March 19th Game Day at Emerald Knights AAR

We had five members, plus a cameo by Blair Bellamy, for our March Game Day at Emerald Knights in Burbank.

Dave Nicholas, Sal Palaez and Dan Plachta teamed up for “Aiding the Local Constabulary” one of the 3-player scenarios from the new Journal, with Nick as the Mutineers, Dan as the Italians and Sal as the South Africans. Turns out 3-player scenarios are much more time consuming than they look, and Nick, Dan and Sal just ran out of time and called this one a draw.

That left me and Ed Esparza paired up, and we chose the new VotG scenario “Bad Day for the Luftwaffe”. I was really excited about this scenario; first, I love VotG, and second, I love scenarios where you get points to purchase part of your force. The dice gave me the Germans, and chose the 4 elite squads, FT, LMG's and low level leadership. The Russians also get to choose part of their force, and Ed took the 6-2-8 assault engineers and T34. In retrospect, I think there are two primary strategies for the Russians. They can either gang up on one of the German forces and try to crush it before the other arrives, or string out and make the Germans come to them. Ed tried a combination of both, and unfortunately that, and some rather shitty dice rolling, did him in early. We decided to call this a German win after turn 3, to allow us time to try something else.

Our second scenario of the day was “The Deadly Line”, with Ed choosing the Japanese and me taking the attacking Russians. This is a late war scenario where the Japanese get 12 TH Heroes, and some poor quality troops with no SW' to try to defend a hill and some open ground. Ed had a bad time with his TH Heroes, but excellent luck with his ART Guns, which immobilized both OT34's back-to-back on turn 2. But his TH Heroes failed to kill even a single Russian tank. That left my Russians with way too much firepower an mobility to hold back, and the Japanese were ground up on the hill.

We had our usual chili dog lunch, served as usual by the ever-lovely Veronica. The survivors adjourned to Bob's Big Boy for our usual late dinner. It was another great day of ASL!