December 15th Game Day at Emerald Knights AAR

We had seven members, plus a cameo by Matt Cicero, for our SoCalASL Game Day at Emerald Knights in Burbank.

Eric Visnowski's French defeated Blair Bellamy's Germans in “Defending Jandrain”.

Dave Kocot's Germans defeated Larry Reinking's Russians in “Cavalry Brigade Model”.

And Dan Plachta took the Russians against me and Dave Nicholas as the Germans in the Friendly Fire scenario “Amerikanskaya Suka” (American Bitch). This scenario is as much a battle of wits as an ASL scenario. Both sides get hard choices about where to bring on their reinforcements, and it creates a game within the game. The Russians start with one multi-hex building and only need to hold it, plus take one more. They start with five 6-2-8's and five T34-85's on board. They have a second force consisting of a couple of platoons of infantry in trucks, and four Lend Lease American M-10 TD's. The Germans get a couple of platoons of 4-4-7's and two JdPz IV's on board. The get also get a couple of platoons of infantry in trucks, backed by three Panthers. This reinforcing group has the opportunity to enter well into the German backfield and threaten the Russian VC building there. So both sides get some very mobile groups that can strike quickly and deep into enemy territory.

It was obvious that if the Russians came on and got too far forward, the German reinforcement group would sweep into their rear and grab the mandatory VC building. So we used our on-board force to hit the German on-board defenders hard, and held our reinforcing group back to see what Dan would do with his reinforcements. He responded to this by bringing part of his infantry in the reinforce his left, and the Panthers came straight in to challenge the T34's on the right. I responded on turn 2 by withdrawing my T34's way back, while Nick swung the Russian reinforcing group toward the German left. Dan responded by ignoring the T34's and using the Panthers to crush almost all of my 6-2-8 group. We responded on turn three by rushing all of our AFV's from two directions into the center to gang up on the Panthers. When the smoke cleared, the Panthers were dead or Recalled, and one JdPz had a broken MA. The Russians still had two operational T34's and three M-10's. The swirling battle continued, but it was getting late and looked like the Russians would prevail. So we declared them the winners and headed off to dinner. I'm not sure Nick and I beat Dan as much as we wore him out…

This is an interesting and fun scenario that is vastly more complicated than it looks at first glance. We all said we'd happily try it again as either side.

We enjoyed our usual chili-dog lunch at Veronica's, and the survivors adjourned to Bob's Big Boy for our traditional late dinner. It was another great day in Burbank!