November 15th Game Day at Emerald Knights AAR

We had 10 members plus a cameo from Matt Cicero for the November edition of our ASL Game Day at Emerald Knights in Burbank:

Ed Esparza’s Russians defeated Dan Plachta’s Germans by a razor thin margin in the AP10 scenario “Operation Kutuzov”.

Blair Bellamy and Sal Palaez continued their march through the Paratrooper scenarios with “The Roadblock”, with Sal’s Americans defeating Blair’s Germans in a down-to-the-last dice roll playing.

Fen Yan and Kyle Li paired up for two games. In “Soldiers of Destruction” Fen’s Russians were defeated by Kyle’s Germans. Then, in “The Front in Flames” Kyle’s Russians defeated Fen’s Germans in a very close game.

That left John Lehman to take on me and Eric Visnowski in “Inherent Systemic Violence” from the latest Schwerepunkt pack. John took the combined Russian-NKVD force defending boards 49 and 51 against a powerful early-war German combined arms force. The Germans get 3 PzIII’s and a couple of PzIV E’s backing a reinforced company of 4-5-8’s with good leadership. The Russians have a mixed force of 4-4-7’s conscripts and NKVD troops backed by a couple of 76* Guns. They get 6 BT’s with a platoon of conscripts lead by a 10-2 for reinforcements. John had a good set-up. Eric and I split our forces for a high-velocity pincer attack. With only 5.5 turns to capture three victory buildings, the Germans have to keep their foot on the gas peddle. It was a wild and woolly fight capped by a swirling tank battle in the streets. When the Smoke cleared on the final turn, the Germans had barely squeezed out a victory. What a fun scenario! We had a blast, and all three of us agreed we’d play it again as either side.

Dave Nicholas arrived too late to get in on a game, but happily kibitzed all evening. We made our usual trip to Larry’s for our usual chili dog lunch served by the ever-lovely Veronica. After our games had cleared the survivors made the trek to Bob’s Big Boy for our traditional late dinner. It was another great day of ASL.