Tanksgiving Games (an AAR twofer!)

Last Saturday, November 26, a few of us made the two-hour drive to Mikey's house in Waycross for some Tanksgiving toy soldiers. First up was Dystopian Wars. We had four players so it was easy to give each 750 points worth of stuff and commence smashing. I brought my Blazing Suns armored forces and was paired with newbie Bill who borrowed Mike's Prussians. Mike used his British and was paired up with David's first-battle Russians.

The British and Prussian armies don't have your typical composition - no larges is the most obvious peculiarity. Mike but the lists together as "teaching" armies and simply used them for this outing - it resulted in a 1500-point game with only two big machines per side - a bit weird for sure!

The deployment of the Japanese and Prussian troops. I kept the squid and big walker essentially centered. All of the Prussian artillery was on our left, covering a large open area. We were sure to give it plenty of open LOS so finding targets wouldn't be a problem.

The British and Russian deployment. Mike's artillery were "hedged in" and in my opinion, the Russian landship was a deployed a bit conservatively. The drill was underground, abreast of the Belgorod.

This was the story early in the battle. The Coalition won initiative and would move a unit forward. The Bond would then move up, getting into range of the previously moved unit and smacking them. A beautiful "generator offline" on a filthy, nasty Steward. Huzzah!

Our players

A view off to the right of the battle. The big central hill did a marvelous job of splitting the opponents' force in two.

My Myobu snap a few shots at a British artillery gun. These little guys were wonderful for harassing the artillery.

An overhead shot towards the end of turn 2. By the end of turn 2, the Bond was way ahead on points, 315 to 65.

The drill appears! Its cargo of small tanks is disgorged. All Prussian and Japanese guns have a new priority target.

And within minutes, the drill is a smoking wreck as it is hammered mercilessly.

The driver of the Belgorod makes the assumption that two giant Russian vehicles cannot possibly die in the same spot and drives to where the drill got killed.

And turn four turns into a shooting gallery of KILL THE BELGOROD! The Prussians knock it down to just one hull point.

Then a squadron of Chi Ris quickly trundle over and finish it off. Woo Hoo!

Squiddy floats towards the village to unbalance the situation over there on the right which has been quite a melee of Terriers, Mk 2s, and Reckes, with some A6s in reserve.

After turn 4, we'd achieved our objective of destroying 50% of the enemy force including all large/massive units. The tally was a whopping 1040 to 430.

Yeah, it was a lop-sided affair but I think fun was had all-around. Aside from Bill, everyone's dice were crap. Sure, we'd have a good roll here and there, but Bill's were consistently amazing and that had a lot to do with our victory. The Bond team made a few mistakes, primarily in deployment, that put them on the back foot early but hot dice beat tactics as we all know.

Amazingly, the Blazing Suns lost NO units at all - all Bond casualties were Prussian. The fact that both Russian large units died on literally the same spot of ground was also quite amusing.

After we cleaned up, it was on to a big game of Ogre/GEV. Well, GEV since we decided to do away with the Ogres. David and I were on the NA Combine team, armed with a shitload of GEVs and infantry. The Pan Euro team of Mike and Bill was armed only with much slower tanks (and infantry). The Combine were able to select their mission secretly and only had to deploy half of their force initially. The PE then would deploy their whole (larger) force to defend an unknown objective.

David and I chose the objective of scouting 5 city hexes on the PE side of the map.

Our brill plan was deploy our initial forces centrally, in the hopes of getting the PE to follow suit. It sort of worked. The road on the left side of the map was to be our yellow brick road to glory!

Right out of the gates, I shut down the damned laser on the far left. Central forces moved up. A PE Super Heavy rolls up into the city hex on MY road. 

The dreaded chore of dealing with Supers using only GEVs combined with shit dice rolls.

The fight in the center does not go super great for the Nord-americains. We chose to blame dice since there's no way that well-dug-in troops could simply shrug off our light raiders the way the shore ignores the waves. At least with our GEV movement, we were able to escape very harsh retribution.

Finally some headway on the YBR.

Don't have any pics of the moment it happened but David and I made the "oh F it" decision and bailed on the center, making a massive jailbreak left. The PanEuros had to march with us, albeit much more slowly. Hehehe. David left a couple of stragglers in the middle and right that tied up a nice collection of PE Ponces for the duration. 

Like wet Gremlins, the combine swarm the bejezus out of the left side of the map. PE fire couldn't effectively slow that many spread-out units.

Bwahahaha! We settle in and hunker down. The rear guard blocks the PE from ruining our party.

VICTORY! Successfully scouted hexes are marked with yellow Xes. The PE only had a single Super left in that corner to harass our troops and we'd occupied more hexes than it could hit.

That was a terrific game. Around 10:00PM David and I were ready to give up and start driving home. We were getting wrecked and there was no hope at all. We only stayed out of respect to our host. By 10:15, the jailbreak was in full effect and Mike and Bill were in full "Oh Shit" mode. It was a race at that point and we managed to pry out a victory.

Thanks Mike for hosting us and feeding us and putting up with our complaints of rigged dice and horribly unbalanced scenarios. I had a great time and am looking forward to hosting the third Memorial Day Bash in six months!