Squad Leader

The turn

Each side takes a turn of eight phases: rally, preparatory fire, movement, defensive fire, assault fire, rout, advance, close quarters. You act in your own turn, and again in the enemy's defensive fire phase, which is your chance to shoot at men who are crossing.

Men break long before they die

Most fire does not kill anybody. It pins men down, or breaks them, and broken men run for the rear and are worth almost nothing until somebody gets them up. Ground and casualties both pay; a broken enemy pays you a share of what he is worth for as long as he stays broken.

The officer is the scarcest counter on the sheet

An officer subtracts his grade from your fire, lets bodies in different hexes fire as one command, and is the difference between a broken squad getting up and scattering for good. Alone in a hex he is an easy mark. Lose him and the men round him stop being a company.

Cover has to be got into

A body that has moved this turn takes only half the cover of the hex it is standing in, dropped, and is always counted as caught crossing. Walking into a wood in front of a machine gun is not a way of becoming safe. This is what makes the defensive volley worth having.

The slip

Every volley is written up: each weapon that contributed and at what weight, every modifier by name, the two dice, the modified roll and the verdict. The slip fills before you commit, so you can see the shape of the gamble and put the shot down again.

Two things that are doctrine, not talent

Whether to keep a volley back, and how far an officer will go to collect men who have run, were measured over several thousand machine-against-machine actions and neither separated a good officer from a bad one. They are therefore fixed for every commander, and the three officers you can face — green, regular and veteran — differ only in how well they choose their ground, how hard they work to fire as one command, and how close to the best move they will settle for.