Steve was in the chair and elected for a 20mm Cold War Goes Hot game using his impressive 20mm collection. Not sure who made the excellent tanks and APC' but the infantry were by Elhiem and they are really very good indeed..
The only slight jarring not was the table size- the main hall was in use so we were restricted to the bar - which had its compensations so the table was only a tad over 6 feet by 4 .
Still no worries overall
Forces
Paul and I took the British with a platoon of Infantry in FV432 and a platoon of 3 Chieftain mk9 . We also had an 81mm Mortar a couple of Milan posts and off table artillery controlled by an on table observer.
Andrew and Shaun took the East Germans and all I can say is that there seemed to be a lot of them T-72 all over the place and all sorts of other vehicles with all sorts of guns hanging off them !
Rules were Steve's own derived from I believe the WW2 set Spearhead or some such. I didn't take much notices as in umpire controlled games such as ours you get to concentrate on decision making rather than rules mongering.
The system was basically IGOUGO but with tweaks and only a certain number of orders per turn depending upon a dice roll and your troop capability most actions taking 1 order but others taking 2 or even 3 orders. So you needed your wits about you..
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| Britsh infantry await the onslaught. |
The British were tasked with defending the rather shattered village from a reconnaissance in force by WARPACT forces so we dug in and awaited the assault.
Early on we realised that this was not going to be an easy gig. There seemed no end to the East German forces as they came on to the table. Fortunately our artillery was up to the job and while we did not actually kill too many 'pinned' vehicles caused and awful traffic jam which upset the WARPACT timetable.
However their own artillery was not idle and it was this that gave the plucky Brits the most grief killing dug in infantry and a Milan post and if memory serves our right flank Chieftain - though that may have been a T-72.
It often seemed to us- Paul and I- that the more we smashed them with artillery and mortars the more of them that needed smashing. Our Milan and Chieftains did their share- taking out BRDMs and T-72s amongst other things I can't recall but the WARPACT artillery was slowly wearing us down- we'd lost a third of our morale.( This was a neat mechanism- when suffering casualties you drew a chit from 'the bag of doom' which usually had a number between 1 and 5 on it- though there were other results which never came up. This number was subtracted from your 'Army Break Point' number once you reached Zero you were done. Our Break point was 31 the WARPACT 26. We had our fair share of luck here never drawing more than a 3 while the opposition drew at least one 5 ).
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| A Milan post. We began the game with two covering this road |
For most of the game we kept pounding at the WARPACT traffic jam not always with massive success but enough to keep them hung up while we picked off around the fringes.
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| The Warpact traffic jam part one. |
As it happened we had decided to bug out in the near futures as their artillery continued to pound us but some of our own shooting finished the issue taking out a Shilka and another T-72 which after firtling in the bag of Doom took the WARPACT total over their break point just before we decided to scarper.
So a narrow victory for the plucky Brits.
Personally I was seriously impressed with the rules. They flowed well and forced you to think but also had that taste of 'realism' which we enjoy. Nice One Steve.
As always our thanks go to Norman Oyston for the use of the venue and to Ros for the splendid beef butties without which no meeting would be complete.
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| The WARPACT traffic jam part tow- well done the Royal Artillery. . |
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