January 4th Game Day at Gameology AAR

Well 2020 is off to a great start for SoCalASL. We had 8 members for our first ASL Game Day of the year at Gameology Games in Upland:

James Quinn's Germans defeated Ric Hammond's French in “Panzers Forward”. They found out afterward that this shows 80/20 pro-German on ROAR. To which James, ever the nice guy, responded, “well now I feel like a bully.” To which I pointed out: “Trust me, you'd feel a lot worse if you lost.”

Jim Svette's German/Hungarian force defeated Fen Yan's Russians in the excellent Deluxe scenario “Streets Afire”.

Fred Diver's Germans defeated Mike Meeks' Americans is the Deluxe Night scenario “Clay Pidgeons”.

And Scott Thompson and I paired up for the Rally Point scenario “The Big Bugout”. We've both been on a Chi-Com kick lately, and this one looked big, meaty and cool. The dice gave Scott the South Korean 'ROK's against my Communist Chinese 'Chi-Coms'. As the name implies, this scenario is a foot-race scenario: most of the ROK's start on one hill, but have to 'bugout' to another hill. Meanwhile, another smaller force has to hold a large stone church. The Chi-Coms get two powerful infantry groups that have to try and cut off the escaping ROK's and prevent them from getting into a victory area on another board. To win, they also have to capture the large church. Scott set up to 'bugout' of the hill position, but correctly left a rear guard with most of the heavy weapons to disrupt my Chi-Coms. The Chi-Coms have to move fast and take casualties. I did both in abundance. What we realized by turn 3 was that the terrain greatly channels the Chi-Com movement, and allows the ROK's to easily create kill zones. This forces the Chi-Com's to either take casualties, or take long, time-consuming detours. We realized that, even if the ROK's weren't on the board, it would take 4 turns just to get to the church, and they could barely reach the ROK victory area by game end. We decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze on this one, and threw it in on turn 4 as a ROK victory.

We had our usual lunch at Farmer Boy's. It was a great way to start off the new year!