April 16th Game Day at Emerald Knights AAR

[Jim Aikens]

It looks like our revised Game Day schedule is paying off in spades. Two weeks after the Gameology Game Day drew its largest crowd since we split the event into two locations, our Game Day at Emerald Knights in Burbank drew its largest crowd to date; 12 members plus a cameo from Nadir Elfarra.

In a two round “battle of the Mikes” Mike Soffa’s Slovacs defeated Mike Cirrincione’s Poles in “Riding the Coattails” from Out of the Bunker. Mike Cirrincione got his revenge in their second game of the day, when his Germans defeated Mike’s Canadians in “The Bavent Recee” from Schwerepunkt.

Eric Visnowski’s Germans defeated Dan Plachta’s Brits in the big-ass bocage scenario “Battlegroup Nor-Mons”.

Blair Bellamy’s Germans fell to Bill Yuen’s Russians in the Schwerepunkt heavy metal scenario “The Trouble with Tigers”.

Ed Esparza and Dave Nicholas took the Germans against Kevin Kiff and Ken Tee’s Russians in the jumbo Kursk scenario “Cat’s Cradle”. In a slug-fest that took all day, Ed and Dave’s Germans came up short against Kevin and Ken’s Russians.

Dave Rosner and I were the last to arrive, and that worked out fine, because it’s been a while since we’d had a game together. We settled on “Ragnarok” from Journal 9. This is an end-of-war exit scenario reminiscent of “The Fugitives”. A gaggle of future war criminals tries to evade being captured by several groups of Russians. My war criminals managed to find a seam in Dave’s defense and squirted through for a quick exit victory. This seems to be a scenario that’s a little hard on the defender in a first-time playing. Because we finished early, we broke out the Schwerepunkt scenario “The Last Full Measure”. I love late war Marines, and this Battle of Okinawa scenario has been on my play list for some time. Dave chose the Marines and I took the Japanese with the balance. It turned out to be a very exciting and enjoyable scenario that went down to the last movement phase. But in the end, my IJA troops pulled out a victory. This is a fun, fairly quick playing scenario that is quite suitable for tournament play.

We hit Larry’s down the street for a chili dog lunch, and adjourned at 10:00 PM for our traditional late dinner at Bob’s Big Boy.

Man, I gotta say; 13 members, 7 games, chili dogs, and dinner at Bob’s, all with a terrific bunch of guys. Who could ask for a better way to spend a Saturday?

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