July 15th Game Day at Irwindale AAR

As expected we had an excellent showing of 13 members for our SoCalASL Game Day at Apex Fasteners in Irwindale:

Eric Visnowski's Germans defeated Larry Reinking's Americans in “T-Patchers”.

Mike Soffa's Germans fell to Dan Plachta's Russians in “Kiss of Fury”.

Dave Nicholas' Russians barely squeaked out a win over James Quinn's Germans in “Into Vienna Woods”.

In another close game, Scott Thompson's Germans defeated Sal Palaez' Kiwi's in “The Umbrella Men”.

Blair Bellamy's Germans fell to Tim White's Russians in “War of the Rats”.

And Jon Jarramillo took the Russians against me and Matt Cicero as the Germans in the VotG scenario “Storming the Factory.” I love the Valor of the Guards module. Thanks to my good friend Don Petros, who designed and painted the map, I was in on the development of the module from its very beginning. My weekly group playtested CG IV three times, and Don and I had playtested an early version of “Storming the Factory”. I like the scenario a lot, and have played the final version it a couple of times since. The ROAR shows this 2/1 pro-Russian. Personally, I think it's a lot closer than that. Besides, its a big, meaty, fun scenario and well worth the effort. Jon chose the Russians, and Matt and I took the Germans straight up.

The Germans get a total of 8 StuG's, and the Russians get a couple of T34's, but this is really an infantry scenario. It's all about assault engineers, FT's, Fanatic Russians defending fortified buildings, and lots of firepower. Our plan was for me to take the firepower of the on-board forces to hit the Russians from the north, while Matt took the oncoming assault engineers to hammer the Rail Station straight on from the west. We had a small holding force in the south, supplemented with half the StuG's. Our pre-game bombardment was completely ineffective.

Jon had an excellent set-up, and our southern force ran into some well-placed AP mines and got hung up. Matt brought up the engineers for a turn 2 assault, and I went across the street hard and fast from the north, under the over-watch of two kill stacks and cover from 3 StuG's. We used two rifle platoons to make a secondary attack on the Rail Station from the north, and the weight of those two attacks took its toll on the Russians. By turn 3 they were forced out. But in the north my attack was running into trouble when my 9-2 broke, then went Berserk in the rally phase and took a squad across the street alone. Meanwhile another of Jon's well-placed minefields KIA'd one of my 5-4-8's and broke another, slowing my attack down significantly.

In the end, the fall of the Rail Station allowed me to send two rifle platoons into the fight in the north, while the assault engineers started rolling up the Russians south of the station, and it was obvious the Russians were in trouble. We called it a German victory on turn 4. This was a hard fought battle, and we all had fun. I'd take the Germans again, straight up, regardless of what the ROAR says.

We had our usual excellent lunch at the Mexican restaurant across the street. The survivors enjoyed a late dinner at BJ's. Thanks again to Matt and Bryan for hosting us. As always, it was an awesome day of ASL in Irwindale!