that! 🙂 Yes, I’m Russian, we have several people there in Moscow, who plays heavy wargames like OCS and ASL. PBEM means play by email. I played several games using VASSAL and email and that’s was ok! 🙂
Very happy to see the developement of this excellent serie of games!