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We had 6 members in attendance for our Special 5th Saturday Game Day at Gameology.
Dan Plachta and Dave Nicholas paired up for “Tropic Lightningâ€, with Dave taking the attacking Americans against Dan’s Japanese. This is a big, complicated scenario with an interesting armor battle. By the end of the day they still had 3 turns to go, and decided to call it a draw. This scenario has been on my play list for a while, and Dan & Dave both gave it high praise. It’s pretty big for a game day format, even with a Japanese set-up done in advance. But I’ll probably try it anyway.
Chip Wertenberger’s Germans defeated Blair Bellamy’s Brits in “Miracle at Sinagogaâ€. Both thought this was a good scenario choice; and they certainly had plenty of fun.
And Eric Visnowski and I paired up for, what else.. a Deluxe scenario. We went with the HOB hedgerow scenario “Snake Ready to Strike.†The Americans get a company of infantry and a dozen Shermans (some with Giros, some with hedgerow devices, two with dozer blades.) The Germans get a couple of platoons of mixed-quality SS squads backed by four PzIVJ’s, a SPW251/9 and a 75L gun. Both sides are very light on leaders (3 for the Americans, 2 for the Germans.) Eric took the attacking Americans and I took the SS.
The Americans have to accumulate 25 CVP and/or exit EVP, and eliminate 2 Roadblocks. Since it looked like the Americans could easily gain their VP’s with so many vehicles, I set up to prevent him from clearing the RB’s. To that end, I put both in the last two hexes of the far right-hand corner of the board, where they were surrounded on 3 sides by marsh hexes. Because of the typical hedgerow lines of sight, the 2nd RB would not be seen until the Americans were two hexes away. That made for something of a bug-hunt for Eric, while I carefully pulled my squads back toward the RB position. It was classic hedgerow fighting, and on the last turn a sniper finally killed one of my two leaders and allowed EV a breakthrough. But there just wasn’t enough time to get both RB’s cleared before game end, resulting in a German victory.
Eric and I liked this scenario a lot. It really captures the nature of hedgerow fighting and both sides have to handle their troops carefully or get punished severely. However, the bug-hunt nature of the RB clearance makes it pretty hard on the Americans. And the limited number of leaders makes both forces very brittle. We both think it’s easily fixed by giving each side an additional 7-0 leader, and making the German reveal the RB’s as soon as the Americans enter the board.
We made our usual trip to The Hat for lunch, which wasn’t very crowded thanks to the heat. We cleared out just before 10:00 PM. It was another great day of ASL. We will be returning to Gameology next week for our regularly scheduled 1st Saturday Game Day next week.
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