After participating in my Black Ops game back in December, Gord has been on me to try out 02 Hundred Hours, a game designed to simulate WWII partisan warfare, commando raids and similar special operations and wet work. Last night, we finally managed to fit in a trial run!
Arthur set up the board, a small Italian village, centered around the town square. Naturally we decided to fill the square up with all the activity to be expected on a busy market day.
The jolly grocer tries to convince the grumpy signora that the tomatoes are genuinely fresca, but she does not appear convinced.
Musicians and dancers put on an impromptu performance.
Then Gord arrived, and pointed out that the reason the game is called 02h00 is that the action takes place in the middle of the night, and during wartime so we can assume that a curfew would be in place. So all the townsfolk went home, and we adjusted the layout a bit to allow more streets for unauthorised mischief. The mission for the Italian partisans is to capture a German officer, and extract him for interrogation. There are three possible places that he could be - in this case, one of the two churches, or the garage (the white building with the two big doors).
The cat, however, ignored the curfew ;^)
I selected a group of partisans, including a hero of the resistance (the lady with the MP40), a radio operator (Noor Inayat Khan),a partisan sergeant (with the red scarf), and five regular partisans. This selection allowed me to choose several special mission cards, that gave me bonuses for when the action kicked off. In particular, one of the cards allowed me to examine one of the three possible locations in advance, so my search for the German officer would be made a little easier.
I used my free search to check the church, and found that the officer wasn't there. This was great for me, as that would have been the most difficult place to search, and so Gord's sentry there didn't slow my search.
Germans on roving patrol.
German sergeant checks in on his sentry at the cardboard church.
The partisan hero sneaks into the square to check the garage.
She opens the door of the garage, but is too noisy and generates an alert token allowing the German sentries to search for her. On the positive side, though, she confirms that the officer is not in the garage.
Meanwhile, over by the resin church, the partisan sergeant and his compagno prepare to take out a German sentry.
The sergeant sneaks up on him and silently takes him out.
He then enters the church and apprehends the German officer.
And the hustles him into captivity, with his fellow partisans providing cover.
The team that captured the officer managed to make some noise, and the German sentries started toward them. The partisan hero, having previously shed the alert token that she'd earned earlier, now took action to distract the guards. She played her distraction card, and opened up on the guards. This naturally attracted a lot of attention to her, but had the advantage of removing the token from the partisan sergeant and his prisoner. She was also pretty effective with her Schmeisser, taking out one of the three German sentries.
But the alarm was definitely raised, and the German hauptmann dashed onto the board. He mercilessly gunned down the heroic partisan! But her distraction was enough, and the other partisans escaped with their prisoner.
All in all, it was a good, fun, suspenseful game. It gave a very cinematic result as the partisans snuck around trying to avoid the sentries. Meanwhile, Gord was frustrated as my dice rolling worked out to my advantage. Even though I had many partisans running around the town, I was lucky and barely rolled any noise results, and was able to cancel out the few that did come up. I can see that it would be great for solo gaming, as the guards/sentries are mostly on auto-pilot until the alarm is raised, and even then they still need to locate the partisans.
The game does require lots of markers on the board, which is an aesthetic thing that I'd prefer to avoid, but that is offset by the relatively small number of figures on the board. I'll be ready to try the game again.
I am getting into Italian partisan music - will be looking at building a soundtrack for my next game!
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