April 8th Game Day in Bellflower AAR

We had four members for our SoCalASL Game Day in Bellflower.

When we arrived we were surprised to see our venue, The Guild House in Bellflower, was closed for the day. No reason given, just a paper taped to the window announcing limited hours for the week, including the Saturday closure. Dan speculated that one of the cats had died, and they were closed for the memorial service. I dunno, that's as good an explanation as any I suppose.

So, we mounted up and headed to our alternative venue: Brookhurst Hobbies in Garden Grove. This was our first trip to this venue, and I'll discuss our experience at the end of this AAR. Dan had just returned from his extensive trip to the March Madness and Noreaster tournaments, and brought a couple of new scenario packs. All of our scenarios on this day came out of the new March Madness pack:

Dan Plachta's Germans defeated Jim Svette's Russians in “Pulverized”. And because their game got over fairly quickly, they set up “Horror Show”, with Jim's Brits falling to Dan's Japanese.

And I took the Germans against Scott Thompson's Russians in “Yevpatoriya Mop Up”. This looked like my favorite kind of scenario: a well led German rifle company support by two platoons of 8-3-8 assault engineers with FT's and DC's, attacking a city defended by a company of elite Russians, supported by some NKVD troops. At first glance, this looked tough on the Germans, since they only outnumbered the Russians by a couple of squads, and the Russians have better morale. But the Germans get a 10-2, 9-2, two 9-1's, an 8-1 and 8-0, plus a 105 OBA module and a couple of 222's. Scott chose an up-front defense that looked pretty intimidating. I decided to play aggressively, relying on the quality of my troops and leadership.

As Scott observed, if you go with an up-front defense, you have to roll low early and inflict your damage quickly. Scott's rolls were not that good, and I was rolling well, and though I lost a couple of HS's on the first turn, everything on the German side pretty much went according to plan. I was up in Scott's grill at the end of turn 1. I continued to play aggressively on turn 2, and slipped the 222's into his backfield. By the end of turn 2, with the Russians facing the loss of nearly half their OB for failure to rout, we called this one a German victory. I liked this scenario and would definitely try it again. On any given day, Scott's up-front defense might have worked, it just didn't work that day. A defense in depth would also be a formidable prospect.

Because our game got over quickly, we decided on a small second scenario “10th Panzer Takes the High Ground”. This looked like a cool scenario on board 5A, with a couple of dug-in platoons of American 6-6-7's holding a fortified hill in Tunisia, facing infantry elements of Afrika Korps.

Unfortunately, we set up the boards and pulled the counters before we really looked through the SSR's. The SSR's changed the orchards to crags, woods to brush and roads to wadi's. Ok, that's pushing the envelop, but we could live with that. It was the final SSR that stated: “all elevation changes (including wadis) are treated as an abrupt elevation change.” That means adding an additional level to each elevation change. The problem was the terrain was already steep, and with roads treated as wadi's, there were very few hexes in front of the German set-up area where they weren't moving through a wadi *and* a slope hex. It meant that nearly every hex required a extensive amount of advance mathematics to calculate movement costs. Frankly, this is exactly the type of scenario I don't like to play; I found it impossible to get a sense of where and how to move my troops and time my attack. By the end of the German turn 2 movement phase, I was mentally exhausted from the MF calculations. For me, this was not a fun scenario, and I was more than willing to hand Scott the victory, just to escape further agony. It is rare for me to say a scenario is un-fun. But for me, this scenario falls into that category. Perhaps your mileage will vary.

As I said earlier, circumstances forced us to move to Brookhurst Hobbies for the day. They had opened a gaming room next to the store about a year or so ago. I had checked it out one day last fall when I was working in the neighborhood, and I knew it was a nicely finished, well-lit room with AC, plenty of new tables, and comfortable chairs. The store charges $3 per day to play. The place was pretty busy, and because we didn't get there until after 12:30, table space was getting scarce. But we were able to snag a nice 6 foot table and four comfortable executive style swivel chairs. The room is smaller than St. Crispin's, but quite a bit less noisy. We were quite comfortable and all agreed it would work perfectly fine should we lose The Guild House. I saw a lot of people there that I recognized from our time at St. Crispin's. I wasn't surprised, its a vastly superior venue. Plus it's next door to Brookhurst Hobbies, which is an awesome take all by itself.

For lunch, we had the choice of 30 or 40 Asian fish restaurants within walking distance. We opted instead to drive two blocks to Blaze, a make your own pizza place that proved to be a good choice. We had a great day of it overall.