Force on Force AAR - Russians vs Chechens

Managed to get my third Force on Force game in. Once again I get to play the irregular forces. On a positive note the Chechens are actually better than the Russian regulars that they are facing. Its still an asymmetrical battle though which puts my partner and I a bit behind the curve. Rob and I are playing against Kirk and Nick this time with Matt running the game. This is a playtest for Tacticon (coming up on Labor Day weekend) so there was a lot of ongoing discussion to make sure it was a good game for both sides.

Turn 1 goes very well for the Chechens as one of Rob's squads lights up a BMP with their RPG and took out a good chunk of the squad and the crew right away. The T80s split each slowly moving down the two main streets to the ministry of defense and the local government buildings. Russian return fire was pretty devastating taking out all but one of the Chechen defenders.

Turn 2 is kind of a stalemate with Chechen units using hot spot movement to shift positions. Two of these moves are key to slowing down the Russian advance. One squad manages a hot spot move into the corner of the streets threatening both the flank of the T80 and the advancing infantry trying to cross the street. Another hot spot move puts a Chechen squad behind the T80, which fires reactively doing considerable damage. The Chechen BMP 1 opens up with its Sagger ATGM  on that T80 but misses. The T80's return fire fails to hit as well.

Turn 3 sees a lot of Russian firepower pouring into the Chechen squad at the corner and with the Chechen returning fire with the RPG at the T80 (as an irregular unit I can't split my fire so my choice is the T80's flank or advancing infantry. I go for the armor, probably a poor choice, and my RPG bounces off. Russian reinforcements start to arrive

Turn 4 sees much the same. Russian reinforcements start to whittle down the Chechens at the corner. BMPs and infantry pour in fire along with the T80 main gun and MGs. The T80 also misses a shot at the BMP again, while the BMP manages to score a hit and immobilize it. The other T80 continues down the street pretty much unimpeded at this point with the Chechen BRDM running for cover. Russian infantry assault the shaken Chechen squad and despite a serious advantage in numbers and firepower is wiped out by the shaken squad.

Turn 5 sees the T80 finally scoring a hit and destroying the Chechen BMP. The other T80 turns the corner and prepares to fire on the last Chechen squad, two RPGs hit it but fail to penetrate the frontal armor. Its return fire is ineffective. Chechen reinforcements finally arrive and fortunately show up in just the right place.

Turn 6 becomes the final turn as we have to clean up before the game can really end. A round of terribly ineffective fire sees more RPGs bounce off the T80s, including shots from the rear and against the top deck. We had a quite a bit of discussion on play balance on this one, it would have been nice to finish it off, but we had a good time with it.

At the start

Turn 1 Results

Turn 2

 Turn 3

Turn 4 and Beyond

Force on Force - British Paras vs Taliban

This was my first game of Force on Force. Nick Johnson had the night off and brought his miniatures and boards to teach us the game. This is his standard convention scenario and features 2 squads of British Paratroopers against a horde of Taliban. Their mission objective is to find the cache of weapons rumored to be in a building in the back corner of the board. Nick and Lee Schultz built the boards up from a wood frame with half inch Styrofoam on top as the base. Trees and buildings (Gamecraft Miniatures) are separate pieces but everything else is built directly on the boards. Its a good looking setup and has survived traveling pretty well at this point. Its been used for six games at Genghis Con XXXIII (in Denver last February) and traveled around for about another 15 games at this point. In this game Ray and John ran the British Paras and J (John's son) and I ran the Taliban forces. I'll let the pictures tell most of the story but a quick synopsis had the Taliban taking out the British GPMG team on turn 1 and then fighting a delaying action for the rest of the game. The Taliban sniper team died on turn 1 without causing a casualty to the advancing Paras. From there on it was just stubborn resistance (and some really good die rolling) to slow the British advance. In there somewhere a Taliban news crew managed to show up and promptly caught the attention of a fire team that spent two or three turns taking them down. A fortunate placement of an IED cut off one of the British avenues of advance forcing them to split up. It came down to the last turns as two British fire teams converged on the weapons cache. One team lost two members trying charge the building. The other team managed to get in the building but couldn't wipe out the remaining Taliban. This was a great game and well played by both sides. I picked up the win for the Taliban this time as the British Paras ended up with 2 KIA and 2 seriously wounded and did not control the objective. I took a lot of pictures and here are some of the better ones.

At the start of the game British in the LZ and a Taliban sniper team on the roof.

A wider view of the initial positions

Taliban occupy a building on the right flank and open up on the British GPMG team

British fire teams taking cover in the irrigation ditch

British fire team takes on a Taliban flank attack head on, and takes a casualty while doing it.

Paras finish off the Taliban right flank.

Advancing Paras discover more Taliban

Paras continue the advance on the right

Taliban in the Para's rear tie up the second squad and occupy the landing zone

Paras take out the Taliban taking cover in the second irrigation ditch

A Para fire team, with casualties of its own, defends against the Taliban attacking from behind

Para squad closing in on the hidden weapons cache

Paras take a group of Taliban on top of the building under fire and take down the entire unit. Things are looking up but time is short.

The Taliban news team goes down. No video is getting out about this action. (Taliban lose 5 victory points for the news team not surviving).

Para fire teams converge for the final assault.

Another angle on the Taliban holding the building

The British point of view as another unit of Taliban suddenly appear to block the way.

That's a bunch of AKs!

British contest but do not hold the objective. Two Para casualties, one KIA, one serious. Nick has AARs as well as modeling info on his blog at: http://littlenickysgameroom.blogspot.com (I have tried getting this URL in here about 5 times, blogger doesn't like it very much for some reason).

USMC Transportation; AAVP7A1

Quite frankly, school is killing me right now. Its going to cut into my gaming and painting more than I anticipated. I got all my official transcripts in and it looks like I'm not as far along credit wise as I thought I was. 77 more to go to the degree. Ouch!

In the meantime though I have been casually searching for transports for my modern USMC troops. HMMWVs have been very hard to find but today I'm finally getting a chance to make a run to the local hobby shop that should have a reasonable selection. After going through the very thin stock of kits in the Ft Collins area I realized just how spoiled I was down in the Aurora area with quick access to places like Caboose Hobbies and Colpar Hobbies. Colpar has more kits down one side of one of their aisles than I found in two stores in Ft Collins. However, last night I found one of the things I was looking for online at a really good price; the USMC Tuna Boats at $9.00 each. So the order is in and now I'm just waiting for them to arrive. The military modeler in me says that I should go all out and pick up some aftermarket parts to really trick these out but the aftermarket kits are more expensive than the models themselves (at least in this case), so I didn't take that plunge last night. Hopefully sometime next week I'll have four AAVP7A1s to transport my Marines around.

I'm Weak - New Minis, New Scale

My friend, Nick Johnson (let's put that in perspective, he could be my son), ran a whole bunch of Force on Force games during Genghis Con XXXIII. I think he ran two different scenarios for a total of eight sessions over the course of three days. Very dedicated! I like to support a fellow gamer when they have put so much blood, sweat and tears into putting on a game and it looks like Ambush Alley is going to as well. Of course my version of support means buying more minis! I ended up ordering modern 20mm US Marines last night from Elheim and a bunch of buildings from Gamecraft Miniatures. So not only did I manage to increase the amount of unpainted material coming to the house but I did it in a scale that I have never worked with before and have nothing else to go along with it. Perhaps what is even worse is that five Death Kingdom minis arrived right before the convention and the rest of the couplers for my freight cars arrived yesterday. I'm also a bit behind on my school work at this point. I need to set everything aside for a bit and get caught up there before I even contemplate getting the brushes out again, although there is another bunch of WWI US Marines demanding to be painted too, and an entry for the Iron Painter Competition............arghhhhhhh!