As someone new to the hobby, I've been looking for a ruleset that is more of a lets break out some minis and play game and focused on squads for a while now.

I'm also trying to keep things simple for myself. I dont want a lot of figures on the table to start. I want to have army lists in the ruleset Im using and I want some scenarios as well.

When I read the preview and the description for Victory Decision: Raid thought I would take a chance and see if it truley was what i was looking for.

After my preliminary read I was very happy with what I found within the ruleset. I was also taken aback by how many pages of army lists there are! There are tons!

I really think this is the perfect ruleset for where I am within the hobby. Once I get this game downpat and get more minis tabled, Ill be looking at the larger platoon level game Victory Decision.

Honesty up front - I helped proofread the rules. But I offered to do that because I like them.

Victory Decision Raid is 90% the same game as regular Victory Decision, so if you're a player of that game then this version of it will be very familiar. The main difference is that rather than activating whole sections of troops, now you are activating individual soldiers, so that the game is focusing on the squad/section itself rather than the platoon.

Because of this it plays on a smaller area, 4'x4' is recommended, although I played a few games on a 2' x 3' table without issue. Because each side is only half a dozen or so figures the table doesn't get crowded.

As with regular Victory Decision, activation is a dice roll modified alternate activation, with the activated figure being able to perform 3 actions - move, shoot, assault, etc, in any order the player likes, and usually as many times as he likes too, so move - move - shoot, or shoot - shoot - shoot, are legal combos. Apart from a new overwatch order there are no reactive moves, like the parent game, but somehow with Victory Decision you don't miss them. I can only think that it's the triple action activations which somehow manages to remove the need for reactions.

The combat mechanics are very straighforward, although the suppression mechanic of the main game has been replaced with four "health levels" - ready to fight, stunned, wounded and dead; stunned and wounded give figures negative modifiers and limit their available actions, although figures can be rallied back to ready to fight.

The game includes vehicle rules, which are just as straighforward and intuitive as the infantry rules. Unlike the parent game where army lists are an extra purchase, Raid contains fairly exhaustive lists for Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union and the USA, hence the high page count for such a straighforward game. There are plenty of options to cover different small arms. One thing to note is that, unlike some skirmish games, an infantryman is an infantryman. By which I mean that you don't customise each figure with different stats and special rules, like Nuts! or the Song of Blades family; there are special rules but if you have, say, five regular US infantry each of those five will likely be the same in game terms. I much prefer this as I find keeping track of individualised figures to be a pain.

Raid playes very quickly and intuitively. It's not a hard core WW2 infantry combat simulation, but a quick and interesting game which plays with authentic WW2 flavour. There are WW2 projects I'd like to dabble in, but I don't want to go the whole hog and paint 30+ figures and support weapons and vehicles, etc. Raid means I can paint 6 or 8 US Paras, for example, and scratch that Band of Brothers itch.