Urrah Stalino!

Last night John Koprowski and I took RED ACTIONS! out for a spin at the Game Parlor in Chantilly VA. We were both newbies. It was.. an experience...



First Impressions: In general, we found the rules to be badly in need of an edit. Playing RA! at a con with a GM telling me what to do is one thing. Finding out how to run the game from what was in print was a whole other can of beans. It was hard to find a straight answer to almost any topic. We figured out movement well enough (it's on the card) and initiative (do a simple dice roll off, then Igo-Hugo for the rest of the turn, flipping the cool unit cards over to show that you have gone), and fire combat (generally speaking), but right about there we sort of glazed over.

The rules say that NOTHING in Red Actions! is simultaneous, except for MELEE and FIREFIGHTS. We could not find a satisfactory definition of a firefight anywhere in the text, so we *assume* this means an exchange of gunfire. I think (guess, really) that a firefight is initiated when one unit (platoon or company) fires upon another target. That target (guessing) activates and shoots back? Maybe?

I like that definition, as it can make the game less "gamey" and more realistic. If I see that a unit hasn't moved yet, I can fire on him and force him to reply, thus burning his activation and suppressing him in one turn. Far more interesting than a strict definition of Igo-Hugo. We'll seek clarification.

The other element that puzzled us was the MORALE CHECK RESULTS. Okay, we get "TERROR MARKERS"... they are a cumulative way of removing unit cohesion, and make the unit harder to fire and do other military things. And we get how to remove them, and how nasty it gets when you fail to do so. But what about "unit retires"?? Does that mean that the unit is in a state akin to "TERROR?" "Retiring" is only mentioned in one place (the combat results table charts) and not defined in the text. Is this equivelant to "keeping your heads down", but not being pinned or in TERROR?

Am I the only one who think the morale recovery is a tad.. lenient? I had artillery shells land amongst a Konarmiya unit (left in the photo) and they took two TERRORs and a PIN. With one morale check, zip! It's all gone? Seems nothing shy of miraculous to me, but maybe I'm doing something wrong here.

The most interesting lesson (for me) that came out of our experience was force balancing (which is very loosely described in the rules, but thankfully there is a unit chart with each force type that describes relative point values for each troop type. I really thought I had a nice force built up, but it turns out that Reds are kind of skimpy in the points department-- the quality just isn't there. I will need to be beefing up my army, comrade!

We only played a few turns for the sake of time and to basically give us an idea if our force was balanced or not (it wasn't). We plan to run a multiplayer game as our next test, after we get a few questions answered and possibly do some edits and build a handy cheat sheet.

I don't want to seem entirely negative, I certainly did NOT have a bad time. Once we got the hang of Fire Combat, Morale and Artillery, it went pretty fast. It was the exceptions and weird circumstances that bogged us down. I will seek clarification from The Perfect Captain and report back what I find.