Tanks-Giving Saturday (part 2)

After the awesome game of All Quiet on the Martian Front, everyone who was left in the house had a bite to eat and moved on to the FOW table. We had eight players, four a side. The scenario was a simple shoot-em-up Meeting Engagement between a British Guards Armour Company and a Heer Panzerkompanie laden with Panthers, Hezters, StuGs and a pair of Luftwaffe 88's. Mike Baker commanded the British side of the table, while Alan barked orders to his German platoon leaders.

I was given a platoon of 4 Shermans, two Vs and two VCs, aka Fireflies with what we like to call "the big gun." I also deployed some rather bored AA platforms. Aside from a bunch of tanks, our force also had a good-sized Recce element with armored cars and UCs.

We Brits get super-aggressive right away. Since each side was trying to capture an objective we decided to get out there and do it!

Rob, Mike H and Mike Baker. Baker looks pretty confused by that tape measure.

Hans Rudel makes a pass but some furious AA fire from the platoon leader's tank forces him to break off!

A turn on and my side of the table is already a mess! One of my tanks was knocked out by an 8-rad mounting a PaK40. Retribution was swift and it was brewed up by one of Dominic's tanks. Dominic also knocked out one of his dad's StuGs with a long-range shot from a Firefly. I managed to bag another StuG with my own shooting! 

One turn more and we've bagged a third StuG! I was exposed to the Hetzers in the back but figured the risk was worthwhile. The wrecks in between were adding some concealment for me.

Well, OK. Not enough concealment. There goes my second Firefly. Nice shooting, Z.

With no Germans close enough to contest the objective, I get Mike's attention and ask him to send his Recce guys in to press the issue. We get an armored car and a UC close enough to piss off the German side of the table. HUZZAH! Be aggressive and decisive!

Way over on our left, Hans finally bags a Sherman. Good for him.

Another turn or so and the writing was on the wall for Fritz & Co. The Hetzers lost two of their platoon, The SutGs had been neutralized, MIke & Mike's tanks had flanked the hell out of the Panthers on the far side of the table and were rolling up the German baseline. 

Wow. I can't remember ever seeing German tanks get worked like that in a game of Flames. British Shermans typically can't compete but that day, the stars aligned and we managed to get a solid victory. We bagged the objective and thoroughly smashed the German tanks. As much as I dislike FOW, it's one of those games that everyone seems to know the rules for so a group of eight people can sit around and push tanks for two hours without having to crack a rulebook.

Mike, thank you so much for hosting this game day - I had a great time and I think everyone else did too.

Now... only two other AARs to work on. I got in a lot of gaming lately.

Saturday Vietnam Gaming

Saturday afternoon, gaming buddy Mark put on a Vietnam game day at Galactic Comics and Games in Statesboro, Georgia. He pulled out his tremendous collection of Viet Cong and PAVN, along with another massive pile of US regular army and Green Berets and we had three tables of rumble in the jungle! We used Flames of War Vietnam rules which everyone attending is at least vaguely familiar with. Mark threw in some additional rules to make the Green Berets truly special forces.

I decorated and played on the "Brown Water Navy" table. The other two tables were Pleiku City and a firebase in the jungle.

The fire base

Pleiku City

So, this is the Navy's boat dock and refueling station, prior to deployment. The Vietnamese would have to set up roughly 24" back from the perimeter. That parked boat was decoration and inoperable for this scenario, though there would be a working patrol boat arriving later.

My co-captain, Brad, commanded the VC to begin with, and I commanded the NVA regulars. The VC troops are the guys in classic black pajamas.You can see our brilliant plan in the two pictures at the left. Without any sort of heavy support units, it was going to have to be human wave tactics and a good amount of luck! The game would begin pre-dawn so we'd have a turn or two of darkness to shield our advance.

Mike and Dominic deployed their company. They'd get two units of Green Berets and a PBR as reserves and could request an air support visit.

My first move of any importance was to push my recoilless rifles forward to blast the base from a pretty safe distance across the lake.

The first American reinforcements arrive. John Kerry and friends would become a thorn in our side for quite a while.

VC wave number one across the fording point goes poorly. Towards the upper right, the VC assault was also repelled. This does not bode well.

I managed to get my mortars ranged in on the defenders protecting the river. This turned out to be huge later in the game.

Wave 2 against the wall was much more successful. Sappers managed to blow a gap in the wall and we assaulted with the remnants of the first VC platoon and a platoon of PAVN regulars. The defenders made a critical error by concentrating their defensive fire on the VC, wiping them out. This left the NVA platoon wide open and they swept through the defenders.

The aftermath of assault 2. Brutal.

After the failure of the first assault across the river, I got two platoons in position to advance together. A third platoon begins advancing up the road.

Mike calls Broken Arrow! Their ais comes in the form of a pair of Little Birds with miniguns. A lot of NVA regulars get shot to pieces and Mike is able to consolidate his defenders back to a tenable position.

Napoleon's most important piece of advice, "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake." Mike drops his first Green Beret unit near my mortars to shut them up. In hindsight, they'd have been much more useful:

a) dropped behind our advancing troops

b) defending the town

c) not here

Mike wanted the artillery gone. Nothing terribly wrong with that rationale except that the Americans were starting to lose troops and needed to either take the air out of our advance or put as many bodies in our target area as possible. To this point, the mortars has only caused pins and killed one infantry stand who'd left his foxhole.

By this time, Brad and I'd simply taken command of different fronts. I handled the river crossing while he managed the road side. I sent my two flamethrower teams ahead and finally made a dent in the defenders' position! You can see that the second Green Beret group has just landed inside the perimeter - feh!

Tragedy for the Americans as a lucky RPG shot connects with the Huey! Three of the six teams are killed in the wreck. 

The boat pulls up and thrashes my remaining platoon in the river and blasts three stands from the bridge! You can see that although I cleaned out the defenders pretty solidly, I lost a platoon and a half in the process.

A bit of revenge a turn later. 

Green Berets sneaking up on my recoilless rifles. Balls. They were having so much fun blasting away at the base,

The base is well and truly overrun now!

The Green Berets across the river watch the base get overrun. We assume they called in napalm on us before they slink back into the jungle.

We played for a good six hours and I think everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves.The Americans were much more successful on the other two tables - the firebase held and Pleiku City was successfully defended. Mike and Dominic chewed through seven of our platoons, plus the mortars and recoilless rifles during the engagement, to four of theirs. It was a classic meat-grinder and went pretty much as you'd expect. Mike would have like some artillery support at some point and probably could have used it, though I imagine the Vietnamese wouldn't have stood much chance of achieving their goal if there'd been more tools at the defender's disposal.

Quite a fun afternoon and thanks a bunch, Mark for organizing it!

Flames of War (and I enjoyed it)

Saturday, Morningstar Games here in Savannah hosted a FoW Tournament. The tournament was Kursk-themed since that was 70 years ago and this was an anniversary bash. Having sold off my Soviets some time ago, I threw a few lists together and ended up using one that was simply "fun." I've made plain my general dislike of FoW and Battlefront Book Sales, Inc. but since the organizers are gaming buddies, I didn't mind terribly. My list:
1ic    Panzer 3N
2ic    Panzer 4f2
Platoon    4 Panzer 3 J(late)
Platoon    4 Panzer 4 F1
Platoon    Panzergrenadiers w/ Halftracks
Platoon    3 Luchs (recon)
Platoon    4 105mm artillery
Limited FW190 Air Support

1855 points

The scenarios were set up in a dawn-till-dusk format. First game would use the "Dawn" rules, second game was normal daylight, third game would use "Dusk" rules. Believe me, nightfall in that third game was a game-changer for lots of folks.

My first game was with a fellow who drove down from Augusta, GA named Kelly. He was using a Guards Strelkovy battalion with two large infantry blobs, 3 SU122s, 3 SU85s, 6 120mm mortars, 4 152mm howitzers, and maybe something else. The mission was "Dust Up," a 3rd edition newer mission which am notoriously bad at. I just never know what to do, so I just went super-aggressive which tends to be my fall-back mode when I don't know what to do in a game. I hate sitting back and waiting for something to happen.

Our deployments. I started with artillery, Panzer IVs and the Luchs on the table with Panzer IIIs, mechanized infantry and the Kampfgruppe of my 2IC and a Panzer IV in reserve. I had to take one of the grey objectives and Kelly was trying to capture a red-marked one.

After turn 4 I think. I've run off the SU-85s - a wreck is noted in red. One of my Panzer IVs got hulled out by one of the 85s before they went away. I also shot up his heavy mortars which was quite beneficial. My objective was wide open, now to go get it!

Kelly's reinforcements eventually turned up So had to start playing some defense. My halftracks appeared and double-timed it towards my rear-area. My Panzer IVs turned their attention to the SU-122s.

The Panzer IIIs, tired of the heavy mortars, assaulted them and ran them off. The shooting match with the SU-122s went well for me and my half-tracks made mincemeat of the Strelk horde on my right. My infantry was now contesting both objectives on my side of the board.

During turn 8, I finally caused enough casualties to the giant infantry blob on my left to run them off, sealing the victory for me as Kelly had nothing to contest the objective with.

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Game 2
The next game was a "Fighting Withdrawal" against Jamey, one of our locals. He was also pushing a Strelk horde so I'd be the attacker. Jamey placed the one objective he couldn't remove far off to my right, so I piled everything I had strong on my right. In an FW mission, objectives placed by the attacker can be removed from the board later in the game. The one I'd concentrate on wasn't going to just vaporize.

 I wasn't kidding. My artillery was off to my left, but the killy stuff was lumped together. The ol' overwhelm a flank tactic is a favorite of mine.

Jamey had a shitload of 57mm and 45mm ATGs amongst his horde which dealt with my Panzer III platoon easily enough. The Panzer IVs did considerable damage to the smaller infantry company and when time cam for Jamey to withdraw a unit, he removed them before I had a chance to wipe them out.

For whatever reason I didn't take many pictures of this game. The scenario times out on turn 8. I did get troops to the objective but he had at least one stand close enough to contest, so it was a bad loss for me. I think I did rather well and Jamey went into momentary panic mode when he realized that objective couldn't be pulled off, but there were just too many stands. Since shooting casualties are selected by the player being shot at, he was just pulling bodies from the back while leaving stands close to the objective.

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Game 3
The final game of the day was to be a "Breakthrough" game at dusk. I was playing against Keith, another of the crew who traveled down from Augusta. He was using the same Strelkovy list Kelly used earlier. The table we ended up on was brutal.

The "Dragon's Spine" bisected the table from corner to corner, with a small gap in the center. This ridge kept my troops safe as they traveled from my near-right to the far-left corner. There was a paucity of cover. Keith made a major error in not putting troops in my near-left quarter. He was allowed to deploy in both quarters and I'm not sure why he didn't.

Our deployments. I kept my Panzer IVs off as my reserve who would show up on the far-left edge later in the game. I figured their better HE rounds would be of more value prying dug-in Untermenschen off the objectives.

By turn 3, my speedy Luchs platoon had nabbed the objective. Unfortunately for me, the game was a minimum of 5 full turns. Halftracks and infantry were close behind. I'm not afraid to move at the double in FoW - if your enemy can't see you, there is nothing to fear. The Panzer IIIs machinegun the Strelk company advancing towards the objectives.

When in doubt, smoke the observers. His mortars and heavy artillery were blinded. The smaller infantry group advanced towards my artillery.

An airstrike took out two of my Luchs but the third held fast. The panzergrenadiers disembarked near the objective. An amazing barrage from Keith's small 76mm guns kills one of my Panzer IIIs and bails another! I landed a barrage of my own on his two observers (live rounds this time) and killed both!

Bottom of turn 5. Darkness had fallen which saved my bacon. His planes were now useless and artillery equally useless - with the observers gone, they couldn't see shit in the darkness. His infantry advanced to the objective but couldn't get close enough to contest it. At the start of turn 6 I got the win. Neither of us ever received our reserve platoons.

I ended up getting third place out of ten players! Not bad for a game I haven't played in a while and for an army list I threw together at the last minute primarily because it featured tanks, artillery and planes. I actually really enjoyed the tournament although I was dreading it going in. Game tournaments tend to bring out the worst in gamers and there were a couple of tense moments in my game with Kelly, but by the end we were all good buddies.

Sunday Gaming

Long-time readers may remember my ranting about Flames of War and my disgust for Battlefront. New readers - see the previous sentence. Regardless, I ended up playing FoW on Sunday with Mike. Our friend Alan is trying or organize a Kursk-themed FoW tournament for August; and since Mike and I haven't played in, oh, about a year and have agreed to play in the tournament we thought we could use a refresher.

The tournament is set at a ridiculously high points value, 1860, so forces are enormous and there is not a lot of empty space on the tabletop. Having sold off much of my FoW collection last year, I used out-of-place DAK Germans for a Eastern-Front battle. The equipment was fine, the paint job - not so much.
My force list:
4 Panzer III Js
4 Panzer IV F1s
4 Panzer II Fs
2 8-Rads
Panzergrenadiers in halftracks
Battery of 105s
HQ and 2IC on Pz 3N and Pz 4F2

Mike has a British army for FoW so we converted them to a Soviet Tankovy (lend-lease) with Shermans and Lees, as well as a bucket of infantry, mortars and guns.

What followed was a tale of two dice-throwin' hands. I could do no wrong, or more precisely, Mike's dice could do no right.

Pretty ducks all in a row. Mike's company prepares to attack. I have artillery on the table and two tank platoons hidden in ambush (idling in the lower left until they truly get placed).

My Panzer IIIs along with the 2IC appear from the trees and unload on the Soviet rental tanks. Still pretty typical. Mike's awesome paper plane is about to make a strafing run on those tanks. It failed miserably.

I bring the Panzer IVs out since the forward objective was pretty exposed and vulnerable. A few more Soviet tanks get rattled. Still nothing too crazy. I did finish off a third Lee, causing a morale test which the crews passed easily.

A turn or two later. Mike moved his remaining two Lees around to get some flank shots and my Panzer IIIs in the woods. He'd also moved his Shermans up around the hill with the other objective. His gunners utterly failed to hit their targets leaving his tank platoons really exposed.

During the postmortem, we decided that Mike should have double-timed his Lees to the area I marked in pink. I would have been forced to react to them, throwing me off my comfortable position. As it was, I was able to leave my tanks in a great defensive position and return fire.

My return fire wiped out the Lees and caused enough casualties to the Shermans for them to rout. Mike called off the attack. I eliminated two tank platoons and suffered no, nada, zip, zilch casualties. All I'd removed from the table was two Kubelwagens "sent to the rear." It was a bit embarrassing and I felt bad for Mike, but "dice is dice." FoW has some serious deficiencies with the way some things work which is part of the reason I don't play it for fun any longer.

Mike has never played with Soviets in FoW before this game and they are tough to get used to. We had an extended post game chat about things and he should be better off next time if his chance cubes cooperate.

For three hours on Sunday afternoon we had a very surreal time - two guys playing a game they care nothing about, surrounded by interested parties, just as a refresher for a tournament neither of us particularly wants to play in. Ahhh life.