Take That Hill

You command an infantry platoon of three sections and a Pl HQ. Your mission is to destroy an enemy section hastily dug in on the hill 500 metres away, as quickly as possible. The ground in front of your position is open and offers no cover from view or fire. To do this you must fire and manoeuvre your platoon into an assault position adjacent to the hill while keeping the enemy suppressed.

Take That Hill is a hex-and-counter wargame primer: a short, focused introduction to the genre. It features a simple IGO-UGO turn structure that introduces the core mechanics used across the majority of commercial wargames: alternating sides, action economy, dice-driven fire, line of fire, suppression, morale and rally.

The base game strips wargaming down to its essentials: four sections, one enemy, one hill, and sixteen turns to take it. Reach the hill inside the first ten turns and it's a clean victory; from turn eleven the best you can hope for is a draw.

Advanced rules layer in one-shot fire support (Rifle Platoon, GPMG, 81mm HE and Smoke), hidden Red defences (minefields, wire, depth positions and 120mm mortars), stacking hit-marker morale penalties, and pre-dawn low-light attacks where illumination becomes its own tactical decision.

The Paratrooper Raid is a full scenario expansion. You are dropped behind enemy lines on the eve of a major offensive, with one night to destroy the enemy's command-and-control node on a nearby hill. You come down in darkness with only your platoon commander on the board; the rest of the force is drawn from the drop zone over the turns that follow. Every turn you spend assembling is a turn the garrison grows stronger and dawn draws closer, and at turn eleven first light flips on for good and the darkness you were counting on is gone.

Get through the wire and the sentries, put your commander on the crest, and roll for the engineers' demolition: three attempts, each at better odds than the last. Then get out, because the raid is not over when the node is and turn sixteen does not end it. Every section has to make it back to the wood line.