Battle report - 11 Mar 2019 - Charlie Don't Surf

Ok, so some of these aren't dummies, right?

Not quite sure where I found the brain to manage this having been at C2C since Thursday evening, but...

Ash ran a scenario from Surf's Up, involving a Communist (run by myself and AndyMac) incursion from Cambodia into 'Nam, where the Free World forces (Pippa) were trying to deny them a river crossing.

I am instructed to apologies for the unpainted VC.
To spare blushes I won't let on whose figures they are.
A bunch of FW about to get captured.

Lots of scouting with a solitary scout platoon to start, as the Commies don't get any blinds until the blank card starts coming up. We do get lots of Recon Bonus cards, so we did manage to spot quite a lot of the FW stuff though...

Annoyingly said blank card also starts the countdown for the Free World forces rigging the bridge to blow, so it's a race against time for the VC to get across the river and off the table.

Hah.

There should have been an earsplitting KABOOM.
In fact, a turn later, there was :( 

Not so much, as they say. Once the blinds started appearing, we basically drove a bunch of dummies up the right with the aim of keeping two of Pippa's three sections busy while the real force pushed up to the bridge.

Given a few more turns (which obviously we didn't have) we might have got somewhere, as the FW unit protecting the bridge got first pinned in an exchange of fire and then ripped to bits and captured by a Human Wave attack. Had we had another unit to capitalise on that we might have managed it.

My first serious game of CDS, and I'm definitely liking it. There are enough similarities with IABSM not to completely rot my brain, but it's different enough to be entertaining.

Battlefront 'Nam sale

[As a complete aside, I do think it's rather unsporting of the US to deprive me of another hour's sleep just when I've about got used to the timezone...]

A heads up for players of FoW 'Nam, Charlie Don't Surf, and anything else that suits itself to 15mm Vietnam-era minis. Battlefront are currently offering 40% off the entire FoW 'Nam range.... The sale starts on 13 March 2014, and ends at midnight on 31 March 2014.

"As many of you may know, the end of March marks the end of the fiscal year for many companies. Here at Battlefront, our taskmaster of an accountant has given us a mandate: Make my end of year Stock Takes easy!"

Battlefront claim they have at least some of all items in stock...

I'm quite intrigued by the fact that they feel the need to emphasise this, especially given the paucity of FoW stuff (from any period) that was available at Hammerhead - literally the only people with any stock were Caliver, and they were bemoaning the fact that it when stuff arrived from Battlefront seemed to be extremely random and at the mercy of, rather alarmingly, BF's cash-flow (regular readers can find examples in the past of retailers for whom that got very messy indeed). It's been a disturbing trend over the last year or so, in fact - at the Milton Keynes show last year, every single trader with FoW stuff was shifting what they had at a discount.

I admit? As far as the game goes, I'm not massively fussed. But I do probably own more painted and unpainted Battlefront 15mms than a lot of people, and while I welcome any chance to get them cheaper, I'm a little concerned....

Question is, do I pounce now for 'Nam forces... :D

Book Reviews - the Vietnam War

A couple of book recommendations, this time for folks into the Vietnam conflict, be it with FoW Vietnam or Charlie Don't Surf. These are:

In The Field: Vietnam and My Letters Home, by Damon Darley. Basically this is a set of transcripts of the author's letters home to his (very new) wife during his tour of duty in Vietnam.

Vietnam: No Regrets: One Soldier's Tour of Duty, by J. Watkins. Again a memoir of a tour of duty, but not (this time) as letters.

Both these books were available as free Kindle downloads a while back, but they're both still under a fiver each, and well worth a read, especially if you want to understand the poor infantryman's view of the conflict.

I have a copy of Charlie Don't Surf. This may be bad news for my lead mountain :D