April 4th Game Day at Gameology AAR

We had 8 members, plus a cameo by Matt Cicero who came bearing copies of Hakkaa Paalle for us.

Matt Blackman’s Russians fell to Scott Thompson’s Germans in “Lennin’s Sons”

Dave Nicholas’ Germans defeated Eric Visnowski’s American’s in the Schwerepunkt scenario “The Go Devils”. Both of them rated the scenario quite highly.

After an all-day battle, Dan Plachta’s Russians and Rob Stai’s Germans fought to an draw in the East Side Gamers scenario “Scorpions in a Bottle”. Both spoke very highly of the scenario.

And Dave Kocot and I paired up for a pre-arranged playing of the Kakazu Ridge scenario “On the Hoss’ Side”. Dave asked me a couple of months ago if I’d be interested in playing a cave scenario with him, and I happily agreed. I had forgotten how cool the Kakazu Ridge map is. Dave came well prepared with an excellent Japanese cave complex setup, and we got underway pretty quickly. In fact, his setup was a little too good, and my attacking Americans got mowed down in short order. By the end of turn 2 Dave’s Japanese were counter-attacking and I was down to only 3 unbroken squads. Although I felt bad resigning so soon from a game that was so fun, and one that Dave had obviously spent a lot of time in preparation, there really wasn’t much hope for the Americans and we called it a Japanese win. Dave had a great set-up and played a very fine game.

Because it was still early, and we had the Kakazu Ridge map out and the cave rules were fresh in our brains, we decided to set up “Clearing Kakazu”. The ROAR shows this one fairly pro-American, so we gave the Japanese the balance and gave it a shot. I took the Americans, attacking into a village against entirely HIP defenders. My dice got hot early and I got on a roll, but Dave kept hanging in there. In the end though, the Japanese ran out of squads, and we called it an American win. While playing we realized there’s a strategy the Japanese can use that would definitely increase their chances for a win, but you really have to play the scenario once to figure it out. Both scenarios were a blast, however, and we had a great time.

We made our usual trip to The Hat for our usual excellent lunch, and returned to hear the sad news of Kevin Kiff’s passing (which I have previously commented on.) We wrapped it up at about 10:30.