August 7th Game Day at Gameology AAR

[Jim Aikens]

We had 13 players, plus a cameo by Bruce Kirkaldy, for the August edition of our SoCalASL Game Day in Upland:

Eric Visnowski’s Russians defeated Peter Strand’s Germans in “Anhalt Pandemonium”.

‘New guy’ Jeremy Driesler defeated Dave Nicholas in “Retaking Vierville”.

Fred Driver’s Japanese defeated Mike Meek’s Americans in “First Matanikua”.

Jim Svette’s Russians defeated Fen Yan’s Germans in the Dispatches scenario “Stalinesque Christmas”.

Fred Timm’s Germans defeated Blair Bellamy and Ed Esparza’s Russians in “The Down Payment”.

Jim Svette had brought back the copy of Poland in Flames I’d purchased through him at the Texas Team Tournament, and I was hell bent to crack that baby open and get a game in. Dan Plachta was up for the challenge, and we chose “Kazina Klash”. The dice gave me the Poles and Dan the attacking Germans.

The Poles have to keep the Germans from grabbing two single hex buildings, and avoid losing all of their AFV’s. They get a couple of platoons of infantry, backed by a 37L AT Gun, 3 tanks and two tankettes. The Germans get a company of infantry backed by a PzIB, four PzIIA’s and three PSW’s. Dan chose the optional 75*INF Gun, and I took the optional 81*MTR.

My plan was to fight hard for the front victory building, but make my last stand in the rear one. I put the AT Gun in H0 and a HS in K1 to cover the gully approach. I put the CMG Vickers in the back victory building, and the 20L TKS in the front one. They remained concealed for as long as possible. The excellent 47* Vickers tank went into the woods in C6. Since the Germans can win by killing all the Polish tanks, I put the two tankettes in the safety of the rear woods. Half my infantry went into the woods around H9 and the remainder spread out along the rear woods line behind the rear victory building. The Germans have a solid force, but not a lot of time. My plan was to burn time, and concentrate of killing off as many of the German AFV’s as quickly as possible.

Dan came on strong, and got some bad rolls with his SD’s. But he still managed to steadily close on the victory buildings. This was a bloody fight: that tends to happen when you have a total of 16.5 squads and 14 AFV’s fighting on half a board. In the end, the Germans had one PzIIA left, and the Poles had only their two tankettes. My last two squads survived CC and held out in the rear victory building for the win. Dan is arguably one of the best players in the club, and he played his usual superb game. We both liked this scenario; it’s fun, exciting and of a manageable size for a Game Day. ROAR shows it very balanced, and we thought it felt that way.

When we first arrived, the card players had the store filled up because of a new release. But Kevin promised us that if we went to lunch, there would be plenty of space when we returned. So we had our early lunch and started setting up around 1:00. In the evening, the survivors enjoyed dinner on the patio at Louie’s Chicken and Fish. It was our first meal there since the pandemic, and it really hit the spot. The turn-out for this Game Day was probably the largest we’ve had there in several years and it was great to see everyone.

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