FB3 Furor Hungaricus

by on February 7, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Patch and I continued our playthrough of Festung Budapest scenarios on Vassal with FB3 “Furor Hungaricus”, a combined Hungarian/German counterattack on Soviet positions on the outskirts of the city. We’re mostly doing these FtF, but Vassal has some nice tools for night scenarios, so we went over to Vassal for this one in June 2012.

It’s roughly the same area as the previous scenario, with another three hexes added to the east for the Hungarians to cross. For the first time, the Russians are defending, meaning that most of the lessons of how to attack this section have to be tossed out, as the advance is in the opposite direction.

I had the defending Russians, and felt entirely inadequate to the task, with visions of everyone being slaughtered in place. Patch’s comments indicated he wasn’t feeling much better….

The Russians are actually in pretty good shape, with 11 squads (mostly elite), four leaders, a 57mm AT Gun, an OT-34, as well as a few support weapons, mines and wire. However, not only do they have the normal No Move restrictions of a night defender, but they are not allowed to set up more than one MMC per hex. Per Location would have been fine, but no more than a squad per hex really kept me from establishing the concentration around the main victory area that I wanted. Meanwhile the Axis comes in in three groups: The Hungarians get 12 squads, up to half of which can set up HIP on board in building L29 and on the roof of E29 (that last option gave me lots of consternation), and the rest enter on the east (top) edge along with a Bergepanzer III (which has to be SSRed to heck for the stats—why didn’t they provide an actual counter for this?) and Flakpanzer IV. The Germans enter in the north with another six squads, while a couple Hungarian assault guns (Zrinyi IIs, one of which has its MA replaced with a MG) enter on the east or south.

Like FB2, the scenario has six victory conditions, and the Axis needs to satisfy four of them. Two them are for control of buildings C30 and E29, one for controlling hexes F32, F35, and I32 (which all have foxholes with burnt-out wrecks on top of them), one for controlling 10 of 16 building hexes inside a road loop that occupies most of the board (three hexes start under Axis control), one for killing the OT-34, and the last is for getting 25 CVP.

Our first session was slow as we struggled to remember what we’ve forgotten. Both of us had minor setup goofs (quickly fixed). The early tactical goofs went to Patch. He obviously had a nice plan for getting up close before I could do anything, and then partially spoiled it by forgetting and driving a tank into view (you can see [hear] tracked vehicles at twice the range of other units). My two units that could see it couldn’t get a starshell off, and I didn’t think to fire on it before it turned around and got back out of range, but a couple units were free of No Move.

Over on the north side, my setup area actually intersects the edge of the German entry area. I had a hidden unit in there, and he managed to walk right into him, getting revealed and bounced out to his entry hex. I fired (which removed my restrictions on using starshells) and broke the HS+PSK in that Cloak counter. Final Fire also got a 1MC on Cloak F, which turned out to be a Dummy. Then Patch revealed Cloak E as 2 squads+LMG+MMG+8-1 (a third of his north-side force), and the resulting 2MC broke my squad, but also activated my Sniper, who eliminated Cloak K.


Situation, Axis Turn 1, showing full board in play. Also note that at least one unit in E30 is a Dummy.
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16 No Better Spot To Die

by on January 31, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Patch had already played the rest of the scenarios in Beyond Valor, so I decided to continue my tour of the early core modules with Paratrooper. Patch has already played all of them, but I’ve only played two of the eight. I picked scenario 16, “No Better Spot to Die”, and we started in April 2012.

ROAR has it at about 3:2 in favor of the Germans, so I took them (my track record is abysmal…) with the American balance. It’s June 7, ’44, and and I’m trying to get into La Fiere on the way to Ste. Mere-Eglise. The Americans have 6 paratrooper squads, a AT Gun, and some support weapons to hold me off for nine turns. I have 13 squads, and four French Renault tanks, the usual bevy of MGs, and a couple 50mm MTRs with which to get into board 24 (with no valley) and take four building hexes (three without the balance).

The two sides set up with nine hexes between them; I’m sure a modern scenario would say only half of board 3 is in play, as there’s no point to most of the area, but the scenario setup says to use the full board.

Patch seemed slightly surprised when I declared a Op Fire on both my MMGs and then went straight to movement on the first turn, but I wanted to get into better range and not have a couple of woods blocking LOS. When Patch realized that the initial fire fight was going to be in my normal range, and his long range, he started regretting his set up.

With a lot of movement options out there, and using the board-edge woods and grain for cover, Patch didn’t fire until my last infantry move, where he went for a leader-led stack with a 4 -2 shot, but only broke the leader on a 2MC.

The general plan was to concentrate on the south side, and get a few units into the gully, where they could advance up to the defenses out of sight while the rest of my forces softened them up for the gully force. This developed a problem when Patch revealed the AT Gun in K8 and opened up on the lead tank. Thankfully, he lost rate and and ‘?’ on his first shot, but he still hit and immobilized it with an ’11’ TK. My AF didn’t do much, but did reveal F1 to be a Dummy (apparently, I really was headed into the teeth of his defense…).


Situation, German Turn 1. The wreck in E6 is actually from the previous day’s fighting.
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Dominating the Ice Age

by on January 29, 2013 at 11:37 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After letting things slide for a while, I arranged for a group gaming day this Sunday. Only Patch and Jason could make it over, and Dave managed to start coming down with what I had a week earlier, so there was only three of us available.

Since Dave had been showing early symptoms a couple days earlier, I arranged for the game of the day to be Jason’s copy of Dominant Species, since it should do better with three players than most anything else (Successors had been tempting). We gave a quick explanation to Patch, who hadn’t seen it before, and drew randomly for animals (I got the Insects, Jason the Mammals, and Patch went to the Birds), and we were off.

My start position was relatively isolated (note for next time: might want to guarantee every-other-hex start animals on the next three-player game) and I was consolidating my little empire nicely in the first turn when Jason nearly wiped me off the map with a Catastrophe. I tried to bounce back some in the second turn, but took more losses to my species, and spent the third turn purely trying to set myself up better for the rest of the game. My VPs were lagging behind, with Jason and Patch trading positions a time or two before Patch started amassing a pretty nice lead on the strength of multiple turns holding the Survival card.

However, things were starting to pay off for me. I spent a couple of Speciation actions to get my on board strength up again on the second to last turn, leaving me with one spare cube going  into the last turn (and as the Insects, I got to place that for free). I had managed to get an extra action from a first turn card (Omnivore), and everyone got extra actions from Parasitism and Intelligence on the second and third turns respectively, so the action display was fairly crowded by the end of the game. My ‘needs’ were a bit off of Jason and Patch’s, and I was thoroughly dominating about half the board until Patch managed to ensure the removal of three water elements from Wasteland (which hurt him, but not nearly as badly as it hurt me). A little later, I managed to remove several meat elements from Jason’s side of the board, which caused a large shake up in that area.

My VPs actually recovered fairly well in the mid-game (Patch and Jason didn’t go after the scoring actions quite as hard as maybe they should, and I managed to get a couple spare actions in there), and I caught up to Jason as he struggled to recapture the Survival card from Patch. At the end of the second to last turn, a couple card events insured that we all dropped a couple adaptations from our needs. Jason and Patch to had to drop their grass element needs from Regression, which gave me a strong position over part of the board, and I made things worse for Patch by insuring that several seed elements were lost on Wasteland for the final turn. I ended up with about eleven hexes that I was Dominant in, thanks to the collapse of important food sources for Patch and Jason, and I was able to get some sun elements in important places, and I was the only one adapted for that element.

The final scoring put me in the lead at 185 points, Patch in second with 158, and Jason in last for 145. I find it interesting that Jason lost with a score about equivalent to Dave’s in our first game, which was about a 40 point lead. I’m guessing that the game generates roughly the same number of total points each time, and they were split three ways instead of four this time.

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6 Red Packets

by on January 24, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Continuing our tour through Beyond Valor scenarios, Patch and I picked up “Red Packets” in February 2012. It’s effectively the original introduction to vehicles in ASL, and has a good reputation as a fun, fast-moving scenario. Better yet, it’s a meeting engagement, which is a scenario type Patch and I always enjoy.

Set on the opening day of Barbarossa, a German recon group stumbles upon a Russian recon and AA section moving to set up a defensive line. The Germans (me, in this case) enter the west side of board 22 with a Pz IIIF, PSW 231, and SdKfz 251/10 (37mm AT gun) with a HS with LMG and leader on board. The Germans also get a 9-1 AL, which I put in the obvious Pz III. The Russians enter next on the east side with a motorcycle platoon, a IAG-10-AA, and five (two platoons) of BA-8s. They’ve got numbers, bigger guns, but, even less armor, and the BA-8s are radioless, reducing tactical flexibility. Patch needed to either get 18 EVP off my end of the board, or kill all three of my vehicles.

I was having a really off night as we started, mixing up east and west, forgetting that the Germans only get a half move as they enter…. It was bad. I stuck mostly to the northern route, trying to secure that bridge before Patch got there. The south bridge was entirely out of range, and the jumble of wooden buildings down there promised a hide-and-seek fight no matter who got there first.

Patch drove his entire motorcycle platoon over the south bridge, unloading in O8. He backed them up with the understrength BA-8 platoon, while the other parked in the center with the lead vehicle parked behind a wall to take a pot shot at my PSW. …or so we thought. When Patch actually fired, we were both surprised to find the LOS blocked by O3. Meanwhile, the IAG detoured to the northern road, and parked to give him a shot down that road if I continued forward.


Opening moves, Turn 1.
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Keepers of the Keys of Heaven

by on January 17, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Posted In: Books

Roger Collins is a name I’ve known for many years through his Early Medieval Europe 300–1000, so when I realized that a book I was considering getting was by him, it became an instant first choice.

Covering nearly 2000 years of history in about 500 pages, even if restricted to a single institution (the papacy), is no mean feat, but Collins does it quite well here. There are places where names and titles go by at a dizzying pace, but mostly he picks an issue or a pope, and does a subchapter on it. This breaks the narrative into a large number of discrete chunks that mostly read very cleanly.

He actually starts in 1942, with an excavation under St. Peter’s which eventually turned up what was later announced as the bones of St. Peter himself. Collins points out a number of unresolvable uncertainties about the claim, and moves on to how this this claim ties into the Papacy’s view of itself. The book is well done and informative, for me especially in the period from 1790 to 1850, where the papacy went through it’s toughest struggle, loosing all of its temporal power, only to gain new respect in the spiritual field.

Collins maintains a good even tone throughout, treating the subject evenhandedly, and sceptically (when needed), showing how various policies were (and weren’t) reactions to the times. His final thoughts on the papacy are, “The papacy in the twentieth century was more defensive on its impregnable rock than at almost any other time in its past, and more disturbed by changes in human society and in thought than at any previous period, at least since the Reformation. The latter remains the great turning point in its history. Recent decades have, on the other hand, put the person of the pope at the forefront of the Catholic sense of identity to an unparalleled degree, and focused popular piety upon it. At the same time there have been losses, both of vocations and of faith, more in some parts of the world than others, as expectations of change, reform and leadership have been disappointed. The papacy may need to adapt to the changing circumstances and demands of the new millennium, but if its history suggests anything, this will be done slowly, reluctantly and with a firm denial that anything of the kind is happening.”

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