Take That Hill

A Wargame Primer

You command an infantry platoon of three sections and a Pl HQ. Your mission is to destroy an enemy section hastily dug in on the hill 500 metres away, as quickly as possible. The ground in front of your position is open and offers no cover from view or fire. To do this you must fire and manoeuvre your platoon into an assault position adjacent to the hill while keeping the enemy suppressed.

Take That Hill is a hex-and-counter wargame primer: a short, focused introduction to the genre. It features a simple IGO-UGO turn structure that introduces the core mechanics used across the majority of commercial wargames: alternating sides, action economy, dice-driven fire, line of fire, suppression, morale and rally.

LOW COMPLEXITY
The base game strips wargaming down to its essentials. Four sections, one enemy, one hill. Sixteen turns to take it. Combined turns plus hits reach 16 and the attack collapses. Reach the hill inside the first ten turns and it's a clean victory; from turn eleven the best you can hope for is a draw.

ADVANCED RULES
• Fire support: Rifle Platoon, GPMG section, 81mm High Explosive, 81mm Smoke. Each is a one-shot asset; spent at the right moment or wasted.
• Red defences: Hidden minefields, barbed wire, depth positions that may or may not be real, and 120mm mortars with a beaten zone that chains hex to hex.
• Hit markers and morale: Direct and indirect hits stack penalties on rally rolls. Take both and the penalties double.
• Low light: Pre-dawn attacks penalise fire and rally by -2 until illumination arrives. Blue pre-arranges a flare; Red can call their own.

PARATROOPER RAID
A full scenario expansion. You are dropped behind enemy lines on the eve of a major offensive, with one night to destroy the enemy's command-and-control node on a nearby hill. You come down in darkness with only your platoon commander on the board; the rest of the force is drawn from the drop zone over the turns that follow. Every turn you spend assembling is a turn the garrison grows stronger and dawn draws closer - at turn eleven first light flips on for good and the darkness you were counting on is gone.

Get through the wire and the sentries, put your commander on the crest, and roll for the engineers' demolition - three attempts, each at better odds than the last. Then get out: the raid is not over when the node is, and turn sixteen does not end it. Every section has to make it back to the wood line.