Nuts!?
Our end of year event will be 85-point Late War Battle of the Bulge so Tank and I thought we'd try out our first list choice with Tank running Bastogne Paras and me running my Volksgrenadiers. Tank attacked and I maneuvered and we wound up playing the v4 version of Cauldron, Killing Ground.
Game Start
85 points didn't tax Tank's fitting in his deployment zone and it also didn't give me the kind of army that I could completely wrap around his:
I left my Brigade Panthers and Brigade StuGs off table and cunningly kept an Assault Volks Platoon in ambush to counter any attempts at a cheeky redeploy by the Para platoons.
Turn 1:
Tank advanced aggressively and took the centre of the board with a view to shifting his attack left or right depending on how my turn one went. One of his Para platoons took the church in towards my left and his Pershings taunted my 75s and his M18s (which you can see in the top of the picture below) went off to stop my Volks Rifle platoon getting into the side of his army.
In my turn one, I got reserves and lo! Brigade Panthers appeared and fired...successfully! You can see them at the bottom of the photo above, but the image below makes me much happier.
The Brigade Panthers brewed up a single Pershing that foolishly parked on the crossroads. The black smudge in the background is the smokey plume! Plus this photo just reminds me how happy I am with how these have come out!
Turn 2:
Tank's turn two was fairly uneventful. He pushed the M18s forward (failing their second blitz of the game) to .50 into my Volks Rifle platoon, the Paras pushed further forward and the Pershings repositioned to deal with the Brigade Panthers. The M18s fire was delutory, the Paras plinked away to little effect and the four shots from the Pershings came up 1, 2, 2, 2.
He started my turn two with "if you get Reserves and they come on over there, maybe we should reset" and he may have been right. Because I did. And they did.
This photo was just before the end of my Turn 2 after the reserve StuGs shot up a couple of M18s and then I waded into the last two with the Volks Rifle Platoon (!) and used three Panzerfausts and two Panzerschrecks to casually remove the last two using Siegfried Moldenhauer's 6 point command add on...
We possibly should have called the game there but the rest of my turn two had been decidedly not gone as well. The Panthers missed, the artillery all missed and while I managed to launch a solid assault into a damaged Para platoon, they absolutely minced me in response. The photo below shows you the four stands of remaining Paras who chewed up my ambushing assault platoon!
Turn 3:
This is the last photo I took, at the start of Turn 3:
Tank had a cunning plan. The remnant of the first Para Platoon moved toward my base edge and threatened both my 81mm Mortars AND the objective. The second Para Platoon moved across to try and finish off my Volks Rifle Platoon and give my StuGs something to think about. Then it went sideways. One of the Pershings refused to cross through the wood (on a 2+) and Tank missed every shot he took which, which you're shooting at Aggressive troops, is a real feel bad moment.
I threw my StuGs down back towards the mortars realising I might be in a bit of trouble. The second Volks Assault platoon slipped past the flank of the stationary Pershing, reading themselves to get into the rear of the Paras. Then my dice came right again and the StuGs pinned (luckily) the Paras threatening the mortars and two Panzerfausts from the Volks Assault when through the side of the Pershing.
At the start of Tank's turn 4, the remaining Pershing failed it's Last Man test (even with Dick's reroll) and the small Para platoon failed to unpin. At that point, with the big paras about to get hammer and anviled and Tank not really having a chance to pull the game out of the bag, we called it.
Lessons?
This was a good mission for me to defend. Tank's small but very good army was still badly outnumbered and honestly, assault rifles make up for a lot when there's infantry crossing open ground! I got *really* lucky with my reserves and Tank also didn't have a chance to redeploy because of where they turned up.
I like the idea of the Volksgrenadiers as a counterpunch kind of army so the idea of attacking or maneuvering with them as a mission selection stance seems very sensible. I also learned (mostly from the second game) that if I'm paying out 6 points for Siegfried Moldenhauer, I need to be getting the most out of that!
Again?
I played a second game defending in No Retreat against Blogger Scotty's Hungarians. It was a deliberate choice to see how I'd go in this mission. I also left my 10-point HQ off the board in my 60/40 because it's 10 (!) freaking points. That was an error. Scotty rolled over me pretty quickly as once my platoons pinned, I stopped doing anything meaningful.
More lessons were learned. Volksgrenadiers should not dig in and defend.
And from the pile:
Three random 28mm models:
A succubus from Malifaux, my old PP Hordes Druid and the last Space Marine for my Deathwatch that only got made because I found that sweet Dark Angels torso in my bits box! The Succubus seems like it could be an odd PC in DnD as a Tiefling Rogue (but because whip, must be Henry Jones Jr styles) and the Druid is an old favourite model of mine.
Next Time
The third Jagdpanther is ready to go so that's exciting and I'm going to clear a bunch more stuff out of the pile, he says, with a degree of optimism...
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