2 Mila 18

by on January 17, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

In February 2012, Patch and I picked up our next ASL scenario. Neither of us had actually played “Mila 18”, from Beyond Valor before, so we decided to go for that.

Dealing with a 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, it is a situation that hits a raw nerve with many people (for good reason), but the scenario itself is interesting. There are no support weapons of any kind. Each side is nearly even in numbers (10 SS squads to 11 Jewish partisan squads; three leaders each). The SS squads have double the firepower, but are fragile (ELR 1, and they go all the way from 658 to 447 upon ELR failure), and all the partisans have HIP. An additional twist is that German units leave their guns behind when eliminated (in the form of labor counters). The partisans can recover these and promote from 337 partisan squads to 447 Russian squads, and they can be promoted to 458s. These promoted squads retain their ELR of 5, and split into HS/Disrupt if they fail ELR instead of reverting to the weaker state.

Feeling a bit lazy for brain-busting setups, and as I pointed out to Patch, I’m usually the one who gets to sweat over them (like in the last night scenario we did), I took the SS, and Patch set up the Partisans.

The Germans win either by getting double the CVP of the partisans (with a minimum of 10), or by Mopping Up 27 of the 33 buildings in hexrows L to Y of board 20 in nine turns. That latter condition requires an average of 3 successful Mopping Up actions a turn, and there is no way to be in position for any until turn three, so it’s closer to four per turn. There’s only eleven units to mop up with (after before-game Deploying; more could be had by Deploying HSs during the game), and anyone who Mops Up is TI, and therefore not in position to Mop Up the following turn. All that makes for a very tight schedule, and it seemed to me the point of it is to keep the partisan player from just hiding in odd corners where he can’t be found, and the Germans can’t generate 10 CVP in time. So my mission was to go in, and round up the partisans more directly.

Thanks to the HIP and German entry from off-board, we had our fastest Game Turn 1 ever, with no Partisans showing.


A quiet patrol, Turn 1. The partisans are somewhere between the light blue bars….
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , ,
1 Comment

3 The Czerniakow Bridgehead

by on January 10, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

While we were gearing up for “Six Came Back”, Patch got a copy of Storm Over Arnhem, and we tried that out next. I have to say it didn’t do a lot for me, despite finding the idea of the system interesting. But it may be that I just need to get more experience with the game. In any case, after that we went back to ASL, and a scenario from Beyond Valor that I hadn’t played before (I can’t remember if Patch had or not) in October 2011.

“The Czerniakow Bridgehead” is a late ’44 scenario with the Russians having entered Warsaw, and are now defending it against a German counterattack with Partisan help. The Russians set up 15 squads on the east (bottom) side of the board 23 canal, with 12 Partisan squads backing them up on boards 20 and 8. The Germans get 15 squads, 7 leaders, the usual mix of MGs, and three crews (presumably for the HMG and MMGs) on the west side of the canal. The Germans have 10 turns in which to get 20 FP factors onto board 8 while earning more CVP than the Russians.

I ended up with the Germans and went into the scenario with a lot of trepidation; the last time I’d attempted to attack across a stream it had not gone very well, and I was worried that I’d spend too much time trying to get someone, anyone, across the canal. There are four bridges across the canal, two of which are close to each other (4 hexes), and troops trying to cross one could easily support an effort against the other. I looked at Patch’s set up, set up the Germans… experimented a little… went back to the original set up…. And scrapped the entire thing and started over, this time orienting around the bridge at the opposite side of the board. The two-bridge area was the obvious choice, and Patch had obviously set up for it. So I decided to go to the other end of the board and try to cross at H4, with a HMG and MMG upstairs to try and break his defenders and interdict his movements across the board. I also put enough near the P7 bridge to make sure he had to defend that as well.

A final complication for Patch was that at the end of the initial RPh, all the Russian (not Partisan) squads take NMC. Patch rolled somewhat poorly with two squads pinning, six squads breaking (all but two of them undergoing ELR failure), one Battle Hardening, and one going berserk. Importantly, two of the four squads guarding my chosen bridge broke. The other two were actually my planned targets for the 1st level MGs, and Patch obligingly broke both of them under my fire, with the addition of ELR failure and CRs to boot. The only thing standing in my way was an 8-0 leader. I finished off Prep with a shot from the second MMG that broke a concealed Partisan squad in 20Q9.

Most of my movement was getting everyone lined up at the canal across the bridge and through the first couple of blocks on the other side. I did lose a HS to fire from his only remaining unit in the area (J8), but the remainder of the squad passed the MC and kept going. Over at the P7 bridge, I tried pushing with a couple of squads I had available for the task, figuring I would at least get him to reveal some of the Partisans concealed on board 20. Patch’s fire was very effective, causing ELR failure on both units, and getting a K/1 with the residual on the second one.

My advancing fire broke his 8-0 (reducing him to a 7-0 in the process), forcing him and the HS adjacent to surrender.


Situation, German Turn 1.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , ,
 Comment 

G5 Six Came Back

by on January 3, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

About the time we were playing “Merzenhausen Zoo”, I got Barbarossa: Crimea, and Patch and I tried it out in a FtF day. The Odessa scenario is quite long, and we continued it via Vassal for the next few months. After that, I offered Patch the choice of anything he wanted to play in ASL. He took the Germans in “Six Came Back”, an old scenario from the Avalon Hill General, and we got going in May of 2011.

It’s January ’44 in Italy, and a Ranger unit has gotten in trouble. The supporting attacks are stalled, and they’re all alone in front of a lot of Germans. The Germans set up 16 squads with 2 81mm MTRs w/crews, three unarmored AA halftracks (including a 7/1 with the quad 20mm/20 IFE), three StuGs and two Tiger Is, as well as 20 ‘?'(!) on board 12. The Americans get to set up 17 squads with some support weapons on a four hex strip of board 17 (south of board 12). South of that is board 16. The Germans need to score 25 CVP in nine turns, and ensure that they score twice as many CVP as the Americans. The Americans can also freely exit off the east half of board 16.

Just running for it, and not letting the Germans get to 25 CVP is certainly tempting, but that does mean crossing board 16, which is very open. Board 17 isn’t all that built up either, and over half the buildings are out of the initial setup area. There is some help in the fact that all unpaved roads are treated as having ditches, which act as shellholes who’s MP costs are associated with non-road movement. A final complication is that every American unit rolls a die and is broken and DM at the start of the game on a ‘6’.

I set up with most everyone in the available buildings and woods from P through BB, with one stack in the ditch (and a building immediately behind them), and another (U4) in the open, that I hoped to get into cover before Patch could get him. The pre-game drs broke 3 1/2 squads on average die rolls, though it spoiled my plan to fire at his unarmored AA HT on the 12 column from W2. But the leaders were untouched. This gave me three rally attempts to open the game with, but naturally none of them worked.

Patch opened the game with a ’12’ to malf a MMG in his main fire base in 12S9h2, but otherwise had a decent Prep, breaking two squads, pinning another, and getting ELR and CR on a double-break in 17BB4. In movement, a lot charged forward, and Patch put one of his Tigers behind my flank. I had worried about it, but couldn’t find much to do about it, as the set up area restricted me to being far too close to prevent it.

My DF only managed to reveal and pin a HS. My 6FP shot on the star Vehicle line at his HT in 12W7 failed, but would have killed it if the second squad hadn’t broken on the pregame dr.


Situation, German Turn 1.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , ,
1 Comment

2012 in Review

by on January 1, 2013 at 1:38 pm
Posted In: Life

Well, we’ve reached the end of the first full calendar year at my own domain, and I’ve settled in fairly well. I still need to get a proper banner for the blog, but the site is working, I’ve gotten pretty good with the WordPress software, and I’ve gotten everything pretty well sorted out after the transfer.

Personally, it has been a good, if quiet year for me. The main gripe would be that the local gaming group is having some trouble (a large part of that is my fault, as I’m the cat wrangler for the group), so we didn’t meet very often this last year. On the other hand, I did get Patch to drop by for a few two-player sessions during the empty times, and all of those were fun days.

Financially, the entire household is just a bit better off than 12 months ago. We’ve also gotten some new heaters for the winter that we think will trim quite a bit off the power bill compared to the horribly inefficient strip heaters that the place came with for the next couple months. I’m still working down debt incurred from when the BackBreaker debt was dominating the finances of the household, and if I can keep on schedule, most of that will be gone this year. I managed to pay things down while spending entirely too much on games (this may have been the most I’ve spent on games in any single year, and it’s likely to stay that way).

My computer gaming has been a bit sparse this year. I’ve played a bit on various Paradox games (I was thinking of starting a series of reviews on them, but the first one has stalled out after running entirely too long and not going where I wanted, and I haven’t managed to rescue it), a couple complete games of Civ IV, and of course SW:TOR. The latter started out strong, then went down to the usual ‘log in on Friday’ pattern very quickly. My long-term opinion of the game is that it has a lot of things where they had the right idea, but implemented it poorly. That said, I’ve recently gotten the bug again, and have spent a fair amount of time on it over the past week, and finally have hit max level with my main character, though the end of the story line is still some ways off.

I haven’t gotten in nearly as much board gaming as I would like, mostly because of the difficulties with the group. Also, my PBEM games of F&E with Belirahc have really fallen off over the last few months as his work is keeping him entirely too busy. However, seeing Patch get jazzed over my copy of Festung Budapest put me into a positive feedback loop with ASL, which is why I finally purchased a new 2nd Ed rulebook to replace the old one which had been coming apart. And I ended up with a big project that has kept me focused on ASL; I used to do a bunch of reporting on my games as they happened, which was my “AAR in Progress” series over on GameSquad. I had just been hosting the images for the threads on my corner of backbreaker.com, so when the domain changed I planned to go into all the old threads and update the image links. It turns out that I couldn’t edit them; I assume they don’t allow editing of posts over a year old. So I decided to start re-posting the compiled threads here (and over at BGG) with the updated images. The first one happened to go out on a Thursday, and I decided to start scheduling out further posts each Thursday so that I would have a regular feature on my blog, for as long as it lasted. There were more threads than I expected, and the last one only posted a couple weeks ago. I have in the meantime written up posts for all my complete PBEM games since I stopped doing those threads, and those are set to run through about the end of February. After that, we’re back to the murmur of at best a couple posts a month.

Speaking of ASL, I had thirteen complete games this last year, plus three that are still ongoing by PBEM (and weekly sessions on one of those) right now. Of those thirteen, I won four, which is doing well for me at any time, and I finally broke a three-year losing streak back in April with “No Better Spot to Die”. This, and the writing of the reports, has kept me fairly focused on ASL for several months, when I finally get a few more things done I hope to get back to working on the all-new F&E 2.0 Vassal module I started work on.

Moving on to the blog itself, the yearly examination of tags reveals 86 posts for the year with: sixty-eight tagged ‘gaming’, forty-three ‘ASL’, thirty-five ‘AAR in Progress’, fifteen ‘review’, fourteen ‘history’, ‘reading’, twelve ‘bgg blog’, ‘F&E’, eight ‘books’, six ‘PBr campaign’, ‘bvr wind’, four ‘VotG Campaign’, ‘C&C Ancients’, three ‘life’, ‘Vassal’, ‘second wind’, and one each ‘micca’, ‘Pony Tales’, ‘Marathon’, ‘TOR’, ‘Paths of Glory’, ‘CiM’, ‘AdCiv’, ‘Virgin Queen’, ‘Moebius’, ‘EFS’, ‘candidate’, ‘EiS’, ‘dominant species’, ‘Sekigahara’.

When I started reposting the AAR in Progress series, I did not realize there were so many of them…. Eighty-six posts blows any other year out of the water, and I doubt I’ll ever get to an average of more than one post per week ever again. One of the things I meant to do last year was write about what I was reading, particularly the history books. Fourteen posts about that is a pretty good start. Most of them aren’t as extensive as I’d like to be doing, but there’s some good ones in there.

The ‘Read My Way Through History’ project has continued, with my official date moving up from 1300 to 1500. I actually don’t have that much on the period, but I keep getting new books for earlier parts of history, which I then go back and read. In fact, I’m currently reading Keepers of the Keys of Heaven, a history of the Papacy that covers from AD 30 to the present day. I also recently got How Rome Fell, and will be reading that soon. And my parents got me The Great Sea for Christmas, a history of the Mediterranean from earliest times to the modern day. So a fair amount of this next year will be spent on such projects, and I can’t predict what the ‘date’ of my reading will be at the end of the year again. (On the other hand, my parents also got me Playing at the World, a history of hobby gaming centered around D&D, and how it got to be what it was and its effect on modern culture; I’ve already started devouring it.)

└ Tags: 
1 Comment

J19 Merzenhausen Zoo

by on December 27, 2012 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

After the last Deluxe fight, Patch and I decided to try out the ‘instant classic’ scenario from Journal 2, J19 “Merzenhausen Zoo”, which I had just gotten the reprint of, and we got going in November 2010. I only have a few brief notes that I posted to BGG at the time, so this will be going back through the logs and reconstructing.

It’s big scenario, with two full boards in play and eight turns. The Germans are defending the outskirts of a town with mixed force of infantry, four self-propelled guns (StuGs, PzJg III/IV, JgPz IV), and a 50mm AT Gun. The Americans (with plenty of British help) enter from the west and south with a bunch of infantry, too many Shermans to consider, a couple Churchills, and three Crocodiles (Churchills with FTs). Midway through, the Germans get more infantry and a pair of Tiger IIs. Ten types of AFVs (including three different models of Sherman)—it is a zoo. To win, the Americans need to take 38 stone building Locations in eight turns.

This was possibly the most complicated set-up I’ve done, since for once I had the opportunity to use Bore Sighting on a number of units (four AFV, one Gun, and four MGs). Pity it didn’t really do me any good. There’s a walled area in the middle of board 43. It was an obvious first place to attack towards, and I set up a force in there with the idea of holding Patch off for a couple turns and then pulling out under cover of some woods and orchards nearby while the town on one side and the hedge and brush on the other allowed me to cover the area.

The game starts with every German infantry unit and Dummy stack taking a PTC, and while I generally rolled well, it seriously compromised the protection of that central area as I lost a Dummy in there, one in the nearby woods, pinned a unit in there, pinned the MMG that was supposed to cover the large open area nearby and pinned my extreme left flank. During movement Patch showed how much in the air that area was by running a Stuart through and into my back area. My pinned squad did manage to pull out a PF, but it missed. All his rolls other than the TH did pretty well, and if he hadn’t been pinned, could have really slowed down that side.

During defensive fire, I got what was probably my highlight of the game: my StuG in 43O9 got a critical hit on its first shot against a Churchill that was staring down the woods-road at it. This was followed by the MMG on that left flank malfunctioning, and Patch breaking my forward squad in 43C5, while putting down a fair number of acquisition counters.


Situation, American Turn 1.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , ,
 Comment