NCO: The Squad Based WW2 Tabletop Skirmish Game

NCO is an enjoyable and competitive ruleset for recreating WWII firefights between two opposing squads of soldiers on a tabletop surface. As with all WWII games, is closely based off the realities, situations, equipment, and men of the world-wide, historical conflict. However, unlike the typical WWII tabletop engagement, this game is played at the uniquely turbulent and violently intimate level of squad vs squad skirmishing. Many battles were won and lost at this very level of combat, and it is a great honor and pleasure to bring this ferocious contest of interpersonal war to the tabletop scale.

Squads were the smallest and most fundamental division of WWII soldiers. When peering through the crosshairs of his rifle, a man would be staring into the faces of other men from an enemy squad—not flags, not machines, and certainly not an ideology. Small groupings of humans personally shot at and killed other small groupings of humans in WWII. The statement seems obtuse, but maybe it is a gruesome truth that is far too understated—or overlooked altogether—as we reflect on the global conflict. Indeed, caught in this very manner of daily killing, thousands upon thousands of men lived and died for nearly a decade across the entire world. Typically numbering from anywhere between five to fifteen men, a squad was the individual soldier’s only hope for companionship and survival during the long days of fighting. And there, at the heart of every squad, was a Non-Commissioned Officer: abbreviated NCO.

Typically ranked as sergeants or the equivalent, NCOs were the last line of communication to the regular soldier before orders were executed. These men were thankless tacticians of the instantaneous. An order from the platoon’s lieutenant meant virtually nothing without the sergeant’s ability to put his peers into immediate, effective action, and then hold these men to the objective until it was accomplished. What should of happened on paper and what actually happened in the heat of battle was often a discrepancy solely rooted in the moment-to-moment command of the NCO. On any given day of the war, a dozen men could proficiently succeed, or efficiently and unceremoniously die, as a direct result of the orders given to them by their commanding sergeant.

In NCO the game, you are the sergeant of your squad. And your squad of men will live, or die, by your orders

(self-description)