September 1st Game Day at Gameology

We had nine players, plus a cameo by Scott Thompson, for the September edition of our ASL Game Day at Gameology in Upland.

Jim Svette's Germans just barely defeated Fen Yan's Kiwi's in “Kiwi Attack”.

Bruce Kirkaldy's Germans defeated Mike Meeks' French in “The Abbeville Bridgehead”.

Dave Nicholas' Russians defeated Dan Plachta's Germans in “Pulverized”.

And John Lehman and I took the attacking Russians against Eric Visnowski's SS in the Deluxe version of “Himmer's House”. The SS get about two companies of mixed quality (6-5-8's and 4-4-7's) infantry with an ELR 3 and Ammo Shortage. They have couple of 105 ART and 88L AA Guns. The victory conditions are very simple: the Russians win immediately if they control building aK3. They get plenty of firepower to get the job done: 35 elite squads, 3 FT's, 5 DC's and a couple of 9-2's. They also get six tanks; two each OT-34's, SU-100's and JS2M's.

In my mind, the key to this scenario is to engage quickly and get the defender to start shooting. With Low Ammo, things will start to break, and low ELR will start to degrade their infantry quickly. Eric's defense was spread out pretty much across the board to prevent the Russian flank attack. The Russians get plenty of time (8 turns) but they're separated into two unsupporting pockets and have a lot of difficult terrain to cross. John took the right hand side, with a two HMG, 9-2 led killstack in the center, overwatching a couple of platoons of 6-2-8's. The remainder of John's troops went to the right, and would try to develop an assault into the flank of the victory building. My force, with all the FT's and tanks, would attack diagonally from their jump-off pocket and head straight to the gully to the left side of the victory building, then around to the rear. We were both very worried about the SS San of 6, but for whatever reason we didn't put any Sniper protection in the street. Let's just say, we rolled a lot 6's on turn 1 and EV turned almost every one into a Sniper attack. By turn 2 the 9-2 was dead, and a German HMG rate tear broke nearly every Russian squad in our center. We sent another leader in, but he died to the Sniper on turn 3. At one point, we had 6 broken squads and yet another leader in the building, but the SS Sniper picked the leader out of seven units in the location and wounded him.

By turn 4, John's attack on the right was struggling. But our troops in the center were finally rallied. The left hand force had made steady progress thanks to the OT-34's. But Eric had pulled most of his surviving troops into or near the victory building. We felt the SS Sniper really held up our assault by a couple of turns, and we probably didn't have enough time to clear the building. With time running out, we called this one a German win. We had a lot of fun with this. It's rare when we have enough time and space at a Game Day to try a scenario like this with 4 boards and 55 total squads. I'd like to try this again, perhaps on Sunday at WCM XXII.

We decided to mix it up a little this month, and chose to walk to Farmer Boys instead of going to The Hat for lunch. That worked out well. The survivors returned to Louis' Chicken & Fish Grill for another excellent dinner. All and all, it was another great day of ASL!