Goonhammer Historicals: Your Guide to 0200 Hours Expansions

We've been going hard into 0200 Hours, with our review, solo play guide and big plans in the offing. If you've been playing the core set, the fun isn't over yet because Grey For Now Games have a wide range of expansions available - but which ones should you get? Never fear! We're here with a guide to the expansions available for 0200 hours so you can take your midnight raiding out into desert scuffles, prison escapes, secret labs, and plucky French villages holding out against the German invader.

Thanks to Grey for Now Games for sending over some of the expansions included below.

Desert Raid

The other kind of midnight raiding in WW2 was notably noisier than the knife-in-the-dark commando raids, but nevertheless works well in 0200 Hours. Pick up the Desert Raid expansion if you want to blow up fuel dumps, play SAS Rogue Heroes, make Fitzroy Maclean jealous and strike a decisive and annoying blow against the Afrika Korps.

The big mechanic here is the Weather cards, and these play a massive role in making the set feel different to the base game. You start the game with a weather card in play, and shuffle another into the event deck - a change in the weather is (may be) coming, but you don’t know when! As the weather cards are hugely impactful, either changing the all-important spotting distance, or making key actions more difficult, this can really change the pace of the game. If the weather is favourable to the attacker at the beginning of the game, expect a smash-and-grab assault, but if not it’ll be a cagey process of manoevering for the weather to change before completing the objective. It’s a simple mechanic that does a lot, and playing with (and against) the weather is going to mark out the true LRDG operative, helped by two veteran cards which give you a chance to mitigate - or switch out - weather effects.

0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

The attackers gain a solid set of fighter options representing the SAS, LRDG, Popski’s Private Army and other raiding specialists. They’re tough, well equipped and experienced in the desert - most can at least roll to avoid negative weather effects - but there’s very few of them so expect to either tool them up with requisitions or have them bring along some less desert-experienced SAS from the main game along for the ride. There’s a unique, and very good, SAS character in here as well, who more or less operates as a one-man army!

Defenders aren’t left out, with a chunky six new fighter cards representing seasoned Afrika Korps troops riding (or running) to the rescue of the base game sentries. This is a nice bit of on-theme work, representing increased security and rapid response forces put to combat Allied raiding. The Seasoned Afrika Korps troopers are better equipped and better at spotting attackers, making them powerful reinforcements once the alarm has been raised. I’d have liked some cards for Italian sentries in here, but in lieu of that we get a Luftwaffe Pilot for scenario play - good to use this in the base game too! - and, for some reason, that bastard Rommel. The guy who absolutely knew Sonderkommandos were operating behind his lines is here as a target for assassination or capture, but comes with a raft of defensive event cards making him a tricky prize to capture. Still, capture him and then we won’t have to suffer eighty years of Nazi apologists painting him as a good guy.

Partisan Resistance Cell

Covering the activities of Partisans, Resistance Fighters and SOE operatives, Partisan Resistance Cell is a chunky expansion adding new fighters that range from Civilians with a gun to Resistance heroes and punchy Jedburgh teams. This is the expansion for you if you watched Allo Allo too many times, want to liberate Yugoslavia with Tito or have bought all-in on Bad Squiddo’s resistance range.

The expansion covers Jedburgh teams (Allied soldiers and SOE dropped in to assist/lead resistance operations) with four soldier cards. They’re a little less fighty than the base game SAS equivalents, but offer really impactful boosts to Partisan operatives, representing the increased level of kit and logistical support given to local cells. Partisans are covered by 14 new fighter cards, with a spread of tough officers and sergeants, cheap, lightly armed recruits and regulars. Partisan recruits might not get an awful lot done, but they’re good for activations, drawing fire and distraction. There’s also 6 unique Partisan cards in here, which each present particular comic book/movie/tv archetypes and provide clever - if expensive - ways to embed a really hard bastard into your Partisan group.

A Partisan force could go very wide, with a lot of cheap, paired, fighters, or specialise into heroes and Jedburgh - the possibility to switch out recruits for irregulars and then heroes as campaign play progresses could create some great narrative arcs.

Wargames Atlantic Partisans with WA WW1 weapons. Credit: Lenoon

The key mechanic in this expansion is Plans. Plans represent the Partisans attacking on their own terms, with forward planning, local knowledge or embedded agents. They stack the deck in favour of the Partisans, much needed to balance out the fact that their troops are relatively easy to take out and aren’t that great at the fighting and shooting! Plans act as pro-attacker events, and can be drawn at the start of the game, with three kept at base though Partisan heroes and Officers can increase the number you keep. Mixing Partisans and SAS, or including lots of Jedburgh operatives leaves you with fewer plans - an all Partisan force will have access to many Plan cards. Using plans in game feels like a good, narrative building, kind of gotcha moment - a sentry that takes a smoke break instead of moving, using the local language to evade detection in a tight corner, or best of all, chucking sausages to distract guard dogs.

I’ve really enjoyed using some Partisan fighters to represent local scouts and allied resistance in my games and I think this is a must-buy expansion that adds a huge amount to the base game. If you’re sending your SAS into Northern Europe, the resistance will be there to meet you, so pick it up and incorporate them into your games!

Guards of Facility 9

One of the fairly early expansions, I have always thought of the Guards of Facility 9 expansion as “the Nazi Super Science” expansion and, being a trained scientist whose myriad ethics classes tend to begin with the Nuremberg Code, I tend to avoid that as a theme. But in truth, I think this undersells the expansion. I think it’s better thought of as the “Make the Germans More Interesting” expansion.

The plastic guards are supplemented by four metal gas-mask heads, the equipping of which will make those guards tougher in close combat, on par with a normal SAS trooper. They synergize particularly well with one of the five metal character miniatures that comes in the set, the “Chief Scientist,” who can hurl the bottle he’s holding like a grenade and produce a noxious gas cloud that the gas-masked guards are, naturally, immune too. The combination is a pretty potent area-denial weapon. There are four other characters – a Commandant, who makes your reserves arrive more reliably, the Wounded Officer who can bring sentries to him, an Adjutant that DOES THINGS, and a Gestapo Officer that allows you to re-draw Event cards the whole game.

Of these, I personally find the Gestapo Officer the most interesting – they’re almost a side-board character, or the Non-combat Units of A Song of Ice and Fire. Essentially, rather than gunning down British commandos, this character is primarily just making things go somewhere between a little and very wrong through what is effectively a deck building mechanic. It’s also the one I think is, notably, the most unsuited for solo play. The other characters just bring a little more to the table than the generic German officer from the core game, in ways that can put some significant pressure on the British. The other standout in my mind is the “It’s a Trap!” event card, which turns whatever the mission had been into a now desperate attempt to escape a fully armed and operational German garrison.

While you certainly can do Nazi Super Science shenanigans with this set, and the aesthetics are there with the gas-mask guards and the Chief Scientist, this is well worth it for anyone looking for generically more interesting German officers, and who isn’t focusing on the more setting-specific expansions like Desert Raid or Escape from Stalag Luft III.

Escape from Stalag Luft III

The Great Escape: The Movie: The Game. That’s it. That’s the brief.

It’s a good brief at that. The flow of most 0200 Hours games is some sneaking about and then, when things inevitably take a turn, a shocking amount of violence often (but not always) triggered by the attacker “going loud”. Escape doesn’t really allow you to do this – rather than heavily armed commandos, the attacking force is made up of a group of detainees, with only what weapons they can scavenge, or perhaps a smuggled knife. What this amounts to is a campaign that is essentially a series of cat-and-mouse escape and evasion puzzles, with compelling openings for trickery and personal heroics.

The set itself comes with six Escapee models, as well as a German guard on a motorcycle, as well as the cards and mission booklet for new types of gameplay, including scavenging for supplies in the form of contraband or disposing of soil being brought up from tunnelling operations beneath the base. A second set of miniatures is also available, with four Escapees no longer in uniform, but dressed in civilian clothing.

The campaign system also works well with other 0200 Hours sets, covering missions where the Escapees are trying to meet up with partisans, or get past a road block. The German guard on a motorcycle is also easy to see working into other games. He’s genuinely a new type of defender figure, one that’s loud, easy to observe, but quite fast and with genuinely good Smarts that will make hiding harder. I can also see the Run for It! order and Wirecutters veteran ability seeing a lot of use in games, the latter getting you past obstacles with greater ease and less likelihood of being spotted, and the former giving a figure a big boost for that usual end of game dash to an extraction zone as the Germans close in.

The combination of the rules for more escape-and-evasion missions and the Escapees in Civvies is what I’m the most excited about though. The combination opens up new types of gameplay, and potential scenarios that push things more towards spycraft rather than pure commando raids.

Stiff Upper Lip

If you’ve plumbed everything you can get out of raiding German positions, Stiff Upper Lip lets you switch sides to play out The Eagle Has Landed, Operation Sealion or any number of other German raid scenarios. Instead of the SAS attacking hapless sentries, Stiff Upper Lip provides Fallschirmjaeger against British sentries with an entirely new set of events and some additional mechanics to boot.

The key additional mechanic here is parachute drops, which could be very easily picked up and put into British or US themed forces by adding the Airborne Assault keyword to other trooper cards. Airborne Assault randomises which trooper (or character) the attacker places on the board, representing the scattering of men across countryside that even the most accurate WW2 para drops suffered. To offset that (slight) handicap, models using the airborne assault rules can - if they’re clever - negate an additional eye roll of a sneak action on the turn they enter. They arrive unseen, unexpected and - slightly - unreliably! The Fallschirmjaeger also come with Assault Rifles - the StG44 and FG42, which are nasty, long-range spread weapons that will often raise the alarm but do a lot of damage in the process. They represent a different type of elite raiding force than the SAS and Commandos of other expansions - they will arrive on the table and launch into very loud, very effective combat immediately, so instead of sneaking around trying to achieve an objective and escape unscathed, playing the Fallschirmjaeger is about getting into position for when you all go loud at once. It’s a good twist on the formula, backed up by solid all-rounder stats.

The British defenders are well represented with Officers, Sentries and NCOs, all of whom are surprisingly handy in close combat if often a little naff at shooting. The options are very regular - almost but not quite identical to the German sentries - which is fair enough, though possibly a missed opportunity to add one or two sentries with notably worse stats to represent home guard! The Brits also have their own event cards which provide a different set of unfortunate events to spring on the attacker. In keeping with the Fallschirmjaeger theming of “everything’s very loud”, most of these are about fighting better once push comes to shove, with two cards increasing Brawn and granting additional white dice. If the Germans are here to shoot wildly, the Brits are here to beat them back with rifle butts and bare hands!

While I thought I wouldn’t be that interested in this one, it’s sparked a lot of ideas - Eric is talking about Operation Sealion with Very British Civil War models, and I’m wondering about German raids on Slovene partisan bases. The expansion provides just enough difference in play style to give a new angle beyond a palette swap, and that’s a nice bit of work. Now I just need a Michael Caine in German uniform model…

Operation Torchlight

So…we forgot Operation Torchlight. This isn’t because it’s not a great expansion, but because of a classic “I thought you had it. No, I thought you had it…” type situation.

With that disclaimer…Operation Torchlight.

If we divide 0200 Hours expansions up into two categories, “More Options” and “A Particular Movie”, Torchlight definitely falls into the former. The biggest addition to the game is the cards and models to take Royal Marine Commandos as your attacking force (and arguably Commandos more broadly). On the more historical side of the game, this opens up a ton of options for playing part of the war that didn’t involve the SAS, ranging from Norway to Sicily.

In addition to a bunch of plastic Commandos, you get five metal characters – a demolition expert, a Highland Major, a downed RAF Pilot, an SOE Operative and an SOE Assassin. The free Operation Torchlight campaign really highlights the utility of these models both for giving some variety to objectives - rescues, investigations, etc - and for transitioning campaigns between different phases, as the downed pilot hands off critical information, the commandos act on it, etc. It also makes for a very good interface between the “base” game and the Partisans expansion we both regard highly.

With the fullness of all the newer expansions Torchlight might not seem quite as exciting, but it really helps flesh out and expand the base game, and provides a lot of potential narrative links between the base game and the later expansions. Like Facility 9 it’s an expansion that adds variety to what was already a good game. Should you buy it? It’s not load bearing, but if you prefer your special operations more Commando flavored than SAS flavored (as I do), it’s well worth it.

What Should You Pick Up?

There’s a lot here and while we're up for playing all of them, we should probably outline some priorities! All these expansions are great and add a lot to the base game, so if you’re interested in one over the others you’ll not lose anything picking them up. For me (Lenoon) though the must-buy is the Partisans. Not only do you get rules for Resistance, Partisans and Jedburgh teams, but the addition of plans and resistance heroes adds in so many amazing hooks for narrative play that just leafing through the card deck brings up dozens of campaign ideas.

For me (Eric) it's the Guards of Facility 9. As an expansion for the German/Sentry side of the game it adds a lot of additional options to make playing the sentries more interesting. It's a solid expansion that adds a lot to the base game and improves your play experience on both sides without opening up new fronts in the war.

After that, I think it’s a matter of the kind of games you want to play - Africa? Great Escape? Achtung Cthulhu? You got it, there's an expansion for it so get playing and let us know how you get on!

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don't forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website, and subscriber-only content covering competitive Warhammer 40K!

Tags: historicals | ww2 | world war 2 | 0200 hours