March 2nd Game Day in Upland AAR

Often the game day following WCM looks like the Sunday after Easter in a church. But that wasn't the case for our game day on Saturday. We had 11 members, plus a cameo by Bruce Kirkaldy:

Larry Rohlfing's Germans defeated Dan Plachta's Americans in “Fahrenheit 352”.

Mike Meek's Russians defeated Robert Hammond's Germans in a playtest of “The Uniform Factory”.

Jim Svette's Germans defeated Fen Yan's Russians in “Setting the Stage”.

Dave Kocot's Germans and Dave Nicholas' Russians fought to a draw in “Objective Uman”.

Since I had to leave early, Scott Thompson and I tag-teamed Eric Visnowski in the Schwerepunkt scenario “Dare-Death & the Iron Division”. Eric took the attacking Japanese against me and Scott as the Chinese. This is a cool little scenario that we thought would make a good choice for a future mini-tournament. The Japanese get a company of infantry and a couple tankettes. They can win immediately by either capturing a victory building or exiting 12 EVP. The Chinese get a reinforced company and a couple of crappy ART Guns. The hook is that all the defending Chinese squads are Dare-Death. Scott and I set up pretty heavily in the victory building, with a screen across the exit area. Eric decided to move for the exit, and hit our line hard. He sent his tankettes into the gap to the left of the VC building, where one was bagged by one of our ART Guns. Meanwhile, we got lucky with a couple of CC's and were able to disengage from the initial attack, and began a delaying action to avoid the exit win. At that point, I had to pull out, and Scott took over. In the end, a couple of pinned HS's kept the Japanese from a win in a razor close finish. This scenario shows 2/6 pro-Japanese on ROAR, so we gave the Chinese the balance (an extra 3-3-7). That seemed to do the trick. We all liked this scenario a lot. It plays quickly, and the sudden death VC keep the tension high throughout. It looks like an excellent mini-tournament choice.

We made our usual trip to Farmer Boys for lunch. All in all it was a great day of ASL!