I was introduced to Blitzkrieg Commander (BKC to it's friends!) in 2004 by Owen Bell, a fellow club member, and loved it straight away. Sadly, Owen is no longer with us, but he and I had some great games. In the time since then I have come to know some excellent people through the BKC forum, foremost amongst them Nik Harwood (a.k.a 'Tank-bane' - he is very good at getting his armour destroyed...), Keith Flint and Steve Johnson.

My theatre of choice is late war Eastern Front. This is due to several factors: 1) everybody else playing BKC at our club had North West Europe covered, and we needed a Russian player, 2) I have a Russian wife and 3) late war models were the most readily available. If time, money and opponents allow, I'd like to cover the entire Eastern front as some point.

My current battle groups are based on the excellent Micromark lists, and research from other sources. I originally aimed at doing 4000 points for each side (German, Soviet), but have now moved to focusing more on using historical OOBs rather than points.

Pictures of the Germans are here (armour, infantry or artillery) , and Russians are here (armour, infantry or artillery).

Suggested House Rules/ Rule Tweaks

Recce

Currently the Recce rules limit recce actions against the closest enemy unit, which some of the time is not a problem. However, if there is a line of enemy units that are close to each other and of similar distance to the recce unit, the recce unit can only carry out recce actions against these units by moving along the line, which reduces its effectiveness (see pic for clarification).

A couple of options:

1)     Once a recce unit has carried out a recce action on one enemy unit, in the next initiative phase it may attempt to do a recce action against another enemy unit that is with 5cm of the first one (see pic for clarification). Distance penalties for the recce roll are determined by the distance to the new enemy unit.

2)     A recce unit may nominate a target point within 60cm (i.e. normal recce distance) and if the roll is successful, all units at least half under a 10cm diameter circle are located. The diameter is arbitrary, but 10cm seemed reasonable.

The second option is especially usefully if units are not currently on the board – using mapped positions for example.

They could both be used during a game if necessary.

Auto-Suppression

Units that suffer one or hits (after saves are made) become suppressed when hit by off-board artillery, and all on-board indirect fire (mortars, infantry guns, on-board artillery).