Battle Report - 19-Dec-2011

Operation: Squad again - Rob and I have been hankering after a Stalingrad session using some of the Battlefront and GW buildings we have. Sadly, no photos, as I was having way too much fun getting killed. I was joined by Dewi, who ran half my squad, against Rob's Plastic Soldier company Russian Guards squad.

Game 1 was a bit of a disaster - I managed to leave my Wehrmacht squad's sniper where Rob's sniper had a pretty much free shot at him, and needless to say he didn't survive. From there on in, it was pretty bad for the Germans: we had awful luck with the dice, and that damn sniper basically picked off people at will, and we conspicuously failed to spot him...

Game 2 started better: one imagines the dialogue went something like this:
Gefreiter Schmidt: Grenadier Müller, how would you like to earn an Iron Cross?
Grenadier Müller: Sir?
Schmidt: Just pop across the road to that building.
Müller: Jawohl...
Sniper Aleksandrovitch: Hrm. *sights* *blam*
Müller: arrrghh... *dies*
Schmidt: Ah. Did I not mention it would be posthumous? *makes spot roll on sniper* *hoses his location with MP40*
Aleksandrovitch: Ow. *much swearing in Russian* Not fair! *dies*


Which was fine. Except that about half a turn later a very similar event happened to the German sniper, being spotted and pretty much pinned down with a Russian DP LMG. The second game went on quite a bit longer, and did continue to reveal just what a cracking system Op: Squad is for squad level battles. However, once the wounded German sniper got on the receiving end of a grenade toss, we were pretty much done for... again.

Great session, though: I also came away with a couple of Rob's spare sprues of Russians to paint up, and a batch of 40 Celts and 9 Numidian cavalry ready undercoated from Phil. All in all, a good evening.

In the painting queue....

Just undercoated (in black, in the hope that a bit of careful drybrushing will bring out the rarher soft detail in the mail) 18 hybrid Wargames Factory legionaries with Warlord heads and shields. In the end, I went with a small piece of sprue and heavy application of liquid poly solvent to make the Warlord heads sit right.

Behind them in the queue are two Renegade ECW 9 pdrs and crew for my Royalist army, as well as two boxes of Wargames Factory Celts and a box of chariots - my son (who is 11) wants to wargame, so I figure some adversaries for the Romans seems like a good plan.

Also on the way from eBay are a box of WF Persian Cavalry, which I have designs on turing into the start of a Parthian army. I really need to get the master spreadsheet up to date just to prove how... erm... well I'm doing on reducing the stash? *winning smile*