If you’re a wounded British paratrooper bravely battling to keep the Germans from crossing a railway line in THC’s first play-by-comment CM game, the scene above is the very last thing you want to see in front of you. In Turn 8 the players make progress at the embankment, but that progress comes at a price.

“And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake. And the seven angels with the seven trumpets prepared to sound them.” (from the Book of Revelation). In Turn 7 our pair of Granatwerfer 36s shake, shred, and suppress, and seven startled magpies presage disaster for a speeding Sonderkraftfahrzeug.

I’m torn between permanently relaxing the “one unit per Comment Commander” rule and accepting its inevitable (?) consequence – a few untasked German units each turn – as accidental realism… a de facto activation system. The fact that the Panzer 35(t) and one of the newly arrived halftracks spent Turn 6 doing sweet Fanny Adams doesn’t seem completely inappropriate when you’re simming a battle as fragmented and multi-directional as this one.