Starting on Rommel

I had decided that this week I would tackle a Sam Mustapha game.  Might and reason was on the cards until I remembered "Rommel," and that I had been planning to paint and base some old (and I mean old) Skytrex 10mm as the vehicles.  These don't match any of my Pendraken or Minifigs vehicles, and I had quite a lot of extra Pendraken and Wargames South Infantry that I could use. 

Rommel is another of those Sam Mustapha games I`'ve been waiting for ages to try.  The main impetus for this was getting these ready for the pending publication of "O" Group.  Rommel is at least two levels higher than "O" Group's battalion game, being on a Divisional scale and the terrain will reflect that.

Actually I`'m not doing terrain at all, as such.  My plan is to hand draw a map in the style of a wartime AMS Normandy map, using the Mortain area, as accurately as I can, for the Cobra breakout. The armies I have built are German vs US, with Infantry armour and artillery elements. 

 

The AMS 1:50000 map from 1944.  

The squares are 1km across, but I will fudge the actual terrain so that open, wooded, urban and soft ground is apparent.

The map, or at least an eighth of it.  I will be drawing up the sections based on the AMS Map (the US Army Mapping Service WW2), but it has yet to have the hedges for the bocage added from the satellite imagery.

The units go down onto the squares.  30mm frontages in 4 inch squares which correspond to a kilometer on the map.

Testing the look of the game.  Two units from 117 Regimental Combat Team face a Panzer Grenadier attack.

And it fits the look I'm going for pretty well.  This is two map sections on a 6 by 4 grid.  Six map sections to go for a full 12 by 8 grid!

Top down and it's getting there.

The first game will be a half map/grid tester.  I will field 50 points per side, with 2nd SS panzer Division against US 30th Infantry and it's Sherman support, and intend to blog it in detail move by move for learning the game.