Most wargaming games revolve around three things that are present in virtually every title: measuring distances, rolling dice, and alternating players along clearly predetermined turns. In WWII Crossfire, only the dice rolling applies! It may sound novel and innovative, but now comes the second bombshell. The game was released back in 1996, so this innovative approach is from the last century!
The creator of the rules, Arty Conliffe, thought it was more important to "play by feel" using logical historical approaches than using artificial boundaries that don't match reality. A soldier running from cover to cover isn't going to stop an inch from a trench because his movement just failed, and the enemy machine gunner isn't going to just watch and wait his turn to open fire either.
Now surely someone has thought that this can't possibly work, because it must either be complete anarchy gameplay-wise, or the game is completely drowned in rules to compensate for the lack of rounds and gauges. And strangely, neither is true - Crossfire still has a clear understanding of how activations work, and strangely enough it's not drowning in rules, and it's the kind of game that's fine to play after reading the rules with just a reference sheet.
In practice, players take turns holding the initiative. Whoever has the initiative can do whatever they want in any order. So you can move troops, shoot them, call in artillery, raise them for morale. You can take it as far and wide as you like. There's a catch, though. Once you mess up an action or get interrupted by an enemy (successful) shot, the initiative passes to your opponent.
These are small things, but it really switches one's thought processes when playing. You're not thinking in terms of "this round I'm going to get to the corner of a building, next round I'm going to sacrifice shooting to run across the road with a unit, and it's great that the move works out by an inch so that even for one activation I can get into the building so my opponent won't shoot at me at all in his turn". But instead you're addressing the fact that "I need to get this squad across that fucking unprotected road, but it's still guarded by an enemy machine gunner who I just can't get to engage and the mortar can't see there, well what the hell am I supposed to do about it?!"
The basic unit in Crossfire is an infantry squad with a light machine gun (so something like 6 to 15 soldiers depending on nationality and period of war), represented (on a smaller scale) by a single base with figures. These squads in theory can act independently (but under the supervision of a lieutenant), but in practice they are activated as part of an entire platoon, which is the true "cornerstone" of Crossfire (for comparison, in the previously reviewed Bolt Action, for example, the platoon is practically an entire army).
The platoons are then grouped together under a company ( which doesn't play a role in activations anymore, but its commander still gives morale bonuses to "his platoons" and the company also allocates any support weapons like heavy machine guns or artillery) and if you have enough soldiers to play with, the companies are further grouped into a battalion, which is the "final station" in Crossfire.
So there are about a hundred to easily half a thousand soldiers on the table. The game is therefore more in concept for smaller scales such as 6mm or 15mm, and is also very popular in both 20mm and even 28mm. Since there is no fixed remeasuring of distances, the game works regardless of the size of the figures.
But some players have taken the game down a level of organization in 28mm, where the basic unit is not an infantry squad but a fire team of three soldiers, only then grouped into an infantry squad with a machine gun, commanded by a sergeant instead of a lieutenant. The game then works exactly identically, only the commander activates with a squad instead of a platoon, and the experience is more similar to the aforementioned Bolt Action.
Even the shooting and dice throwing itself is very minimalistic and not full handfuls of dice, as one is used to in most skirmish games or from Warhammer 40,000, where some armies take it to absurd extremes, when, for example, one shot is scored with fifty dice.
In Crossfire, machine guns are fired with four dice (the game uses the classic D6) and everything else uses three dice to fire (except, of course, for artillery, mortars, and the like). That's how simple it is. To hit, you roll a five or six on the dice and one hit makes a pin (the pinned squad stops in place), two hits suppress (the squad can't shoot in addition to not moving), and eventually the third hit finally kills the squad and takes it out of the game.
The cover takes one die off the shooting, and if you don't want to lose initiative (or just want to steal it from your opponent), you must at least suppress the enemy squad while shooting. Simple math will tell you that the chances of one infantry squad using two dice to shoot an opponent in a building are not very great.
This is where command and control mechanics come in, where commanders not only add a morale bonus to soldiers, but also allow them to combine joint fire (thus eliminating the chance of "missing" and consequent loss of initiative), but also the ability to attach a heavy machine gun to the fire.
But this is where the organizational difficulties come in, that the commander has to control both his own soldiers and the view of the target, as well as having a machine gun nearby. And it's not as much fun as it might seem to move troops in front of a dug-in enemy who is firing back..
The other interesting thing about shooting is that all weapons have unlimited range, so in theory you can shoot from one end of the game table to the other. This works in practice too, and it makes the game very, very terrain-intensive and therefore slightly limiting for potential newcomers, as you really need a table full of terrain to block your views.
This prevents those comical situations where the rifle doesn't go from one end of the warehouse to the other because it only shoots 24" and this particular building is 25". Therefore, the most useful weapon in the game is not tanks or machine guns, but a stealthy mortar or artillery guide that can bring a smokescreen to the right spot to block the view of enemy shooters.
But let's not just talk about the positives, there are also negatives. One of them is the fact that Crossfire has objectively really simplistic "shallow" rules for tanks, which are really unsatisfying compared to the rest of the game. Tanks have stats for cannon strength and armor, and when they fire they roll one die to hit and when they hit they roll a second die for penetration (which is versus the tank's armor, affected by the cannon's penetration bonus) and when you roll over the armor, boom, the tank explodes. Done.
I mean, tanks explode incredibly, and deploying them is all about chance if your opponent can roll a 4+ twice in a row. The developers explain this (as with Bolt Action, for example) by saying that tanks are just an add-on for variety, but the core game is about infantry. Which is up to everyone whether or not they accept that explanation.
People are equally divided on the "genericness" or lack of national rules and differences in weapons. An infantry squad shoots using three dice and it doesn't matter if they are British with an Bren, Germans with an MG42 or Americans completely equipped with semi-automatic rifles. They have the same rules for shooting. And in general special rules for nationalities are scarce - Japanese or Russians ignore pins when running at close range, Germans have better NCOs who can command a squad without a lieutenant, etc.
This design intent was justified by the fact that unlike skirmish games with a few dozen soldiers, where the difference is whether an MG42 or a bren is shooting out the window, in Crossfire, where you command a company (or even a complete battalion) it is relatively unimportant, whether a particular weapon has a slightly higher cadence than the opponent's weapon, because at this scale of combat these details are irrelevant and it's more important to deal with the movement of larger formations than whether the German machine gun has an extra die.
Of course, the advantage of this approach is that the rules can be applied without the slightest problem to other twentieth century conflicts than just WWII, and people very often apply it to WWI. I personally tried playing a wargame from the decolonization of Africa in Crossfire, and the game worked just as well as it did in WWII, without having to introduce any of house rules.
The rulebook itself is not exempt from criticism, and the ravages of time are really showing. Forget modern rulebooks full of colourful pictures, diagrams, explanatory tables and highlights. Crossfire is an old-school rulebook that looks more like a script or technical manual than a friendly book that invites you to read it. But that also makes them clearly written like a manual, with no digressions and clearly structured "technical" English. But oddly enough, it reads really well once one gets over the initial aversion to the visuals.
To me, it's absolutely incredible that even almost thirty years after its release, Crossfire has a vibrant and large online community that even some more modern or popular games might envy, and which is still creating new scenarios, fan expansions, balancing fan FAQs and the like. This also says a lot about its undeniable qualities.
Even after all these years, Crossfire is still an interesting game that still has a lot to offer today. But there's a bit of a problem with who to actually recommend it to today. Because in theory it's a game that's suitable for all players, but at the same time it's definitely not for everyone. It can be difficult for newcomers to grasp a lot of "abstract" concepts and wargaming basics that the rules kind of ignore, knowing that everyone probably knows them.
Instead of the introductory explanation of "this is how models move and this is how dice are eventually rolled" that is included in the first pages of most rules nowadays for the sake of newcomers to the hobby, it just pours in the rules for various mechanics. For newcomers, it's also limiting that the game is relatively model-intensive, especially the terrain, which you really, really need a lot of because of the unlimited range mechanics.
For experienced players, it can be a problem to get into the game at all through the rules themselves, because nowadays when someone is used to beautiful and colourful rulebooks, it takes a bit of persuasion to start reading black and white blocks of text. Moreover, the rules break already rooted and learned practices (that everything has maximum range and movement) and it takes effort to switch from this mind-set.
I admit that even I had to force myself to read a little bit and the only thing that helped me to do so was the online community of the game, which is still playing it years later and praising it on the internet and I was wondering what everyone still sees in it and if it is really worth it. But once you get past that, Crossfire offers a fresh gaming experience full of interesting moments that has incredible tactical depth without a plethora of special rules and without throwing a bunch of dice. That's what the game excels at, even after all these years. The player doesn't feel like they're playing a "Rule X war game", but really playing World War II, where the rules are just an add-on.
Verdict:
Crossfire provides an absolutely amazing gaming experience, where as players you are not sensually playing the game according to some artificial mechanics, but rather you are actually commanding soldiers on the battlefield, where the game rules serve as an aid to evaluation rather than the backbone of the game. The game still feels gameplay-wise fresh and innovative these days, which is really remarkable for rules that are more than a quarter of a century old.
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Originally published in Czech on the ZeStolu portal. Unless otherwise stated, images taken from my Hobby Instagram page @Potan_CZ.
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