BKC Hints & Tips?

[Leon]

As BKC has been around for while and has been played by a lot of people, I'm thinking it might be nice to include a small section with tips for beginners, from the more experienced players? 

Not so much game tactics and ways to outfox the enemy, but more like little tips that made it easier to play, such as how you've tracked your hits or marked suppression, how you've represented Off-Table assets, labelling for CO vs HQ stands, tips when assembling battlegroups, etc?  Anything like that really.

Let me know anything you've done in your games that you think might be useful to anyone new to the rules, and we'll include some of them in the new version.

[Steve J]

Off the top of my head:

I use small die (6-7mm) to represent hits (white), supressed (red) and opportunity fire (blue).

Transparent templates (I made mine from some plastic at work) for artillery barrages and concentrations with the centre marked make it very easy to see what units are hit or not.

A template with 45 degree angles to show the field of fire for units with a restricted firing arc.

For the first games, start small, so maybe just a battalion per side on a small table (2'x2' or 3'x3') with minimal terrain and no off-board artillery, aircraft or tanks. A simple encounter battle has worked well in the past. As the players become more familiar with the rules, then add in some tanks, artillery, dug-in units etc.

The Battlegroup generator on the forum is very useful as it gives you everything you need once you've selected your force. The free version is perfect for small games as IIRC it goes up to 2,000 points.

I don't represent off-board assets at all, other than aircraft if and when they appear just because they look cool.

In the past, Pete Jones had some guide Battalion starting forces on the Commander website, similar to those in the original BKC, that might prove useful to new players. Personally I tend to use historical OOBs as a guide for my forces, then tack on the points from BKCII to try and get the balance right depending upon the scenario being played. Naturally experience helps with this.

Hope this helps? If I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

[fred.]

Things that are really needed for the first few games:
A good number (10-20) of  d6 for command rolls, and combat resolution
A metal tape measure, you often want to measure out to a metre or more
A lot of small dice (6-7mm) to record hits on units. I like to use a different colour for each side, this helps ID where the dice have come from if not moved with the unit.
Suppression makers, we have used each of blood splats, resin craters or acrylic explosion tokens at different times
Printouts of each player's army list. The ones from the app on the website are best as they just give you the stats of the stuff you have on the table so save a lot of time looking through the list. Trying to use the army lists at the back of the book during a game becomes annoying and slow.


As Steve says keep the first couple of games small and simple, I'd stick to infantry with a couple of tanks to start with. It might be worth having some starter scenarios that give some simple forces and a setup. These can then introduce new stuff like recce, air, arty over a few quick games.

[petercooman]

We left air, artillery and recce out for the first games, and still rarely use them (more because our free time is limited so we play smaller engagements.)

I also strongly suggest not starting off with tigers and churchills. Pz4's and shermans are our good enough to start with. Getting rid of the big ones without arty/air support can be troublesome.

[fred.]

Transparent templates (I made mine from some plastic at work) for artillery barrages and concentrations with the centre marked make it very easy to see what units are hit or not.

A template with 45 degree angles to show the field of fire for units with a restricted firing arc.

While these can be very useful during games, they aren't essential for your first few games. Its easy enough to measure out the templates with a tape measure. Its probably important to distinguish between stuff you need to play a game, and stuff that makes playing the game easier and smoother. We have found marking wounds and suppression is essential beyond that a lot of stuff is helpful, but not essential.

One thing you do need is a scatter dice of some type, either get a blank dice and draw arrows on each face, use a GW one, or at one of our group's house we use the bottle top spinner ( a beer bottle cap with an arrow drawn on it, which you can spin to get the scatter direction ).

Leon - you may want to think about putting together some packs of bits for BKC which would help new players get started easily. You already stock a bunch of stuff either under Pendraken or Mininbits. But having it all together in a single pack makes it much easier for someone just to grab the lot, either online or at a show.

A pack of
10-12 normal size d6
1 scatter dice
30 small d6 (in two colours)
20 MDF suppression markers
would be a good starter set, should be under £10 too

You could add other MDF tokens for opportunity fire or activated.

Or look at acrylic and you could do the markers and templates in this.

[ronan]

(...)
I use small die (6-7mm) to represent hits (white), supressed (red) and opportunity fire (blue).
(...)
For the first games, start small, so maybe just a battalion per side on a small table (2'x2' or 3'x3') with minimal terrain and no off-board artillery, aircraft or tanks. A simple encounter battle has worked well in the past.
(...)
I don't represent off-board assets at all, other than aircraft if and when they appear just because they look cool.
(...)

I could have write these lines above.

[Orcs]

If your doing a big game it can be useful to mrk units that have been ordered with a counter, like wise the HQ's when they have failed or you have finished with them.

Counters/ dice to mark opportunity fire and those that have used initiative
Scatter dice to record hits
I use a counter in front of the unit for suppression.

[Shedman]

What Steve J said

[Ithoriel]

Agree with most of what's already been said.

A "bag o' bits" sounds like a very good idea, though old hands will already have all this, and more, at a guess.

We insisted on models to represent off-board artillery so both sides remembered what was available ... but we're old fogeys with poor memori ... Ooh! Squirrel!!

Can't say we ever had a problem remembering which commands had already been used or which troops had already been given orders so never used markers for that.

One of the regulars had a pile of Pendraken surrendering Germans (GR115 Surrendering, hands on helmet), painted in either Field Grey or Khaki with a dark green helmet, which were used to represent suppression. As you may gather from this, we played entirely Eastern Front.

For ease of remembering Command values I punched out a disc of thick card with a standard hole punch. Glued it to the stand and painted the value on it so both sides can see at a glance the starting target number. Does mean I've done multiple command stands to accommodate the various options though.

[petercooman]

Maybe worth using plastic discs with dry erase markers. That way you can change the command values.

[Ithoriel]

Maybe worth using plastic discs with dry erase markers. That way you can change the command values.

Where's the fun in that?

[Lord Kermit of Birkenhead]

Use two differently coloured chips, or double sided ones to show suppressed - say red for first move and yellow for the move removed. Also markers for opportunity fire and initiative fire/movement. We also assign a die to HQ's which have been given a recce advantage, remove when used. Restricted arc of fire is no problem to me, as I use a square base.

IanS

[Orcs]

We insisted on models to represent off-board artillery so both sides remembered what was available

One of the regulars had a pile of Pendraken surrendering Germans (GR115 Surrendering, hands on helmet), painted in either Field Grey or Khaki with a dark green helmet, which were used to represent suppression.

These are good Ideas. Might have to adopt them

[nikharwood]

All good suggestions (natch)

Only thing I'd add is that I use larger dice (x2) for command rolls - keeps them separate & clear from all other hit/save rolls - in my dice collection that translates to some awesome WH40k / WFB limited *big* (I dunno, 18/20mm?) dice and hit/save at (I dunno, 12/16mm?) dice - and then dinky (technical term) dice as SteveJ says for stuff....

[Albie Bach]

To easily tell the difference between different Command stands, I use 25mm round stands with 2 figs to represent HQs with low CV, and 3 figs for the higher CV.
CO stand is a bigger rectangular/square stand with more figs/vehicle.
FACs and FAOs are on 20mm round bases.
Of course, these numbers can all be increased to suit your style.