Assault: Red Horizon Revised Edition - What's New?
Transcript
Hi, pretty. I'm ZillaBlitz and welcome. Today, we're going to take a look at Assault Red Horizon 41, the revised edition from Sound of Drums. We're going to take a look at the components, talk about what makes this game play interesting, then we're going to do a comparison between the old version, the prior version, and this new revised version to see what is different. And then lastly, I'm going to talk a little bit about who this game is for. So, got Assault Red Horizon 41 spread out in front of us here. This is a big game. We'll talk about that in a minute. One quick caveat though before we start, this is a sample version of the game. It's fairly close to the final version, but there are some differences and I'll point out those things where it makes sense to highlight them. Now, at its heart, what is this? Well, this is World War II tactical combat on the East Front set in 1941. So, Germans versus Russians. And as you can see by what's in front of me here, this is a big game.
I mean, we have tons of cards over here. And we'll we'll talk about those and dig deeper into that. Nine double-sided map boards that we're looking at that are interchangeable to create all sorts of different scenarios and design your own scenarios as well. And then 13 counter sheets as we can see on the right-hand side. So, there is a ton of stuff in here and that does start to lead us into the idea that, you know, the game comes with scenarios and a campaign, but you this is really built very well for build your own scenarios too. And we'll we'll talk about some of the formation cards and how those work as we get into that. So, lots of fun things to talk about in this video. Big picture though, what what type of game play do we have? Well, this is a game that's probably one to three hours in length. Scenarios can be small or large. So, smaller scenario is probably an hour to play and then the larger longer scenarios, of course, maybe three hours or perhaps even more.
Now, the other element about this game we'll talk about is there is a campaign, which is a bunch of linked dynamic scenarios where the outcome in one battle determines which scenario you go to in the next battle. Casualties matter and all those things. So, that of course is a much longer experience than 3 hours. That's, you know, I think it can be as many as eight to 10 battles in that campaign, that dynamic campaign, which is going to tell a huge story. So, there's that level of gameplay as well. Historically, uh you know, one of these engagements, it's very tactical, so probably a half an hour to an hour is the historical length of a game. Turn length probably represents just several minutes of of time. Unit scale in this, uh each counter is an individual squad or an individual vehicle. So, that's the level that we're looking at of gameplay here. If I were to give this game a complexity rating, and that's very important I think to talk about with a tactical level game, I would say this is a six out of 10. So, it falls in that mid-range, a little bit higher probably than the central point of complexity for a tactical combat system. Now, this is a a two-player game. There it's pretty easy to add in players, so you could make it a three-player or four-player game, you know, where you divide up the who's in charge of what parts of your sides. And it's also, I would add that it's very amenable to solitaire. So, I would say a seven out of 10 on the solitaire scale. You'd be be playing both sides. There's no bot for solitaire or anything like that. But, it's a very friendly system for playing two-handed solo. Before we jump in and talk a little bit more about gameplay, I think it's important to set this game in the historical context of the series, too.
So, Assault Red Horizon 41 was originally published by Assault Games a few years ago. It was their first edition in this type of this Assault system of tactical combat. Since then, they started working with Sound of Drums and they produced Assault Sicily 43, and then an expansion for that. So, that's West Front Italy. We have Italy Italian forces, German forces, uh US forces, and then British forces if you add in the expansion. That's a big module as well, and it's important to note that in the final version of the game, the maps will all be interchangeable. So, you can take maps from Assault Sicily 43, combine them with maps for Red Horizon, design your own scenarios, and it's really designing itself, lending itself more towards a system of gameplay rather than individual games, as well. So, there's that to look forward to. Then, what happened after Assault Sicily '43 was published, that A Sound of Drums and Assault Games decided to redo Assault Red Horizon '41 so that it was compatible with the the previous version, and update the rules and the counters and the artwork basically to have it come in line with Assault Sicily '43. So, that's the incentive here behind this game is that it makes all of the pieces interchangeable, and it brings the gameplay and the rule set to the same level. It's also important to note, there is more work in the future for this series, too. There is a Normandy module underway in development, so this series is very much vibrant and alive, and where you we have a lot of future development to look forward to. I I I know I've had some interactions with uh one of the two designers of the game,
and I think he might be one of the hardest working people on the face of the planet Earth. So, there is a lot of good things to look forward to in the future that's forthcoming with this series, as well. So, two modules out now, and then a third in development. So, I've set up one of the free-standing scenarios in Assault Red Horizon '41 just to show a little bit better what I mean when I'm going to start to talk now a little bit about what are the things that I like with this game and with this series. So, there are five things overall, and let's start out with number one. First up, this is a mid-level complexity tactical combat system, which I think brings a lot of advantages to tactical combat games. You know, on one end of the on one end of the spectrum, we have things like Advanced Squad Leader, which is very detailed simulation, fantastic, absolutely amazing series of games, you know, more up on that 10 out of 10 complexity. It's a real investment to learn and to learn how to play and play well. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we have things that are more games about tactical combat, things like Memoir '44, Heroes of Normandy, that are designed to be fast-playing, easy to learn, also tremendous fun, but they drift from that simulation type of experience. This is very much in the mid-range of that. So, I'm you know, giving this a six out of 10 on complexity. It's got a little bit of learning heft to it, but it tries to balance both gameplay and simulation aspects to give you the best of both worlds. And how does it do that? Well, I think there's a couple of ways that this
system in particular really emphasizes hitting that mid-range of complexity and mid-range of tactical level engagement. Item number one, stacking. So, we're looking here at the German forces on the west side of the map, and they're going to be defending against the Soviet attack coming in from the east. There's an infantry formation over here approaching this village that is a little bit down to their southeast. And you'll notice that stacking is one unit per hex. And what this does, it makes the game very visually easy to parse. You don't have to go through stacks of units to be able to figure out what's going on. So, this obviously is a compromise between simulation and gameplay to make the game state flow fast and make it easy to see just at a glance what's is going on on the board state at any point in time. Now, there is a little bit of an exception here in that we're looking at the Russian forces that are coming in now from the eastern edge of the map here.
Infantry units can ride on tanks, and there are trucks in the game, too. So, if a unit is being transported, you're going to have two units in any one hex, but that's really a maximum in this case. So, again, very visually easy to parse, easy to look at, easy to digest and consume what's going on on the board state. The second element of tactical combat in this game that makes it a little bit more elegant, a little bit more streamlined than some other systems is what I would call mathless combat. So, the game comes with this bucket of dice, and the dice have different strength. You know, red is the strongest die that you're going to be using that can be doing the most damage. And in any given combat encounter, you're looking at the modifiers. You're going to be adding dice to your dice rolls. You're going to be changing the level of the dice. And you end up with a certain composition of dice that you're going to then throw, and you're going to determine how much damage you do to the opponent. And so this this mathless combat system, you're constantly saying, "Oh, okay. This adds a red die to the combat. This pulls away a die." And when you're left with it, there is just a very easy roll, and you get how many hits you get, and that's how much damage you do on an opponent. So, it's a very streamlined and elegant system that doesn't really involve crunching numbers at all. Now, the caveat here is that this is the part of the game that I found took me the longest to learn to get really fluent at, to if to use a word like that. Meaning that there are a lot of die roll modifiers, and it takes a while to learn which ones you only have to glance at that only happen fairly rarely, and other ones that you're looking at quite often. So, that's really where I felt like one of the learning curves was with this game was understanding all the die roll
modifiers and getting fast at them so that you could execute combat quickly. Once you get there, the system is very very fluid. The second thing that I like about the assault system is the card-based informational systems. So, if we look at this armored car unit here, the BA-10 unit, there's really only three things on it, right? It's got the the nationality, Russian. It's got the facing this way here. And then it's got BA-10. That's the name of the type of the unit. So, when you look at the map board again from a tactical standpoint, it almost has like a miniature feel to it cuz there's not a lot of math, a lot of numbers, a lot of figures on the units. It's still a very visually popping type of game state. Instead, all the information for the unit sits on these unit cards. So, here we can see the unit card for the BA-10. You know, we've got the armor values. We've got that the overall the value of the unit.
And then here is how you work on range against hard targets and soft targets. What type of dice you're going to be adding to your attack based on the range there. It's a very easy system to use and all the information is right there at your fingertips instead of having it cluttered on the game board. Now, in any given scenario, there's probably less than 20 of these cards that are in play. So, it might sound like there's a lot of looking around, but it gets it works really well. It's really fast, a very elegant system, and I really like how it leaves the game board itself very uncluttered. The third thing I like about the assault system is its replayability, and I want to talk about where that comes from. The replayability in the assault series, in addition to being able to replay the scenarios and the campaigns and the branching campaign, which can go in a lot of different directions, we've also got formation cards. And formation cards means that literally almost any scenario you can play in the game is going to have a number of different varieties of gameplay. You'll notice here, so for example, we've got This is a heavy support section from the 86th Rifle Division here.
Every any given scenario is going to tell you that you're going to be able to take, for example, so many infantry formations, so many tank formations, so many artillery formations. And then we have an entire deck here of cards that have all the formations in them. So, you might have a scenario, for example, that says add two Soviet infantry sections. And there's three different ways you can incorporate these. You can take one randomly, you can have players pick the one they want, you can have the players pick two and then choose one from those to put into the game. And all of these formations are subtly different. So, we got a rifle platoon here. This one here, we've got a motorized rifle platoon. And the composition of these formations is different depending upon what type of formation it is. And then also down the bottom, we have different experience levels. So, each one of these formation cards presents a different composition of unit forces that are roughly the same strength, which means that when you come into a scenario, you know, you play a scenario once, you may have two infantry formations in it that are completely different from the next time you play it. And so you're forced to solve different problems, use different units, use your different strengths. You might have a very experienced small unit in one scenario and a larger raw unit in the next scenario, which means the ultimate result, getting back to the point at hand, the game creates infinite replayability through the use of these formation cards. No scenario is is exactly the same every time you play it.
There's a great variety of things and throws a lot of different tactical problems at you that are fun to solve. The fourth thing that I like about the Assault system is that it's just visually gorgeous. And we talked about how all the numbers are off the game board map. It takes gives the game state a certain miniatures type of look to it where you just don't have a lot of math cluttering up the landscape. So really you end up with these visually beautiful landscape scenes where you've got, you know, here we've got an infantry formation sweeping across this town. And you can see it's not cluttered up with numbers or digits. It's just the units and the landscape. It feels like tactical combat and the artwork especially on this Sound of Drums version is visually really popping. The cards look great. The map looks great. The unit looks great. So the visual appeal here I think really helps pull you into that tactical situation and bring the game alive. The last thing that I like about the Assault system is that these modules come with that dynamic campaign. Now this sample version didn't have the scenario book in it, so I'm going to show some digital pictures of that. But the campaign is branching. What happens in one campaign what happens in one scenario impacts which scenario you go to in the next one and what kind of casualties you had, how do they carry over, the experience that the units gain. So you've got this branching campaign that just allows you to go on this hours and hours long journey with the system. And the other element of this of course which brings
to the last thing is that this campaign system, the formation of value, that the nature of tactical combat in itself, this is another series that just spawns great stories. So, when you play one of these scenarios, you're left at the end with, you know, acts of heroism, acts of cowardice, failure, success, tragedy, epic success. It just tells a great story as you're playing through these. And then when you fold in the campaign level on top of that, you really got something that I think is special. You know, every campaign's going to play out differently, experience levels change, the you know, the way things carry over from scenario to scenario. So, a big plus for me is the that campaign system, and that really spawns off into a a second side note, which is the stories that this game tells.
So, wanted to take a few minutes and just compare the old Red Horizon 41 with the new Red Horizon 41 for people who might have the old version and wondering, should I upgrade? And there is on their crowdfunding campaign page, there is a discount available to people that are upgrading from the prior version. So, there is some consideration given to people that would be buying this for a second time. But, what I've got here on the left is the original map from the original Red Horizon, same map 8A 4B, and then map 4B from the Sound of Drums version. And you can see you can see the difference. I mean, this is just visually really striking. This is fine, very functional, this works, but this is really taking it to a different level. The only thing I will say is I do notice in low light that these maps, the new maps, are a little bit dark. And again, this is a sample version, so it's very likely that there'll be some tweaks made to the final printing. But, in terms of visual appeal, you know, this is a 9 out of 10, I think it's more like a, you know, a 5 or 6 out of 10. Just you It's really hard to compare the two with such striking differences here.
Here's another look. This is map 8 from the original version, map 8 from the second version. So much more detail in the graphics here. Just as you look closely at some of the landscape here. It just really again has that almost like a miniature's true landscape type of feel to it. And again, this is functional and it fine, but yeah, this is it's really hard to compare it to the to the new version. So, a big upgrade in terms of visual quality of the maps. Here's a look at the counter art, the beige colored here Soviet infantry, the white the German units here. Again, different art style. We've got more a little bit more of a Soviet representative background here for all of the Soviet units and then the gray for the for the German units here. Visually, I like it I mean they're using the same silhouettes in both systems, which actually I think were perfectly fine in the first system, too. But I just really like how the gray and the the Soviet colors here sit better on the map, again giving that a tactical feel.
The white is a little bit more jarring on the visual landscape. So, this I think just overall looks better in terms of a counter set that works with the map and works with the feel of the game. Here's a look at the cards. Old version on the left, a new version on the right. So, you can see Panzer 2F. Just the clarity of the design. I think this is just much more professional-looking than this original one. I mean this looks fine, too. These you know, the the original game looked good. There was there wasn't any problems. It just is this really takes it I think to another level and just informationally, I find this a lot easier to parse the way they've got the information presented, especially for the ranges here, too. And so, this again showing a difference here between the new version and the old version. Here's T-34/76B tank from the new version, old version, new version in the old version here. So, again just gradual I think these are probably less striking than the map in particular, but still another upgrade here in terms of what you're seeing and what you're getting. The assault system keeps evolving and so in this new version, this is rulebook version 2.5, whereas Red Horizon 41 has the original version 1.0 rulebook. And you know, the layout, the graphic design here just a lot sharper on this new version. And then there's been a lot of work done on rules clarifications, rules aids, help with the different parts of the game. So, just a big improvement I think in the rule set as the whole on the whole as this system continues to evolve. Player aids, can't even compare. This is the old version. I mean, simple very thin cardstock, relatively fun, you know, basic player aids here. And then with the new version
we've got three These are heavy card heavy cardstock, really thick, which are really nice, visually just much better and so much more comprehensive and helpful to play. This one in particular here, the ranged fire aid with all the die roll modifiers, it just makes it so much easier to go through the process of of working out how the dice are changing as the combat are working. So, huge improvement in both player aid quality in terms of the component the contents of the player aids and then just the physical quality too, where this is a much heavier, more durable cardstock than the original ones. The game turn tracker, the troop losses and the troop status marker too is a big difference here. This is all a recessed board, it makes easy to track the different game states. Very, very easy in the new version. The smoke ones look like smoke. They were just basic circles in the other version and the heart ones here for hits look like you know, they just they were basic circles before. So, this is a big upgrade now over the first version with this the tracking systems in the game as well. Lastly, we compare just the box art. You can see again the overall visual pop for the new version is quite a bit better than the visual pop on the on the prior version. I mean, that the visual the clarity was good here. I really liked the the original version here and how it looked and everything, but this the Sound of Drums version here just takes it to a whole new level and I think the box art here is a is a great example of how the artwork in general has leveled up with the new version. So, we have taken a look at some of the features of this Assault System in Assault Red Horizon 41, this new version in particular. And I thought with that I'd offer up some thoughts on who I
think this this is for. If you obviously if you've played the original version of you played Assault Sicily 43 and you like the system and you like the gameplay, this kind of a no-brainer. It's got more, you can combine the systems together. You get more maps, more you've got more gameplay and other campaigns. So, if you enjoyed Sicily 43, this would be obviously a one that you would probably want to pick up. If you've already got the original version too, be sure to take advantage of the discounted price as a prior owner of Red Horizon to be able to get this new version. The other thing if you're you know if you're a fan of tactical combat combat systems in general, this is a good one to explore. It's a solid tactical combat system. I really like the gameplay. So, I think from just fans of tactical combat systems, this is a good one to pick up. If you are a person who has played Advanced Squad Leader perhaps or Lock 'n Load Tactical and maybe you bounced off those systems because you found them a little bit too complex for your tastes, this might be a good one to explore as it is a level down from complexity from those two other systems. Likewise, if you're at the other end of the spectrum, maybe you've played the Undaunted games, maybe you've played Memoir '44, maybe you've played Heroes of Normandy and you're looking for something a little bit more like a simulation, a little bit meteor, a lot something a little bit that enforces actual tactical combat, you know, factors and and strategies a little bit more, then this game might be something for you to dig in and to expand out into.
Also, if you are a fan of games that have dynamic campaigns, you know, where what happens in one scenario is going to carry over and influence the next, a branching campaign, your characters, your forces get experience, those types of gameplay experiences are rather rare I think in tactical combat systems. I mean, Advanced Squad Leader has some campaigns of course too, but that's you know a different beast than this. This is another one that another reason why you might like this one as well. The last thing I'd say is that it's nice to see this series getting substantial more progression, right? We've got a Normandy module coming out after this. So, sometimes you you say when you learn a tactical system, it'd be nice to learn the system so that you can apply it to more than one game. So, you multiply the benefits of learning the system. So, it's encouraging to see this one get continued support, continued development, and know that there is future there are future modules on the way, as well as seeing the rules evolve and continue to get better, continue to get clarified. It's nice when a tactical combat system has that level of uh effort put in it on the development end so that you know you're getting a supported product rather than a one-off game that that could be the the end of the line after you play it. So, if all of those things or any of those things appeal to you, this might be a game you would want to check out. I'll put a link to the pledge manager for this game has just opened up this week. So, the campaign crowdfunding campaign is done, but the pledge manager is open. I'll put a link to that down below. If you have enjoyed this video, but you're like, I really like to get a better sense of gameplay, put a link up here to a multi-part uh scenario campaign that I did with Assault Sicily 43's prototype.
So, the gameplay's a little different, right? The system has evolved, some of the rules have changed, and the graphic look, of course, is not quite what the standards are in this one because it was a prototype more in line with the old version of Red Horizon than the new Assault Sicily 43. But, it shows you what the gameplay is like. So, I'll put a link to the first episode in that series up there if you'd like to check that out. Thanks for watching, everybody. Have a great day.