November 18th Game Day at Emerald Knights AAR

We had an excellent turnout of 10 members, plus a cameo from Matt Cicero, for the November edition of our ASL Game Day in Burbank.

Nadir Elfarra's Germans defeat John Leggat's Brits in “First Cristot”.

Eric Visnowski and James Quinn's Russians defeated Sal Pelaez's Germans in “Skill in Khilki”.

Ed Esparza's Japanese defeated Dave Nicholas' Americans in “A Quick Strike”.

And Dan Plachta and I paired up for “In Deadly Combat”. Dan had played this twice as the Germans and thought it was hard on the Russians. So I set up the defending Germans. We were later joined by Blair Bellamy, who took part of the Russians with Dan.

I set up the Germans with a bias to the German right, which is where I thought Dan would go, but I hedged my strength to the middle, just in case… Dan came in hard on the German left, where all I had was a couple of conscript HS upstairs in a two hex building up front, backed up by one 1st line squad with an LMG further back, a bunch of dummies, and a 7-0 led platoon of conscripts as reserve toward the center-left. Dan's secondary attack, with 7 squads and 2 tanks, came up on the right, but got hit by the German 105 and melted into conscripts. Blair joined us at that point, and revived this side and send it in for the final attack. Meanwhile, in the center-left, Dan organized a human wave that came though my dummies and set up his following attack into the central factory, which was the keystone of my defense. My troops fought hard, but were eventually overwhelmed. I failed to follow the 'Fretlohr Principle': “if you think you can hold the building for one more turn… get out now.” That failure cost me all of my factory defending force that should've pulled back to a secondary line. As it was, my surviving Germans eventually held on for the win, but just barely. We had a fun game, but after 3 German wins we all really felt this is probably hard on the Russians. However, in all three games both sides took their optional armor. It would be interesting to try it as the Russians without the optional KV's (which reduce the VC's from 4 buildings to 3.)

We had our usual chili dog lunch served by the lovely Veronica. The survivors retired for our traditional late dinner at Bob's Big Boy. It was great to have such a nice turn-out for an excellent day.