09 January 2024

WWII Mid War Eastern Front - Flames of War

This was one of the most exciting games of FoW in a long time. The initiative swayed too and forth right up until the end, until the Germans eventually landed the knock out blow. 

The stars of the show were some German 7.5cm infantry guns that held up the Soviet surge for several turns, knocking out a couple of T34s (with rear shots) and a few BA10s in the process. The knock out blow was delivered by the PzIIs when they arrived from reserve and shredded the Russian infantry holding the objective.

It was also nice to see the Germans uniformly kitted out in feldgrau, rather than the late war dunkelgelb.






















19 December 2023

Napoleonics at Yuletide

In our traditional large Napoleonics game before Christmas, a British-Prussian-Austrian Allied force must have eaten too many Brussel sprouts and mince pies before the battle as, apart from the Prussians, they seemed to crumple against the French, who were fired up with lashings of mulled wine and Christmas pudding!















12 December 2023

WWIII Team Yankee - Mutual Obliteration on an 8' x 6' Table

We played Team Yankee on a double size board with 200 points per side to see what would happen. Mutual obliteration is what happened!

Both sides - Soviets vs Americans - went heavy on air assets, which skewed the game somewhat. Initially the American air arm ran amok amongst the Soviet armour, knocking out a whole company of T64s by the second turn. 

The Soviet reserves arrived first, in the form of some T80s which, along with some BMP1s, managed to flank their opponent, enabling them to take out the American Chaparral air defence systems. Also, eventually the Russian Gophers, Shilkas and Gremlin missiles managed to weaken the US helicopter force (helped by the fact that the Warthogs failed to show up for a few turns). The 'Krokodils' (Hinds) then made an appearance, taking out a couple of M1A1HCs, but by that time, there weren't that many ground forces left on the table.

In the end we gave a 'winning draw' to the Americans.

I'm not sure we would play 'big game' Team Yankee again with just two players (as it was a bit of a slog), and we would probably seek to introduce a few other special rules to allow for the larger spaces involved - along with limiting the amount of air assets allowed.