Korps Commander

Korps Commander

Korps Commander Rules Cover
Publisher(s)	Tabletop Games
Years active	1988-1989
Genre(s)	Wargaming
Players	2
Setup time	1 hour
Playing time	4-8 hours

Korps Commander, or "Korps Commander: The Road to Berlin" is a set of micro-armour Miniature wargaming rules designed by Bruce Rea Taylor and Andy Ashton and published in the UK by Tabletop games © B. A. Rea Taylor, A. Ashton & Tabletop Games August 1988.

These rules simulate actions in the second world war on the Western or Eastern fronts during the final two years of the war for forces up to Corps or Army Levels.

The basic units in the game are tank and mechanised infantry platoons, infantry companies, and artillery batteries. Aircraft may be in flights or squadrons. Logistics and engineers are fully covered.

Bruce Rea Taylor and Andy Ashton originally intended that Korps Commander would be the start of a family of rules, each covering a period and location, as can be seen by the quote from the Rules.

Road to Berlin is a set of rules in the Korps Commander Series, which will eventually cover all periods of warfare at a level which will allow large battles and campaigns to be fought. The series aim is to utilise the techniques of boardgaming whilst retaining the flavour of miniature gaming.

The Road to Berlin was the first and last of the Korps Commander publications. Bruce Rea Taylor died shortly after the publication of these rules (1989), at the age of 40. I was unable to find any evidence Andy Ashton made any plans to continue this project.

Korps Commander used the Corps Commander: OMG (Operational Manoeuvre Group) game system, which was published in 1986. The differences between these two rules are summarized in the Introduction of Korps Commander.

For those who have played OMG the most significant difference is that the ground scale and time scales have been halved due to the shorter effective ranges of direct fire weapons, although the only noticeable difference is the range of artillery.

Bruce Rea Taylor gives a special mention to the Wallasey Wargames Club in the Introduction of the Korps Commander Rules.

We would like to acknowledge the help of the Wallasey Wargames Club in the preparation and playtesting of these rules.

Some attempts were made to keep the rules updated, an example is the Nikita Corps Commander & Korps Commander Site, which updated the equipment lists. A more extensive attempt can be seen in the Corps Commander Group Site.

The primary significance of these rules was it was one of the first game systems which used a scale of 1-2 base(s) per company. The reason why a scale of 1 base per company was not used was to allow for small formations, such as 1-2 SP-AA weapons allocated to a HQ and to ensure the record keeping for the standard company sized formations was not too difficult. However, apart from this, the rules fundamentally used a 1 Base = 1 company scale, which allowed players to command one, or more, divisions. Compared with the most common rules used in this period, this was unusual.