Warlord Games - Red Devils, British Paras a closer look

Needless to say I did have to dig through the Warlord Games Army Box set for the British "Red Devils" that I purchased. This is designed as a 1000 point box for Bolt Action although I'll be using them for Chain of Command from Too Fat Lardies. I was able to talk the store into giving me a discount on the box which allowed me to pick up three more packs of miniatures; the extra Vickers MMG team, the piat and light mortar teams and the 3# mortar team.

For some reason I thought the box set of miniatures were plastic but they are actually metal. That was a pleasant surprise as I have decided that I do prefer metal minis. While the plastics are more versatile in assembly and certainly cheaper the way some of the details have to be handled are less than desirable. So bring on the metal!

The box

Minis from the box, plus laser cut bases. They are made from MDF so I probably won't use them.

Also in the box, three more squads and the 6# ATG and crew

One Jeep is in there somewhere

The set should have come with two of these but there was only one in the box. Since the box was plain white and not shrink wrapped I'm not sure if it was stolen out of the box or just mis-packed.

The reinforcements that I added

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).