April 20th Game Day at Emerald Knights AAR

We had eight players, plus a cameo by Matt Cicero, for the April edition of our ASL Game Day at Emerald Knights in Burbank.

Jimmy Hanson brought his friend Ray Timonier to introduce him to ASL. Dave Nicholas sat with him for his first game. Ray's Americans defeated Nick's Germans in “Retaking Vierville”. Congrats Ray, and welcome to ASL!

Meanwhile Sal Palaez' Germans defeated Blair Bellamy's Russians in the airdrop scenario “First Drop”.

I got my copy of Red Factories last week, and I wanted to break it in. Mike Soffa, Jimmy Hanson and Dave Lewis were all on board with doing a big scenario, so we picked “The 138 of the 138th”. I'd played an old version of this scenario, and really wanted to try the revised MMP one. The dice gave me and Mike the defending Russians against Jimmy and D.L. as the Germans.

This scenario has a complicated set-up, with various groups of troops assigned to various areas, and many fortifications. It was probably a bit ambitious. But once we got it set up, it actually played pretty quickly. The unit density is pretty low for both sides, and each side has strengths and weaknesses. The Russians are very thin on the ground, but have lots of fortifications and concealment. They also have a 120 OBA. If the Russian uses his 10-2 as the radio operator, they get his -2 to the accuracy dr. That's huge, and makes the OBA pretty scary. The Germans have a lot of firepower, including 8-3-8's, FT's, DC's and MG kill-stacks. But like the Russians, set-up restrictions keep them pretty dispersed.

In the end, this scenario just didn't go well for the Germans. We were able to get the Russian OBA down in a perfect position and stopped the German center attack, then moved to the right and shut down the Germans attack from the north. By turn 5 it was obvious the Germans had run out of fight, and we called it a Russian victory. We all had great fun with this scenario, and all thought it would be worth doing again. Though maybe with a Russian set-up done in advance.

We enjoyed our usual chili dog lunch at Larry's. The survivors adjourned to Tallyrand's for an excellent late dinner. It was another awesome day of ASL!