FRONTLINE is a World War II combined arms combat game stressing infantry actions on a squad / platoon level. With experienced players this may even be extended up to company level. The main aim of the rules is to give a good representation of this type of warfare while still keeping the GAME playable, enjoyable, and fair for all sides. I stress that this is a game that tries to give you the feeling of what it was like to command troops on this level during the period of 1939 to 1945, because anyone that thinks they can create a exact historical simulation of this kind of warfare is even crazier than me!
FRONTLINE is not a “beer and pretzels” game World War II is a very complicated period to game in, especially at platoon / squad level. There are tens of thousands of situations that the units and players can get themselves into, there is no way to cover all the possibilities in a rule book. Players must be able to take what is in the rules and work out some of these situations themselves. Players who play fairly, and concentrate on having a good game not necessarily whether they win or lose will have the best and most satisfying time with FRONTLINE.
All the scales and measures used
in this rule system are approximations and not hard fast lines. Some fudging
must always take place to insure playibility, balance, and generally just to
make things fit!
Due to the complexity of warfare in the modern era many of the rules and procedures in this book may be seem difficult to understand or possibly incomplete. As you play successive games you will become familiar with the different sections, possibilities, modifiers, etc... so don’t worry if from one game to the next you’ve missed something or run a procedure wrong. Overall it will not matter, if during your first games you can not find something, or resolve something roll a die, odd their sighted, dead, broken, etc... even their not. Resolve the situation anyway you want and move on to the parts of the game you know and look up the unfamiliar section later. ( who knows you may have come up with a situation that I hadn’t thought of! )
GROUND SCALE:
The ground scale is 1 inch = 3 yards or 15 feet.
TIME SCALE:
One impulse = 15 seconds, one turn is four impulses, or one 1 minute. This is what movement rates, firing rates, and so on are based on. If your game lasts four turns or 16 impulses ( 4 minutes ) that means that in the game there was 16, fifteen second periods of action, but the battle might have been actually much longer ( 10 to 20 minutes ), with several minutes of inaction between each period, in which troops are not really doing anything that influences the battle.
GAME SCALE:
One figure represents one actual soldier, each vehicle represents one actual vehicle. Figures are armed with what the casting is cast with, unless otherwise shown on the units record sheet. The game has been designed around 20mm figures and vehicles in 1/72nd or 1/76th scale although 15mm figures and vehicles could be used with no changes needed. In the game we distorted the ranges and capabilities of the vehicles in order to get them on the board and be some what survivable with out having to play on the gymnasium floor!
TERRAIN SCALE:
The terrain in FRONTLINE, as well as the figures and vehicles in the game, are actually much larger than they should be in relationship to the ground scale. The scale in FRONTLINE is 1 real inch equals 15 feet in game scale. A 20mm figure is approximately 5/8 of an inch tall, and in the game’s ground scale the figure would be around 12' feet tall. Most of the terrain (buildings, roads, swimming pools,) in the game will be 20mm scale to visually match the figures. So when measuring across or through terrain we will ignore this fact and use our game ground scale.
UNIT
BREAKDOWN:
Figures are grouped into squads, squads into platoon, and platoons into companies. This should be done along historical TO&E for the time period and theater you are gaming in. Squads and weapons crews may be further broken down into " teams" for game control purposes. ( see infantry section “unit breakdowns” )
GAME TERMS:
In FRONTLINE you may come across terms that are unfamiliar or require
further explanation or definition. There is a separate section at the end of the
rule book that gives definitions of many of the terms and abbreviations in FRONTLINE.
EQUIPMENT NEEDED
To play a game of FRONTLINE you will need:
Troops at least one squad ( aprox 10 men ) per side.
A set of rules with game counters.
Two six sided dice ( D6 ) and two ten sided dice ( D10 ) of different colors.
A tape measure capable of measuring out in inches at least 8 feet.
A roll of thread to check line of sight (LOS).
There are several other pieces of equipment that will help and will be mentioned where appropriate.
FRONTLINE was written and developed with the idea to keep any necessary record keeping and notes down to a bare minimum! Unfortunately squad / platoon level combat in W.W.II is fairly complicated. This with the amount of detail that we have tried to include has made some record keeping necessary. FRONTLINE uses a couple of simple methods to do this without being burdensome to the game.