December 14th Game Day in Bellflower AAR

We had 8 members for the December edition on our ASL Game Day at The Guild House in Bellflower. It turned out to be a good day for the Germans:

Larry Reinking's Germans defeated John Lehman's Americans in “Down in the Count”.

Dan Plachta's Germans defeated Dave Nicholas' Americans in “Priests on the Line”.

Stance Nixon's Germans defeated Guy Jimenez' Brits in the classic scenario “3rd RTR in the Rain”.

I wanted to try the new Deluxe scenario “Death Takes a Toll”. I'd seen Fen Yan and Jim Svette play this one last month. Well, it turns out that Jim and Fen played their game with the wrong board, so Fen was up to trying this one again. He took the defending Canadians against my attacking SS troopers. The Germans get a well armed and led company of 6-5-8's plus two platoons of 5-4-8 SS assault engineers, with a FT and 4 DC's. But the Canadians are hardly push-overs, with 13 4-5-8's, supported by an 81mm MTR and some MG's. And they have some great terrain to defend. The SS have seven turns to hammer their way though a board of hedgerows, and then kick the Canadians out of a cluster of stout stone buildings.

Fen had a good set-up and I saw no flaws that I could exploit. So I set up for a left hook and sent my assault engineers forward to place smoke and cover my assault. Fen used half squads and dummies to good effect, and made me fight for every hedge. But the delay was proving costly in manpower, and for the first 3 turns we basically even in casualties, mostly from CC. By turn 4 it was coming down to whether I was going to run out of time before Fen ran out of men. During that turn, I took some risks with a platoon of 6-5-8's and a 9-1, trying to swing around the Canadian left. Fen managed to break them, and then launched a nifty counter-attack on that flank that nearly bagged them. But in the end, Fen ran out of men just before I ran out of time, and my SS troops came out on top. Fen played a great game, and we both had a lot of fun, as we always do. We both really liked this scenario.

We enjoyed pizzas and calzones for lunch over at 600 degrees, and the survivors enjoyed our usual excellent dinner at Hambone's Barbecue. It was another really enjoyable day of ASL.