March 3rd Game Day at Montclair AAR

We had 8 members for the March edition of our ASL Game Day at Gameology in Montclair.

Jon Jaramillo's Germans defeated Bruce Kirkaldy's Brits in “Cold Crocodiles”.

Peter Strand's Germans defeated Fen Yan's Americans in a down to the last CC playing of “Surrender or Die”.

And because these first two games got over quickly, Jon and Fen paired up for “Guards Counterattack”, with Jon's Russians edging out Fen's Germans.

Meanwhile, John Lehman's Americans and Eric Visnowski's Germans fought to a draw in “Desobry Defiant”.

I came to this Game Day with the objective of diving into the Communist Chinese from Forgotten War. Dave Nicholas was up for the challenge and took the defending Marines in “This is Where We Stand”. And a challenge it was. This scenario has a dozen well-led Marines defending a hill against 45 (!!) Communist Chinese squads, at Night, with Ground Snow, and Steep Hills, and OBA, and Pop-Up Trip Flares… what no landing craft? We expected to spend the day with our noses in the Rule Book.

For those who have yet to tackle Forgotten War, the Communist Chinese are as different to the system as the Japanese when they were first introduced. They stripe like Japanese, have Political Officers that are sort of like Russian Commissars, and their leaders are sort of like Japanese. But they have some major movement (Infantry Platoon Movement) and firing restrictions that are completely unique to the system.

The Chi-Coms have to enter their 45 squads from the side of board 2. That means they only have to go about 6 to 8 hexes, but all up hill, in the snow, in the face of 80mm OBA and tremendous Marine firepower. Since only two thirds of the board is used, there's not a lot of room for fancy maneuvers. With crappy Chinese firepower, range and firing restrictions, the name of the game is to retain Cloaking as much as possible and jump into H-t-H CC. The casualties were frightful, but the weight of numbers prevailed, and by turn 4 the Marines were down to two or three isolated outposts, completely surrounded by Chinese. We called it a Chi-Com victory. It was fun, interesting and instructional. Because of the close quarter nature of the attack, the Chinese movement restrictions weren't much of a factor. We're both looking forward to trying another one.

We had our usual lunch at The Hat, and the survivors trekked to Tommy's for dinner. It was a great way to spend a rainy Saturday.