Command Decision

Command Decision was published by Game Designer's Workshop in 1986. The game was the culmination of many years of effort on the part of Frank Chadwick.

Frank Chadwick's first attempt to design a game happened 25 years (before 1993) when he sat down to redo (Avalon Hill's) Afrika Korps game in an attempt to make it better and more historical. Command Decision started life as a personal project for Frank so that he could game out the battles of the Western Desert with a set of playable rules. Due to his knowledge of the different orders of battle for both sides, he gave that project up when he realized that he could never really enjoy a game set in the Western Desert. He knew all too well who was where at any given time, thus battles were limited in terms of "what ifs." Thus, it was off to the Russian Front, where anything was possible in terms, and so Command Decision came to be.¹

Command Decision enjoyed its own periodical in the form of Command Post, a newsletter published by GDW which later became Command Post Quarterly. In addition to two expansion modules (later combined with the base game in one package, as shown below), there was a modern version called Combined Arms released in 1988, a First World War version entitled Over The Top! released in 1990, and a combination of the Second World War and Modern rules into one package with Command Decision II in 1992.

Frank Chadwick rebooted his Command Decision line in 2006 with a new series of releases published by Test of Battle Games. Major changes included a time scale of 30 minutes per turn rather than 15, and sequential movement rather than simultaneous. The core game, Test of Battle, with US, British, German and Russian orders of battle and data charts, was released first. A series of Campaign books and another series of Army books was announced to follow on, and the first release of each was achieved in 2007. Benghazi Handicap covered battles in North Africa in 1940 and 1941, and Stars & Stripes Forever fleshed out the US order of battle in Europe and the Mediterranean in addition to providing rules to cover unique national aspects.²

Notes

1. Editor's introduction to "Chadwick's Guide to the Afrika Korps", Command Post Quarterly (Fall 1993, GDW)

2. boardgamegeek.com listings and the Test of Battle website at http://testofbattle.com/drupal-4.7.4/