Konflikt 47: A Better Sci-Fi Wargame

conflict 47 a better sci-fi war game today on attention span labs hello and welcome to another episode of attention span labs i'm your host author michael a dibaggio and today i'm going to talk to you about my new favorite uh 28 millimeter war game which is called conflict 47. now uh this is not uh it's a it's a fairly popular war game but it's not super well known it's certainly not uh in the realm of say warhammer 40k or uh it's it's sister game bolt action but conflict 47 is a game produced by warlord games clockwork goblin which originated the idea in osprey games who who prints and formats the the books but uh as as i just suggested there conflict 47 is based on the bolt action world war ii 28 millimeter rule set uh this is a very very popular pro one of if not the most popular uh world war ii miniature war games um the only real competition with it i think is the 15 millimeter flames of war but they're uh it's super popular in casual game playing tournaments has extremely well supported miniatures line but conflict 47 is different because it's a it's an alternate history sci-fi world war ii it's in the weird war genre which basically presupposes that as the title suggests the war continues on to the year 1947 history unfolded a little bit differently and there's a lot of weird gonzo sci-fi stuff it's it's i say gonzo because some of the the forces are are somewhat outlandish but they're very interesting for instance you have um walkers and tesla tanks uh powered armor and so forth in addition to like the regular uh world war ii equipment um and the general idea is that uh history took an alternate path the americans got the bomb a little early in 1944 and before d-day actually dropped a bomb on germany trying to get them to surrender this actually created a rift in space time through which um transmissions from an unknown source were received that allowed them to allow everybody to to decode them to develop strange weaponry um and this this is so this basically gave with the americans only having the one bomb at the time they basically shot their wad and germany didn't surrender and then they got some advantages coming through with these mysterious transmissions but the americans also with their their their test weapon um also had a rift and they were able to develop some stuff so uh world war ii develops differently the americans don't share their technology the so that the soviets uh leave the war and declare war on the americans and the british and uh the war continues by various means through 1947. we're going to talk more about that later but as i said this is a derivation of the bolt action rule set uh specifically the bolt that you can see the bolt actions displayed prominently on the three books there so bolt action is uh as i said 20 millimeter sci-fi war game rule set um it has some very neat rule conventions which we're going to talk about in a little bit but this is based on the first edition bolt action with some additions from some other warlord games war games such as the reaction rules for from beyond the gates of antares and maybe some other stuff that i'm not super familiar with but uh so this is conflict 47 this is my army here i'm going to talk a quite a bit more about my army uh how i got into it why why why i like it when i think you should play it um in that we're going to talk about the rule set why it's good i mean just something something different and perhaps more accessible in many ways than other sci-fi war games which i've talked about on here in the past and we'll be talking about less and less as time goes on particularly warhammer 40k but i'll be making direct comparisons to that because i think uh both in terms of miniatures uh of affordability of uh the the the book bloat issue of all kinds of reasons that this is a is a much better war game and deserves a much better uh much larger audience for those who are interested in sci-fi war gaming okay so how i got into conflict 47 is uh not that long a tale because i've only heard about it since march late march i stopped in my game store and uh saw these i hadn't been in there in a while but i had seen these these walker miniatures specifically uh this uh american mud skipper walker and this uh jackal jump locker here and uh i i picked them up right away they were they were reasonably affordable i think one was like 30 bucks and the other one was like 45 bucks or something like that but they looked really cool look different i was going to use them for my imperial garden so as you can see i actually modified these two before i started painting them before i decided i would uh use use these in is in its own game for warhammer 40k i gave an extra chain gun here from the actually from anvil industries set to this jackal jump walker because he's a jump walker because it can it's designed to fly so these are paratrooper units but i thought they would go very well with my uh imperial guard uh spaceborne interface units that i was making which i will do a video on at some point just to show you them but um anyway as you can see there i added a heavy bolter instead of the medium machine gun on the mud skipper john blocker here but as i was was painting these up and building them a couple of my friends who i game with expressed interest in this game itself um one of my friends uh jeff suggested that he was actually going to get the the japanese starter box because it was a very good price for a good deal um had a bunch of really interesting miniatures and i decided yeah what the hell i'll actually repaint these and paint them up for conflict 47. um so again that was back in late march so i had these two to start and then after that i decided to to get a starter set which was actually a bolt action starter set it was the band of brother starters that was like 90 bucks it came with basically a platoon of american paratroopers and a squad of panzer german panzer grenadiers uh came with uh a german hanomag half track uh and i think and some ruins and stuff so it was a very very good price deal there was um something like 30 35 troops or something like that a vehicle and a bunch of ruins plus the bolt action rule book all the templates order dice uh that i needed and and um um also um suppression markers which are these things here which also type on the but anyway so um i started that and i wasn't sure at the time i was gonna make a german or american force i ended up deciding on americans because i had really i started already buying the american walkers and from there my force grew pretty substantially and as i said again this video is being shot in july it's july 18th today and i started this i really started painting them in the beginning of april and i have to say i enjoyed this so much and i had never before painted and assembled such a large army in that short a time and that's one of the things that i really like about this game uh the uh the miniatures are good quality um they're rel they're compared to games workshop they're not expensive at all there's a huge variety of them because of the world war ii setting a lot of vehicles and even infantry miniatures are available in stl formats to print so i was able to print most of this army here are is actual warlord game kits but several of the units this sherman with a swappable turret i have here between a sherman 76-millimeter gun and a sherman of the 105 millimeter howitzer uh these two jeeps closer here you can see the detail on them will you zoom in on that no okay well darn this camera but the the jeeps the m7 priest the defrock priest one of the uh deuce and a half trucks they're they were 3d printed uh so you know these are designs that are real life designs and so they're easy they're readily available everywhere um so that helped uh the the general price point for these things is maybe you know you might pay 35 for a 10 12 man squad often less than that um vehicles are anywhere from 25 to 30 depending on their size you do you do not find in general you know 100 there are 700 miniatures these are like very large heavy walkers that germany has or or the soviets have uh but generally you know these were all very affordable price points i was able to pick them up um you know week after week and i was able to finish they're simple to assemble for the most part um they have good instructions and they're they're easy to paint because you don't have to um there's not as excessive detail as there is on like every games workshop miniature now where there's there's just too much to paint there's too much to even see you know when you're working on them um these have excellent detail without being uh you know ostentatious we'll say um the if you you can paint them because it's uh you know it's it is a historical war game but it's also a science fiction alternate history war game you're not limited of course to painting them or or putting the the decals on in historical ways right you can have fun but still i was able to paint them in pretty pretty simple colors most of it was done with uh with a particular coat of krylon spray paint and i'll talk more about the painting stuff in another video but uh you know a couple colors of of vallejo uh world war two range and then and then washed and um only certain vehicles i did do a camouflage paint on but these uh these were very satisfying to paint even in large numbers when i was cranking out you know cranking out the 24-man uh band of brothers unit and then expanding my other against the assembly the the assembly line painting style went went pretty fast and the vehicles were really fast i i had a really good system down i was able to usually once a vehicle was assembled and spray painted i could have it finished full details including decals weathering uh in about three and a half to four hours not working too hard on it so again could i have built a warhammer army of this size in that short of time um history says no not not to this quality of which that i was able to to paint and assemble them um and not without really damaging my wallet or you know this this was um i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say you could do this on you know twenty three dollars obviously not you might spend a couple hundred dollars but that's about you know for uh you could by buying one of the starter sets you could have a very functional uh useful fighting force and have it assembled in you know a long weekend assembled and painted in long weekend so that's one of the things i really like about it i also really like the the system and that this bolt action system that it uses with some modifications one of the the key points to it are you seeing these dice in front of every unit here right these are called order dice and that's that's the first big difference you see between this and another system like warhammer um it's a sort of vault it's a semi-alternating activation so instead of the i go you go where you know the your opponent moves and shoots and does all the stuff for his entire army and you sit around waiting for 10 minutes to do anything and you're just reacting rolling dice um this what you do is you have for every one of your units so every year every one of your squads every one of your vehicles um and then also if you have your squads mounted in vehicles like these half tracks here or in a jeep or something like that or the truck or the the defrocked priest that you can they get their own activation too own order dice so that you give them different orders and there's there's six different orders there's advance which is you can move your normal distance and shoot run which is basically you double normal listen to not shoot fire you stay where you are and you open fire um rally is if you your unit is demoralized by taking a fire taking casualties you can recover from that ambushes basically they stay where they are not do anything and elect to fire if someone comes within range on the other player's turn uh and down which is basically they hit they they hit the dirt and try to avoid being shot and give some extra penalties to shooting at them but you put these dice in the bag uh you shake up the bag and then somebody pulls a die from the bag and if it's your diet then you get to select whatever unit you want and give it that order and then when that's all resolved stick your hand in the bag pull another one out and if that's yours you go again if it's the opponent your opponent then they take the die and they give one of their their units in order until every unit on the table or in the army has an order then that's the end of the turn and then you put all the dice in the bag and you do it again so that is uh i think a big improvement over the igo hugo system i played a lot of other sci-fi games that are alternating activation which is basically one person um activates the unit and does their stuff and then the other person activates the unit and always goes back and forth this is a very neat compromise and it add because of the luck uh element to it it adds some some suspense um it usually balances out pretty well like if you have a even number of forces um then you very often go and then your opponent goes and so forth but um it adds an extra dimension to the game with the you know having more units can basically benefits you because your dice are more likely to be picked and then you can you may be able to take the initiative over from from your opponent so that's one big thing um one of the big different differences that this has from bolt action either first or second edition is that units can react by passing a morale test so each unit this is very heavily based on unit quality very much like uh say the star star grunt 2 which is pretty much my favorite uh traditional sci-fi war game uh system which is basically all based on unit quality and unit leadership so you have your your inexperienced troops and your regular troops and your veteran troops and they they cost more or less points depending on that but they uh they have a morale value and like obviously inexperienced troops have lower morale value than regular have lower value than than than veterans and you know that it's easier to kill than experienced troops uh than is regular easier to kill regular troops and better and so forth and like that there's shooting and firing uh there's firing penalties and combat bonuses for for these other groups based on their quality um but that that is uh that's another another benefit um that really being able to have units that are the same composition but different unit qualities doesn't ever really appear uh in in warhammer so if you're used to playing playing that um it it that it itself is a difference but you can make very cheap army that has like the same units that you um the same units one known army can be very cheap filled with mostly inexperienced forces or regular forces or a very elite unit that's much more expensive with the same units that have veterans you can you can customize your army in a lot of different ways but anyway back to these reactions so these reactions um you make a morale test so that even if it's not your turn and you haven't moved yet for instance if you're being shot up by an enemy and you're within a certain range you can you can roll a test if you pass the test you can do a fire fight which means that you also exchange fire with the enemy if you're being assaulted you can try to do a stand and shoot where you get basically get an extra round of shooting before your enemy charges you uh you can do you can do an escape or you run away um there's certain units reconnaissance units like say this pond skater scout walker here or this m18 hellcat which are recce units and what they can do is even if they haven't have taken an order if they're under fire they can roll a recce test and basically reverse at full speed and often that puts them out of the range so the enemy wastes their shot makes them makes these scout units very very survivable so another difference with basic bolt action uh is that there are unit well both action does have unit tags which are basically special rules that a given unit will have but these conflict 47 expands them for instance there are german werewolves and german vampires and german zombies and japanese zombies and there's american superheroes called paragons which i a custom one that i have over here which actually was printed from anvil industries set um but they have a bunch of different statuses like top for instance where if they're if they are hurt or if they are killed they can roll a dice and if they roll five or six uh they actually shrug it off um they're some cause horror like the soviet wear bears or the german werewolves for instance they basically have a moral effect which they reduce everybody's morale when they come within uh a certain certain distance of them there are resilient ones like these american powered armor troops that that basically have the damage resistance of a soft skin soft skin vehicle like a jeep or a or or a truck so that you have to roll a six every time to try and kill one of them uh there are uh units that can fly or jump again like these these american paratrooper units the the the jackal um and the mud skipper back there uh some units are slow some units are fast and agile and so forth but a lot some of them carry they basically carries over all the statuses from from bolt action and then adds in some some additional ones that are sort of a sci-fi horror bent and this adds a lot of really interesting variety to the game if you're if you're a person who's interested in historicals is is interested also in experimenting with with a bit more of a fantasy game this is a good medium step if you're someone who is mostly played sci-fi fantasy games and you're interested in getting into historicals this is is a good a good bridge to that too because the other nice thing about this is because the rules and most of the units are cross-compatible between bolt action conflict 47 you your force you're basically buying one army to play two different games and that is really a tremendous value it's hard to to someone who doesn't play war games uh to convey this to them is you know there's a there's a enormous investment involved in every time you want to start a new war game and you know you you have to buy a whole new army usually you have to buy a new set of rules uh now obviously if you want to play bolt action if you if you want to play conflict 47 you have bolt action you can just take your existing bolt action army right in the comfort 47 you don't need any new troops but you could buy you know you need a power armor here or a walker here there and you're fine and actually the the the units are balanced enough that a good bolt-action army um can can do perform very well and defeat a conflict 47 unit heavy unit army um but if you and also vice versa if you have conflict 47 you can play bolt action now obviously you can't take your your walkers or your werewolves or your power armor or uh you know whatever the special conflict 47 units are but you can for instance if you have this sherman tesla right here you know this model i didn't didn't paint it or build it but this model comes with this it's the existing it's the regular bolt action uh sherman model and it comes with the normal sherman turret which which i don't have here i have this 3d printed one but yeah so the 3d printed one works on there too but so you can build it with the tesla turret which is a really cool weapon by the way for conflict 47 and then you can swap off the turret uh give it the regular sherman 75 million millimeter or 76 millimeter gun turret and just play that in bolt action so that is a is a big benefit right there you you know it's if you're looking at pretty much any other game uh you know with these with the any other like mainstream game certainly the game's workshop games you can't usually certainly not in tournament style um which i don't recommend anyway but you know you can't have your carry your 40k army over to age of sigmar or you know if you have uh you know an infinity force to carry it over to malifaux i mean if you're playing with with decent people and you want to use proxy manager absolutely you can but um it often you know you're trying to come up with new rules for different weapons or different units because because they're because those units are not actually represented in the game whereas this the bolt-action units are all bolt-action units are represented in conflict 47 um and most conflict 47 units are represented in bolt action so that's a huge benefit the other benefit i want to talk about is that there's only for right now three books for conflict 47 and you absolutely only need depending on the army you pick you only really need the first one the conflict 47 main book there to play um now if you want to play japan or the the two italian the the different italian forces uh if you want to play finland then you're you're going to want to get the defiance or resurgence book because the main conflict 47 rule book basically only covers the units for uh the americans the british the germans uh and the soviets so there but there are in each of the the two additional books so these books are like 30 bucks a piece too they're not eighty dollar eighty dollar tomes ninety dollar tomes um they're they're filled with great illustrations great artwork that you use it uses like some of the uh artwork from the osprey books and sausage publishes them um if you're not familiar with osprey osprey produces a range of uh historical reference books that are very useful for modelers and war gamers and just history enthusiasts in general but then there's great photos of the of of the painted miniatures and some nice terrain and everything uh and there's also in each of the two books defiance and resurgence the the two supplemental books there's errata and there's a lot of errata in this game um i'm going to eventually talk about some things i don't like about the game um but there there's a lot of errata and the kind of patchiness and change rules as they're going along and most of those rule changes i think are for the better um so but you can you know feel free to play them with the original conflict 47 rules or sort of like the optional uh advanced rules or modifications in defiance or resurgence but they also come with additional units because they are they do um i don't know they've come out with any new models this year but they you know have come out with a bunch of new units since the original release for pretty much all parties so there's always there there's new um new vehicles new inventory options new force structures the to the base of this game is a reinforced platoon and it tells you in addition to the the point cost however many points you want to play you know a platoon and you can feel more more than one platoon too um uh is you know you can only have you'll have a core unit of so many infantry squads and a lieutenant because primarily infantry based game and then you can add on like a higher ranking officer you can have machine gun teams you can add on tanks or walkers or or up to a certain a certain number specified depending on not only which nation you play but which force like my my force is a is a very heavy heavily oriented towards us airborne um but there are some like regular army inventory units in it as well and you can mix and match those so conflict 47 is i think an excellent choice for someone both looking to get into 28 millimeter war game and someone looking to try something different um as far as the sci-fi war game goes i like it a lot better than the stuff games workshops pointing out putting out now um it definitely scratches that itch it's more it's more affordable the the rules are concise you're not getting a chapter approved coming out every so often that like i said there is a lot of errata but it's not fundamentally these are basically like typos and misprints or like they forgot to include a sat block somewhere whereas they're not you know every year they're releasing a new edition of an army new codex come out and it's an arms race and can you afford can you not afford to buy every codex including every army that your codex for every army that you're going to play um just to keep up on all the rule changes and all the all other unit changes so the on the downside the couple things i don't like about conflict 47 they're actually mainly setting oriented um but i will mention first the errata this really needs i think a second edition of the game not necessarily to bring it up to with to be compatible with second edition bolt action but with the reaction uh reaction rules add-ons it needs a second edition of the game to sort of combine all the units that are in defiance and resurgence into one book um and the new bolt actions that came out in there and then also to correct because the you know the statuses that i talked about before like say horror or jump troops or um what it means to be a tough fighter have changed significantly and certainly you know um there's there's explanations for how they work in the game there's there's um this suppression fire is as is an option now and these are really valuable interesting things and great clarifications which i have to say are not just uh theoretical because when i i played this i played uh a total of four conflict 47 games so far and these issues of of concern of confusion in the book really do come up in the game so they really and and um they're i'd like to play all games with the game master but if you don't have a game master there's bound to be some actual good faith arguments on what the rules mean for some of these cases so that's why i think it needs a second edition of the rules but um you can compile them yourself the erratas are actually available for free these books are also available in pdf for cheaper but you know you can get the i prefer for war game rules reference i prefer to have them in in paperback or hardcover format so you have them at the table and uh you can get them fairly cheap secondhand too but yeah so that's one problem uh the other problem is is the setting which i'm going to do a whole other video on because uh i have not been that satisfied with the setting i think it's an excellent premise certainly weird war is awesome i'm super interested in that i'm super interested in alternate history what i'm less uh taken by is the timeline as i said i you know basically everything's the same up until 44 then some really weird things happen and the war continues for another three years well one of the problems with conflict 47 is that it is determined to only have a technological explanation even though the core premise is inherently supernatural right there's no uh you know this idea of this of this dimensional rift by which encoded transmissions are coming through from parties unknown that allow them to develop tesla cannons and walkers and wear bearers and crap like that um that's inherently a supernatural thing but they uh i guess in an attempted clockwork goblin the originators of the game an attempt to distinguish themselves from all the other weird war stuff that's out there like you know octagon cthulhu or um dust tactics or hellboy or uh where the the the weird uh weird war um or rpgs they they're like no this is purely technological the problem with that though is that there's no way that the axis in particular japan uh and germany after 1944 can sustain the war for that law and they go even farther because they want every all these armies to be available and they go even farther and have hey finland is still operating and they're still allied with the the germans and italy is actually two factions and and they're the northern part of italy is is still loyal to mussolini and the germans and then there's a co-belligerent italian faction so an attempt to make as as you know which i don't blame before keep as many um many armies available with as unique units as possible basically everybody's in the war almost nothing happened for three years just a lot of back and forth uh that doesn't make any kind of sense to me there's because germany still has a fuel problem they didn't conquer the caucuses they did they're trying to penetrate to the middle east but only only now only like in 47 did they ally with turkey um and are driving towards the the anglo-persian oil fields japan should is still mostly starved out and like well they have these wonderful submarines okay but how are they building them they you know they're they were remember this is until late 19th even considering only germany had the rift tech japan didn't even start getting the uh rift tech is still until very late 1944 early 1945. um so there's no way that basically america in particular whose industrial capacity you know concerning they all have the super technology the us would just produce way more walkers way more tesla tanks way more powered armor and in fact even in the book they do like the us is starting to outfit entire battalions with power armor um there's just no way that they can the the axis could possibly sustain that even with their wonder weapons uh the the the the industrial might particularly of the united states um like there's no considering that the soviets declare war on the us and britain then there's also like then they're they're cut off from uh lend lease equipment and so forth um which isn't touched on too much but that the so that is implausible and you say well but there's where what was the map yeah yeah okay but i can that's acceptable that that's part of the premise it's like with pacific rim you know are giant monsters fighting giant robots is that inherently ridiculous yes but that's the premise you accept right on the other hand when it's like everything's the same until 1944 and then you started to get these things but then after that nothing really changes and nobody gets knocked out of the war i mean it's ridiculous if only the axes had the super weapons maybe but they still the fuel problems um they still the transportation problems still that they can't produce enough airplanes in japan they could produce enough airplanes they can't produce enough ships they lost most of their their fighter bomber crews and so forth these are real problems um so i have some ideas on how to how to improve that that situation but that is is the main thing that i don't like about about the game okay with that said i'm going to cut the video short here um and i'll post another video where i talk about uh a good way to get into conflict 47 how to use the starter box sets to your best advantage and what you'll probably need to augment them in order to play an effective game but for now that's it uh thank you for tuning in and listen to me ramble for half an hour um if you have any any questions about conflicts 47 or uh if you're you're interested in getting into historical or wargaming i'd like to hear about it in the comments below please like and subscribe to my channel and stay tuned for some more [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Attention Span Labs

Views: 36,867

Rating: 4.8880248 out of 5

Keywords: konflikt 47, bolt action, conflict 47, warhammer, 40k, wargames, miniatures, alternate history, world war two, ww2, mecha, weird war

Id: rkPVlaqUbLY

Length: 36min 4sec (2164 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021