Battle Report - 21 May 2013 - Chain of Command

It's not often we run out of hedges before we run out
of places to put them!

Last night was the club's 40K campaign night, so some of those of us who don't, ah, partake, as it were, gathered for another run through the Lardies' Chain of Command.

This time, we decided to start the mini-campaign suggested in the rulebook, so basically a platoon a side - we decided to skip any reinforcements. And of course, since nearly everyone else was playing 40K (barring Andy and Paul, and I suspect he'll tell you what he was doing on his blog later!), we got to use ALL the nice new Last Valley 28mm Normandy terrain we wanted.

View of the battlefield from the German right - the red
roofed house nearest the camera and the grey roofed one
a little further down the road at the T-junction were the
main scene of the action.

Gary and Chris took the British, and AndyM (rapidly turning into a veteran of things WW2 and Lard) the Germans: the patrol move phase was, once again, interesting, and once again I think both players perhaps missed out - I really AM going to have to play this damn game rather than umpire, sometime! The Germans got beaten to a couple of spots, and the British did manage a rather nice jump off point out on a flank, but were a bit compressed otherwise.

Germans pick their way past the (rather stagnant) pond
to the house.

Action focussed largely in a small cluster of three buildings off the end of the river bridge: Andy managed to locate squads in two buildings on his side of the main road, but did cop a fearful pounding from two British squads in the gardens across the road, who basically drew a bead on the windows and let fly with everything they had, for several phases.

After a few phases of this, Chris deployed the held-back British squad out on the British right, where Andy's reserve squad managed to draw a bead on them out of the top floor of a nearby building. Cue use of smoke (not for the first time) by the British to block their line of fire... were it me I'd have taken advantage of that and moved closer, but Gary and Chris chose instead to start to bring that section round to join the assault on the building at the t-junction.

The third British section makes its way
round to lend a hand.

By now the Germans were a little under the hammer, and another volley of fire caused them to be pinned. Gary fired off another 2" smoke round to block them from shooting as his lead squad charged the building, and we got to try out the close assault rules!

End result - 12 dice to the Germans (24 dice before the halving for being pinned, which does very effectively demonstrate the need to suppress the living bejaysus out of a defensive position before assaulting it, especially if they're in hard cover with 2 big men, 2 MP40s and a MG34!), 11 for the Brits. 5 kills, 3 shock to the Germans, 3 kills to the British. Which resulted in both forces retreating in opposite directions leaving the building unoccupied - the British because they lost, the Germans because they now had twice as many shock as figures!

Lots of smoke - I forgot the cotton wool again, so raided
some scrunched up loo roll.

That was pretty much it. We continued on for a few phases in which Chris' section got shot at, but as it was getting towards 2230, we called it a night, and a marginal victory to the British. For all they'd driven the Germans out of one of the buildings, and forced them to keep their heads down in the other, they'd taken a fair amount of fire doing it, and weren't exactly in the best of shape.

I might even get to run another game next week!