Goonhammer Historicals: 0200 Hours Review

It's dark out here in the bocage surrounding the village. Guards pace listlessly on their assigned routes, a watchdog stops and sniffs at the ground before moving on. The moon is hidden behind thick clouds and all is peaceful. Your men are poised and ready to move on the objective. Private Hawthorne steps forward, rifle at the ready. CRACK! A twig breaks under his foot - the dogs bark, flashlights swing round. This mission just went from covert to very, very noisy....

It's time to dig into the Grey For Now Games WW2 game 0200 Hours: Night Raids in World War Two, and I'm very excited to be finally writing this one!

What Is 0200 Hours?

0200 Hours is a small skirmish wargame of night raids, commando missions and partisan activity set in the middle of the night in WW2. It's a game that asks you to put yourself in the shoes of an SAS, SBS or Commando team (among others) as they attempt to infiltrate enemy positions, pull off some nighttime skullduggery and get out before the enemy catches on. Played with somewhere between 5 (for the attacker) and 15 (for the defender, maybe) models, it's a hugely narrative, endlessly interesting and enthralling gameplay experience. If I could get away with it, I'd end the review there - go play this, you won't regret it!

Unfortunately, you might need more convincing - luckily that convincing should be straightforward because everything here is good, and most of it is great.

Asymmetry

We love a good asymmetric game here at the Goonhammer Historicals Star Fort HQ, and 0200 Hours is definitely asymmetrical. Grey For Now Games makes interesting, challenging and innovative play experiences, nearly all of which have some element of asymmetry to them. In this case it means that you're playing a force with the initiative and a plan (raiders, commandos, partisans, long range desert group, and so on) against a force that is almost entirely reactive - the sentries guarding whatever it is the attackers are stealing/blowing up/messing about with. While the core rules of how you move, shoot, and wound are shared between both forces, the exciting thing is that the game doesn't start that way. As the defender, you set your patrol routes and your sentries carry them out. If the attackers play it very, very, very canny and with a huge amount of luck, they might stay like that for quite a while.

Oblivious sentries, 0200 in Progress. Credit: Lenoon

The defending force is initially semi-automated while the attackers have access to the full range of possible actions and movements. Before the Calm of the night is shattered by gunfire or spotting a body, defenders are essentially oblivious, enjoying a smoke on a cold night in a quiet sector, but as those white dice start to turn up the eye result, the level of alertness rises, until, invariably, the alarm is raised. When it does, the game isn't quite so asymmetric, and the defender gets more and more control over their models. The game turns from a cagey, tense affair of infiltration and sentry patrols into a confused maelstrom of shouting men, swinging lights and gunfire. You're playing for or against that shift, with both sides pushing to keep, or remove, asymmetry from the game. It's a really interesting way of doing asymmetrical conflict - instead of making one side perpetually a bit better, or giving them completely different ways to play, it's tied to what's happening in the game. If those demo charges go off, all hell breaks loose, so do you set them now, or try to get your men off the board before a lone hero sets the detonator? As a defender, you're pushing for the alarm to be raised, hoping your sentries do their job and that the automated engine you set up on deployment was good enough. When the balloon does go up, you're fighting an equal battle - and when it's equal you have the upper hand.

The transformation from "all going as planned" to alarm and chaos is sudden and - relatively - predictable, but never exactly so. One more roll might trip the alarm, one clumsy step, shot or sentry turning the right way, but maybe it won't. While the alarm stage represents a fundamental shift in the game, you're working towards or against it and the tension ramps until the knife edge is crossed.

How to Play

As a game of midnight raiding, 0200 Hours works with a clever and straightforward rule set to simulate clashes between unsuspecting sentries and heavily armed commandos, all in pitch darkness. There's a core roll-under a model's characteristic value mechanic that leads to straightforward skill tests, with the size (and type) of dice you're rolling determined by the action you're taking, equipment and what you want to do with it. It's nice and simple and works perfectly well for the scale of the game - nearly everything you do is one model (possibly against another model). It's a good underpinning that everything else builds from - most importantly with the dice you roll.

0200 in Progress. Credit: Lenoon

0200 hours has two sets of dice, one representing "loud" actions like firing a gun, brawling with someone, or sprinting. These dice are white, with the other set - the "quiet" dice being black. Rolling white dice can get you more successes, but they carry a risk that your model will be spotted - enemy sentries drawn towards the noise you've just made! Black dice can roll results that cancel out the white ones, representing taking additional action to hide, stay covert or just cover up the noise of firing. It's a really elegant way to represent your models taking risks to achieve something, possibly risking being discovered to sprint from cover to cover, or taking a shot to remove a guard before he comes across a body. It makes every roll a narrative building event - you and your opponent counting up successes and spotted rolls, which immediately start to tell a story. Somehow, that shot succeeded without alerting anyone - perhaps your model waited until there was a crack of thunder - or sprinting across open ground you trip and stumble, crying out and alerting the nearby sentry. Far from a quick test of "did my model make the shot," the results of each roll don't just encourage you to tell a story of the moment, they demand it!

Layered on top of the dice rolls are event cards, which add a little back and forth between players, allowing you to turn the tables, boost your own or cancel, complicate or otherwise mess up an opponent action. The cards are lovely bits of narrative anyway - the Dear John card allows you to reroll a trauma roll, representing a model giving up after getting some very particular bad news from home, or Enigma decrypts might let you pinpoint an objective location, for example - but they're doled out according to the momentum of the scenario, and that's a bit of genius. Before the alarm is raised, attackers pull more event cards, representing all that planning before the raid, and the cover of night. You're able to influence the game outside of the rolls when you need to - perhaps getting a little further onto the board, or moving an objective to a better location for you. When the alarm is sounded, the initiative with events shifts to the attacker and suddenly they're quite literally holding all the cards, able to shift troops around and interrupt the best laid plans of mice and ruperts. It's another fantastically simple mechanic that goes a long way to pulling you into the story.

0200 in Progress. Credit: Lenoon

The third key mechanic that really makes this game work is in spotting. The conceit of 0200 Hours is exactly as it says on the tin, a raid or assault or other action, happening in the middle of the night. That means - blissfully for the terrain requirements - that this isn't a true line of sight game. A model may be able to draw a line to another, but unless they're within spotting range, standing in a pool of light or otherwise drawing attention to themselves, they can't be interacted with. It makes for the good kind of frustration for the defender, when semi-automated sentries move just out of spotting distance, or turn the wrong way to spot a sneaking enemy. For the attacker, it bakes the setting and feel of the game into every movement - if I go here, there's a light and I can be seen, if I take the long route through the hedge I might make more noise, and the sentry might turn the wrong way - as a result you're making choices about movement and positioning far beyond "can i draw a line from model to model". It wouldn't work in a game of 50 models vs 50, but in the context of raiders vs sentries it is absolutely magical.

Between the dice, spotting and events/alarm, this is a game that has an extremely strong mechanical core to it. The system works very well at creating the feel and approach of tense, night time raids and provides incredibly solid bones to build from. With a few games under your belt, it's very difficult to stop yourself thinking of scenarios, ideas and campaigns, safe in the knowledge that the mechanics of the game are all about enabling you to play to theme. The core book builds on those bones with eight scenarios of increasing complexity - all of which I've now played through solo, much to my delight (sometimes procrastinating on writing a review is a good thing!) - in addition to a range of different equipment types, specialist troops and some great additional rules that breathe a lot of life into the game - a disguised pilot might be creeping through a smoke barrage while a German barracks kicks out near-endless reinforcements while searchlights strobe through the haze.

Options for 0200

You can pick up 0200 Hours from Grey For Now in a couple of different ways - as a boxed set, a rulebook and cards version and a straight rulebook. The only one I wouldn't recommend is the rulebook alone - this is a game that lives and dies on its tokens and while there isn't an onerous amount of them on the table at any one time, having the official ones makes everything nice and clear, while the official dice are absolutely obligatory unless you want to be checking a conversion table every time you roll.

Five Mooks ready for Patrol

The rulebook, cards and tokens set is a good deal, and if you already have WW2 models, you'll be able to get going almost immediately with your current collection. The full starter set comes with models - Wargames Atlantic Commandos and German sentries. With more than full sides (12 British, 18 Sentries - with dogs) for British and Germans, it really is all you need to play. Both sets are high quality WA multipart plastics - we reviewed the Germans on release a long time ago! - that will allow you to make every conceivable mix of equipment, rank, model type on both German and British sides.

There's plenty of space to expand your options in the core book, with stats for Russian, Partisan, US, Italian and Japanese characters, which you can use with the existing core events easily (an SMG is an SMG etc etc). Grey For Now already have you covered if you want to go further though, with six expansions. When I've managed to check them out I'll let you know!

Terrain

0200 in Progress. Credit: Lenoon

While this is a token heavy game, it's also potentially a terrain heavy game too. The rulebook (beautifully produced, incidentally), is filled with lovely pictures of fully modelled factories and stockyards. You do want a lot of terrain for this game, undoubtedly, but given the small size of the table, low model count and spotting rules, you can be surprisingly open. If you're reading this and thinking "yeah but I don't have a full WW2 board Lenoon, so I can't share this awesome experience", I got you. A standard 6x4 or 4x4 for WW2 makes for a lovely, suitably claustrophobic 3x3. If you have only fantasy stuff, well, a lot of fantasy houses, hills, trees etc are basically just northwestern europe with some extra skulls, and even a 40k tournament board will happily do you for a bombed out town, the much maligned L-shape ruins and all.

Overall

Ending on the "terrain requirements aren't that bad" seems odd, but it's an important point. I wanted to end there because there's literally no reason not to try this game. It's a really different, really fun experience that, if you really had to avoid WW2 as a setting, works perfectly well for literally anything and everything requiring stealth and asymmetric conflict. So here's the reasons you're not picking up 0200 Hours, and my answers as to why that's total crap:

- I don't have an opponent! This is the most soloable game I've played and a very very satisfying experience played solo, trust me
- I don't have the models! You're looking at a minimum of 10 models for a good game, and the starter set (very reasonably priced, too) contains a shedload of great models
- I don't have the terrain! You do! Ten pieces is recommended, but if some of them are hedges, buildings or walls, you can get a good game in with far less
- I don't play historicals! You should! 0200 Hours is a great example of the kind of thing Historicals does well. There are a million WW2 rulesets, so to stand out you have to be different, and very good - 0200 Hours is certainly different, and it's absolutely very good.
- I don't want to play good games that are interesting! There's nothing I can do for you, my apologies

That's more than enough words about this, because I'm serious that you won't regret giving it a go. With a well designed starter set, top quality rulebook and fantastic mechanics underlying the whole thing, 0200 Hours is the best game I've played all year (2025 at time of writing), and probably the best designed Historicals skirmish system I've come across. I absolutely cannot wait to play more of it, dive into the expansions and get my airfield board up and running. Go play it, and get back to me with your stories!

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Tags: historicals | ww2 | 0200 hours