Here at Fortified Niche, we give Flames of War a lot of shit. And we’re right to do so! Better World War 2 games exist for that scale of battle. For example, there’s Battlegroup.
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Battlegroup is a game about controlling a WW2 platoon or two on the tabletop. The rulebook states that you can go smaller or larger. However, considering the level of granularity, it would feel a bit barren if played at platoon or less (like in Chain of Command, V for Victory, or Bolt Action), and would potentially be too much to handle when running a company or more. Plus, you have to consider how the chosen model intersects with the scale of your miniatures – at 20mm (like my FLGS unfortunately plays), two platoons still look OK on a 6×4 table, but a company would be pushing it.
At the start of the turn, a player rolls dice based on their battle size and adds the number of friendly officers on the table – that’s going to be their order allotment for the turn. Orders can be used to activate units (fireteams or individual vehicles) and do things like call in artillery. Notably, you need to pay an order per gun in the (off-table) battery, so dropping the hammer may mean that your barbies may have to sit around for a turn.
Many moons ago, Battlegroup was the first game I encountered that featured spotting rules. That’s right, you need to spot the enemy to shoot them. Even if your unit is firing twice a turn at the same target, they’ll need to do it twice. It’s a simple table, and the gist is that stationary units in cover that haven’t fired are harder to spot than those more active, and vehicles are much easier to notice than infantry.
There’s also the option of firing to suppress rather than kill – you don’t need to spot anyone to light up a suspicious shack. Pinning may not kill anyone, but it can pin a unit. Pinned units can’t accept orders. More importantly, there’s no free unpinning in Battlegroup. If you want to rally a unit, you have to draw a battle rating chit. How bad is that? Well, you also draw chits when your unit is destroyed.
When you build your army, units contribute battle rating points. The sum of all the points becomes the army morale score for the battle. As mentioned, it is usually depleted via deaths or rallies by secretly drawing chits. Why secretly? To keep your the state of your morale secret from the opponent (you lose if it runs out)… and because you may actually a draw a beneficial chit that may or may not result in an airstrike that may or may not blow up quite a bit of the opposing force.
Your force composition determining force morale has interesting implications, as it allows for interesting units like triage tents that’s don’t do anything in game but add to the battle rating. The army-building itself is interesting, as units are split into many categories, and choices from the more mundane categories (infantry, forward scouts, tanks in armored divisions) unlock choices from more specialized sections (engineering, artillery, logistics). Unfortunately, there are still some terrible things (on-table artillery) in those lists.
Battlegroup has its flaws, the main one (for me) being the seeming absence of any chain of command on the table. Officers have very little to do outside of not dying (their proximity doesn’t impact pinning or rallying at all) and a squad’s fire teams can be deployed at opposite corners of the map without any issues. However, it would still be my go-to game if I wanted to play with more miniatures than it is sensible to use in Chain of Command.