Men of Company B

Men of Company B is a Vietnam era ruleset from Peter Pig . Like most of their rulesets, it has an associated figure range in 15mm though the scale of the game is so small that you could easily play it with 28mm figures if you have them handy.

The basic scenario the game is built around a patrol situation where the Americans (or their allies) are searching the countryside for VC supply caches while trying not to get battered too badly in enemy ambushes.

Initial Impressions

The rulebook is something of a throwback in these days of glossy color productions. It's essentially a spiral bound stack of copied pages. The color comes from colored paper and the few pictures are rather crude line drawings. The covers are laminated and there's a quick reference table on the back, but you need to make game cards and templates yourself. This is a book you buy for the rules, not because it looks nice on your coffee table.

The game uses ordinary six-sided dice exclusively but there are no 'buckets of dice' -mechanics. Usually you are rolling just a single die or two at most. Figure count for the game is relatively low, you can get away with around ten bases of figures per side unless you intentionally flood the table with the cheapest possible troops (probably not a good idea, since you get penalised for casualties all the same).

In addition you need some more special stuff, namely civilian and casualty figures, quite a few counters to represent arms caches and such and a couple of templates for artillery and air strikes. I didn't have the time to cut out the artillery templates so we went with helicopter gunships in the test games.

In Use

Setup is pretty easy. Both forces are built on a simple points system and contain most likely around ten units. In addition, the VC player must buy liabilities such as civilians and arms caches.

The game is based around the idea of zones, suspected enemy locations. There are no VC forces on the table at the start of the game, just the five zone markers. The Americans can activate a zone by moving into contact with zone marker, revealing the zone contents and probably triggering a VC ambush. The VC can also try roll to activate a zone without enemy contact, probably a smart thing to do with your mortar section.

The devious thing is that VC can also deactivate zones, hiding their contents and even swap the contents of deactivated zones. So you might pop an ambush, eliminate nearby enemies, deactivate and relocate somewhere else before the reinforcements arrive.

Scoring is based on caches found, enemies killed and casualties. As an additional twist, there a three different basic missions to choose from which affect the scoring. So in bodycount missions killed enemies are worth more while in hearts and minds you should concentrate on finding caches.

There are also optional rules for river actions, base assaults and so on, so you're not locked into doing the same patrol over and over again.

The game is very random. You're rolling dice for almost everything in the game, movement and game length included.

Verdict

It's a nice little game that plays fast with small amount of figures. We played the first game in 90 minutes while learning the rules. The second game was over in under an hour.

There are a lot of gamey elements like the event cards (which didn't really play much of a role in our test games) and abstractions (all tanks are equal). This is not a game for nuts and bolts simulationists. And a lot of dice rolling... That said, I think this is so far the best game I've seen to simulate these patrols. There is a lot of emphasis on civilians and bringing back bodies of both fallen friends and enemies -- something that is completely missing from e.g. FoW Tropic Lightning.

The rulebook could use some professional editing and I think the rules could use some streamlining. Also, I'm not totally convinced the point system works if stretched to the limit.

I'm not sure I would want to play this exclusively for a long period of time, but as a side dish every once in a while it looks fun enough. Besides, any game that gives a reason to put a tiger on the table can't be all bad ;)