It's a World War 1 Saturday! (part 1)

Saturday at Morningstar Games in Savannah we broke out the First World War games again and engaged in further slaughter of toy soldiers! We had a very strong turn out again - more folks who don't normally game with us. I'm not going to work up full AARs but here are some pictures of the action.

First up was Games Workshop's "Great War" which is basically 40K with different models. I was the Allied C-in-C, with Ziggy taking the Brits and Jon taking the Americans. Mike and the two kids took the Germans who were tasked with holding the town in the face of the Allied attack. My brilliant plan was to attack up the edges of the board and pinch in once we'd made some headway. We had to capture eight buildings and the church at the far end.

The Germans were deployed in secret. I guessed that Mike wouldn't deploy their cannon in a table corner, limiting its lines of sight, which would make the side "gutters" relatively safe for advancing infantry. The gun was pure murder the last time we played and I wanted no part of it.

It's a long way to Tipperary! I controlled the tank, two HMGs and two mortars. My sub-commanders controlled the infantry.

The Americans got held up by a well-placed machine gun.

While the Brits get hemmed up on another gun on their side of the field. Ol' Smokey has had some engine trouble and is spewing clouds of soot but otherwise is in good shape.

Here's a shot of the players.

A shot from the American mortar goes awry and causes significant "friendly fire" casualties. Jon wasn't happy but the German players thought it was pretty amusing.

Amusing anyway until I cleared out half the Fritzes in the building on our left with a second mortar bombardment.

The Germans on our right fall back to the ruined building to outdistance the mortar and buy some time behind the deadly fire of the machine gun there.

Some liberties may have been taken by the Germans - you can actually see Mike bending the rules in this shot.

Here's shot of Zig's Brits on the left. One squad has taken the ruined building, the others have taken positions in the woods. The German squads in the middle buildings come out to greet them but this would ultimately prove disastrous.

You can see the squad nearest to us has been decimated. My tank has immobilized itself but it was still in a decent spot to support the left side. 

A nice blur-o-vision shot of the American's working their side of the field - firing rifle grenades into the ruins. It took a while but they eventually got the machine gun to run off.

At that point the Germans only had one intact squad, plus a mortar and cannon. We called it there after six full turns - it had been two and a half hours and we had other games to play! I solid Allied victory for sure, but a hard fought one that had its challenges. The flank machine gun positions were terribly effective and it was quite a chore to deal with both.

I'm not sure how much wargaming Alex and Andrew had prior to this game but they really seemed to enjoy it. Hopefully they'll be interested enough to keep with it.

Later in part 2... Victory at Sea. The Axis gets a bit of revenge.