Early War Escalation League (4)

Today we had another session of our early war escalation league at Adler Hobby. This being the first session of the month we focused on gaming. As most players are still waiting for Battlefront to release blisters for the early war figures to complete their forces we're still at 600 points in the league. To liven things up we're going to focus on a different mission each month. This month's mission is 'Fighting Withdrawal'. In the photo above you can see the objective placement area marked with green Popsicle sticks. Since both armies were infantry we diced to see who would be the defender and I won the roll and chose to defend.

I used a new army list today which started with of one platoon of regular engineers (instead of the mechanized engineer list). I did this because the blisters for the Panzer I tanks from the mechanized list are still not released so I thought I'd try out the flame thrower-armed foot pioneers instead. For support I used a battery of PaK 36 AT guns that I partially completed, enough to put on the table, and a battery of 100mm chemical mortars which I had to proxy with blank bases. I had 25 points left over so I equipped my engineers with a supply truck which provided me with three sections of barbed wire - just the trick to slow down hordes of advancing Polish foot sloggers. My opponent was Scott with his Polish infantry horde company with a battery of light artillery and a battery of light AT guns which were devastatingly effective.

We're all learning, and Scott chose to try out the Polish special rule 'Bypassed' for this game. This rule allows the Polish player to have one of their platoons arrive at a random location behind the enemy position. This is a tricky rule as the non-Polish player is notified of the bypass and can position troops to block the arrival points. I chose to do this and limited Scott's arival points to only 3 of the 6 available which was unfortunately too effective in a 600 point game and prevented Scott's platoon (his HUGE infantry platoon) from arriving until turn 7 of 8 for the scenario.

Even with this disadvantage, Scott almost won the game with just his artillery and AT guns which were devastatingly effective. His 3 AT guns destroyed my 4-gun AT battery before I could return the favor. Scott's artillery had very good luck digging out my infantry using the guns 4+ firepower rating. At the end of the game I was clinging on to the final objective with only 3 stands of infantry and my commanders. Had his Polish infantry deployed on board and marched across the table he would have destroyed me completely. We both agreed that the 'Bypassed' special rule will be much more useful in larger point games, but maybe not in the 'Fighting Withdrawal' scenario as the defender has the luxury of covering up too many of the arrival points.

A couple more photos of our game are below. Note the placement of my barbed wire at the Polish arrival points. The final position of the troops on turn 8 is in the last photo on the right.

The other game played was Jason's German Light Panzer company against Gordon's German motorcycle company. Gordon's motorcycles had a platoon of PaK 36 AT guns and a light AA half track battery in support. Gordon scored some early kills with his AT guns, but in the end Jason continued to roll along with his Blitzkrieg-ing German armor.