October 19th Game Day at Emerald Knights AAR

We had 9 members, plus a cameo from John Lehman, for the October edition of our ASL Game Day at Emerald Knights:

Nadir ElFarra and Kevin Kiff paired up for Action Pack scenario “Hell for the Holidays”. Pete Shelling designed this scenario and I helped playtest it. I thought it was pretty good, and Nadir and Kevin agreed. In the end, Nadir’s Germans defeated Kevin’s Americans.

Blair Bellamy took on Dave Rosner in the new Friendly Fire scenario “Dryga Larpengar”. I played this scenario at ASLOK and really liked it. I recommended it Blair and Dave, and they enjoyed it as well. In this playing Dave’s Finns defeated Blair’s Russians.

Eric Visnowski and Dan Plachta were in the mood for a monster scenario, and settled on “Blood on Hill 192” from the Behind the Beachhead pack. This looked like a pretty cool scenario, with Eric’s Americans attacking in battalion strength, backed by 3 OBA missions, assault engineers and armor, against a hedgerow/hill strong-point defended by German paratroops, pillboxes, mines, wire, AT guns and vehicles. Reinforcements come in the form of 8-3-8 assault engineers. They go though turn 4 (of but knew they couldn’t finish and called it a draw. I’ll tell you, this looks trey cool, I think it’s doable as a Barbecue scenario if the Germans do their set-up in advance.

And Glenn Sellar and I paired up for the early war scenario “The Wisps Come and Go” by LFT. It has Brits and French assaulting a farm complex defended by some well-armed Germans. In our first playing I took the Allies, who handily beat the Germans. Near the end of this first playing, Dave Nicholas arrived. So for our second playing I took the Germans against Dave as the Brits and Glenn as the French. I had some pretty hot dice in this second playing, and we declared it a German victory about half way through. Ultimately we concluded it really wasn’t that interesting a scenario, as there really aren’t many options on the attack or defense. Both sides line up and slug it out. The side with the hotter dice will win.

Matt Cicero came by and distributed copies of Rising Sun. Steve Thorne, Jim Cotugno and Scott Thompson: I have your copies.

The survivors made their way over to Bob’s Big Boy for our traditional late dinner; always the best way to end a great day of ASL. Personally I felt I had a pretty good day; I got to spend it with a terrific bunch of guys, I won both my games, and the Red Sox clinched the American League Pennant. It doesn’t get much better than that.