Screaming GIs II

WWII Rules

Review By Bill Rutherford

pub. by Sword and Palette

This spiral-bound set of WW II rules is 57 pages long, including 16 pages of charts, 8 of templates, a cartoon, and 32 pages of rules. Game scales are 1:1 for figures, 10-15 minutes per turn, and the ground scale is somewhere between a very short distance and 25 yards per tabletop inch. SGI is usable with any scale of figures although game charts are provided for 20mm and 25mm figures.

The focus of SGI is first and foremost, to have a quick game with no (rules) complications. It uses an interactive sequential play sequence; players dice for initiative each turn and alternate partial moves and combats. Movement is normal, i.e., has standard rates penalized for various types of obstacles. Indirect fire uses range estimation, with additional drift to determine impact location. Some people like this but I don’t because I’ve never been able to accurately estimate range! Once arrived, artillery places a template over the target area and casualties are determined. Much in the rules was included because of the “feel” they lend to the game, e.g., mortars fire twice in a turn to reflect their agility relative to other indirect fire weapons - that sort of thing. There are four pages of aircraft rules which, the authors admit, they rarely use in a game of this scale.

Spotting and direct fire (vehicle and infantry) are both range-dependent and probabilistic with situational modifiers - good! Melee is dice-based and both sides can be hurt. Whenever something bad happens to a troop or vehicle, dice are cast against the troop (1 page) or vehicle (10 pages with several vehicle types) damage charts, depending upon who was hit. The infantry chart, for example, has 100 cells, each with a combat result, the whole ranging from “no effect” to “Dead” with all sorts of temporary penalties, e.g., “2 turns to bandage wound” in between. They are all accompanied by flavor text. The vehicle hit charts have the net result of making vehicles not want to be hit but read like extended critical hit charts… Armor and gun size are not accounted for beyond a simple modifier to the AFT hit charts.

The general gist of these rules are that they’re a “Hey - let’s push some troops around and play!” sort of rules set. Morale and command control are not accounted for but small arms ammunition and interplayer communications are. If two players aren’t within (on-table) a certain distance of one another and haven’t radios they simply may not talk… Vehicle details (of pretty much any sort) are not accounted for but spotting is probabilistic and the game includes air-to-air combat rules…

Played from the point of view that a player controls, at most, a handful (literally) of figures and the objective is some rules-unintensive shoot-em-up (no morale necessary; players NEVER surrender!), a good game can be had with SGI. The basic mechanics are simple enough that one could teach these to a tablefull of new players in only a few minutes, which is a good thing; Screaming GIs II has a niche, I think, as an introductory set of skirmish rules…

Available from your local game shop for $25 or, failing that, directly from the Sword and Palette, c/o Terry Matheny, 4739 Cypress Ave., Carmichael, CA 95608.

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