Brads
So late on Friday before club day, I put the finishing touches on 4 Bradleys for my first games of Seven Days to the River Rhine.
The BF Bradley kit is really nice and I really enjoyed painting these. I have another five to do, but they probably won't get done until I next decide I want to play a game of TY. There are a few dudes at the club getting going on it again with very much the view (which I share!) that it requires a bit of preplanning to get a fun game and everyone agrees not to bring 40 Humvees...
Seven Days to the River Rhine
Pel and I managed two games at 500 points, and a leisurely lunch, in a shade over 3.5 hours which was rather pleasant. Here's a run down of the second game, after I learned a few things having been completely smashed in game one! My fairly conventional list from a TY perspective hadn't really panned out so I rebuilt with something that looked more like his list and was considerably better balanced for this game.
Our scouts lead the way into an escalating engagement between the B.A.O.R and the US Marine Corps.
A Marine LAV carrying an FAO takes an overwatch position (I had the Precision Guided Munitions tactical advantage and hoped to use it on Pel's arriving supports!)
A brave Humvee Scout zipped out towards the board centre and opened up on the British MILAN team hiding behind the garage. He did well and scored 2 morale markers. Pel promptly recovered one and a MILAN went through the Humvee like the proverbial through the proverbial.
Turn two was pretty much a wash as we brought on our first lot of reserves and spent a lot of orders doing it (see below about this.....)
The game ground to a halt in turn three when we both had to bring on the remainder of our reserves. Pel played Electronic Warfare on me (and my Intelligence Coup had already saved me from angry West German partizans from blowing up one of my M1s) and removed 6 of my 8 orders, meaning 4 of the 6 units I had off the board couldn't be brought on. It turns out we got this wrong so this felt REALLY back breaking despite Pel having to spend most of his order pool bringing on his final reserves as well and neither of us really doing much with the turn at all. We learned in game three that when units come on from reserve, their orders are immediately available. Oops.
As a small amount of revenge, given that Pel had also blown most of his order pool on his reserves, I snuck my CO out and he called in some CAS which absolutely ruined a Chieftain (it's the smoky black smear in the back of the photo!)
I decided to take a risk and try and get rid of Pel's second Chieftain so one of my M1s took up a hull down position and sent a bunch of lead downrange. Pel's reaction dice were on fire and the two tanks exchanged several shots before one from the M1 hit home and the Chieftain was destroyed.
On the right flank a single squad of Marines held up the British advance for the whole game and held on for dear life in the apartment building under near constant fire from a British fireteam and a Scimitar. In turn 4, Pel played his ace and coming in from his Divisional Reserve, a CHALLENGER! It roared up his right flank where it was engaged by one of my M1s and from the back of the board, a LAV-AT that had arrived from reserve. The TOW from the LAV-AT bounced off the Chobham twice before an aggressive attack from the M1 froze the Challenger crew and a lucky shot from the M1 knocked it out.
That was rather the final act of the game as having brewed up both Chieftains and the Challenger and having shot Pel's Lynx down with some Marine Harriers, I ran down one of his Scimitars and one of the Swingfires and the game was over. It was a win for me on the scale of Pel's win in our first game! He's taken me through a bunch of new games over the last few years and learning games with him is always a pleasure.
Not a Review
Rather than a massive essay from me, as much I like to write them, I'm going to imagine this as a Q&A. So:
Did I like 7DttRR? Yes. Very much. It's a lot of fun.
How does it compare to TY? It doesn't. They are completely different games, both in style and mechanics.
Loves?
- Driving around in a tank and not fearing a horde of transport vehicles with ATGMs is great
- Actively making reactions to my opponents actions (and having that done to me too) and having to radically replan on the hoof makes for an unexpected amount of depth
- It comes as a PDF although I will note I grumped that there is errata but the PDF hasn't been updated!
- There is no way to fail a 2+ firepower roll. If you penetrate a vehicle it's destroyed or REALLY destroyed.
- A WARPAC army for this will be cool to do as it doesn't involve painting 8000 of the same vehicle.
- Overall, the game is light, quick and interactive and it's hard to be really out of a game
- There's a cool online community and great support from the author.
Dislikes?
- The rulebook has some textual ambiguity in some places but Pel and I guessed at a few things and found they'd either been well clarified online or we could come to a conclusion that made sense to us both.
- The one really silly thing I found is that an AAPV7 carries one infantry unit like all transport vehicles. I put a two-man Dragon team in an APC that seats 50 people. Silly.
I will definitely be playing this more and when Pel suggested that this was something we could play a campaign with, I was immediately on board. It's an easy game to learn and it wouldn't take long to get a bunch of people up to speed to do a thing like that.
Next Time
WIPs wise there's all sorts of stuff going on so next week will almost certainly be a workbench miscellany of things I'm currently working on. I *should* really get the HMG platoon done for my Platoon-a-Month but, you know me, I probably won't.
