November 11th Game Day at Bellflower AAR

We had 8 members, plus a cameo by Scott Thompson, for the November edition of our SoCalASL Game Day at the Guild House in Bellflower:

Eric Visnowski's Americans defeated Blair Bellamy's Germans in the Beyond the Beach scenario “Merely Hanging On”.

Jim Cotugno's Germans defeated Dave Nicholas' Russians in “Mechanized Sacrifice”.

Stance Nixon's Germans fell to Dan Plachta's Americans in the ESG scenario “Frosty the Dead Man”. And because their game got over very quickly they turned it around. In the second playing, Dan's Germans defeated Stance's Americans.

And Dave Lewis took the attacking Hungarians against my defending Russians in “Extracurricular Activity”. This is another favorite of mine from the list of scenarios to be republished in the next reprint of AoO. This scenario is 60/40 pro-Russian on the ROAR, and the proposed fix is to add a squad and LMG to the Hungarians. Dave chose the Hungarians. I have a special fondness for this scenario. Several years ago I won as the Hungarians against Pierce Mason for a mini-tournament plaque at ASLOK, in a very close and hard-fought game.

The Hungarians get 15 well-led squads and 5 LMG's supported by 4 Zrynii II assault guns. The Russians get a solid company of infantry supported by two T34-85's. I set up pretty conservatively, well back from the front line and behind the long boulevard the bisects the playing area. I put one tank behind the wall next to the victory building and the other on my right. I set up a strong secondary position with a platoon of infantry, one LMG and the 8-1 on the far right with the T34. This is a favorite defensive tactic of mine because it serves two purposes: it keeps the attacker from sending a flanking force on a long end run, and it creates a threat that can't be ignored. If the attacker ignores it, I can convert that position into a counter-attack force and hit the attackers from behind as they're approaching the victory building. In order to deal with it, the attacker will have to divert a strong force in the completely wrong direction from the attack on the victory building.

Dave had some bad luck on his initial Smoke shots; getting only 1 of 3. But he pushed his men forward with confidence and by turn 2 got them up to the wide boulevard without casualties. He created two attack forces; a very strong main attack on my left, heading directly toward the victory building, and a secondary force that came in roughly in the center of the board, to the left of my flank force. I continued to play very conservatively and did a lot of skulking until the bottom of turn 4, when I stood my ground and Prep fired adjacent into Dave's main attack. I broke 2/3 of the squads there, and that cost Dave an entire turn to rally and reorganize his attack. In the meantime, I had managed to pick off one of the Zrynii's with a T34, and another was Recalled on a Gun repair roll. On the last Russian movement phase I counter-attacked with one T34, sending it one-on-one against a surviving Zrynii's, killing it with bounding fire, then moving into the Hungarian backfield to DM a lot of broken units. I had again fired point-black at Dave's attackers, except this time I didn't break anyone. Dave's return fire broke one of my squads. But it left his squads in position for a powerful last-turn Prep fire phase. Unfortunately for Dave, his last turn Prep shots were ineffective, and he had simply run out of unbroken squads to push into the building. My Russians won by 2 squads. Had he broken my front line squads in Prep, Dave would have won by 1 squad. It was a fun and very close game.

We had our usual lunch at Burger King, and the survivors, plus Stance's wife Cheryl, adjourned to Chris and Pit's for our usual late dinner. What a great day of ASL!