EW North Africa Escalation League (7)

Last night was what might be my final game in our soon to be completed early war North Africa Flames of War Escalation League. Before the games some of us had a 'review of the troops' photograph session. The league has prize support for completing two 1500 point armies for the league. To the left you can see me with my two armies: my German Stützpunkt force (also shown in detail below left) and 1500 points of my Australian commonwealth infantry force (below right), which in all total approaches 3500 points worth of troops painted up during the league. There is a more detailed troop review of the entire Australian collection in this previous blog post.

I've had great fun painting up these two armies. I'm most likely going to continue tinkering with the forces a bit. I have a couple more units of Australians that I've purchased and will paint up just to complete the project. The Stützpunkt is a bit more of a work in progress. I still would like to add a couple platoons of armor, preferably Panzer IIc or Panzer III tanks and could also paint up one more platoon of infantry. The addition of the latter would also allow me to field this force as a regular infantry company.

 

After the photo session was over I played a very enjoyable game with my Australians running them as a Divisional Cavalry squadron, against Gordon's Black Shirt Italian infantry horde. Gordon was aided by Eric for a portion of the game. My honorable opponents are shown in the photo to the left. This game featured several successful assaults by Gordon's infantry, one against my Bren carriers (below right), and another one pushing back my captured Italian tank platoon in a great counter-attack by a lone infantry team. Brave chaps those fearless conscripts are. I guess the Italians knew exactly where the weakness of their own tanks were!

Early on I had some success with my recon moves and was able to catch Gordon's anti-tank platoon while being towed (above left) and also took out one of his heavy artillery guns also while towed. These two early gains secured me an opportunity to press him on my left flank which eventually ended up being an objective I could hold with my tanks on Turn 6 for the win. The win was not without cost. I lost both of my anti-tank platoons and had only a single carrier left from one of my Bren carrier patrols. All in all a fun game where we learned some of the new V3 rules, all of which everyone seemed to feel were significant improvements to the rules.