Saturday Game Day at Adler Hobby

Today was one of our twice-monthly game days at Adler Hobby. The second such game day normally focuses on painting, terrain building and anything else we decide to do. Gaming of course is always on the menu if people bring armies and want to play. Several of us are considering supporting an upcoming benefit tournament hosted by our friends from the Boston Trained Bands club. To help support this effort I brought a couple of DBA armies so I could teach people how to play the rules.

The tutorial game started with Gordon playing the Greeks and Russ playing the Romans, but Don took over for Gordon when some new customers came to the store that needed help. All three players picked up the rules quickly and Don and Russ played a very good game with both making good tactical DBA decisions several times. In the end Russ squeaked out a win with the Romans with a score of 4-2 assaulting and capturing the Roman camp with a unit of Triarii. There's something you don't see all the time!

Russ had to leave but Don and I still had some time before Gordon had to close up shop so we played a 1500 point Flames of War game as part of our ongoing Campaign. Don brought his Fallschirmjäger company from the Burning Empires rule book, and I opted to use my Australian Divisional Cavalry Squadron. Don's Fallschirmjäger stands are beautifully based with tall grass and meadow flowers from Army Painter. They were so nice that I took the photos below so people can enjoy them.

For our game we played this month's featured mission 'Pincers'. Since I was using a mechanized company and Don was using an infantry I was the attacker and Don was the defender. Don placed his Artillery, Mortars and a large kampfgroup of infantry and weapons, including a very deadly recoilless rifle on the table and kept a platoon of Pak38 AT guns (proxied by Pak40 models) in ambush. The photos below show the first two turns. With delayed reserves I thought a bull rush attack was the best approach. I knew Don's AT guns and recoilless rifle would take their toll. I could only hope I could press him off the objective before my army vaporized.....then the Stukas came!

This was an interesting game. My Desert Rats dice show a rat when they roll a 1. Early in the game I was saying 'RATS!' a LOT. This meant a lot of bailed and bogged down vehicles some of which refused to get back into action for multiple turns. Don's fearless veteran Germans didn't need much luck early on to whittle me down. The combination of their high skill and my Australian's trained status meant Don was scoring a lot of solid hits.

A platoon of Bren carriers was bailed by the Pak38 AT platoon and finished off by an infantry assault, then 2 of 3 Humber II armored cars perished and then two of my captured Italian tanks died with the third failing morale (another RATS! moment). Just when things looked lost Don started to have a few turns of bad dice as well. Stukas failed to score kills, and after killing a PaK38 and their officer Don's remaining fearless gun decided they'd rather go to the rear for ammo. I was able to call in some smoke with my artillery at a critical time, and then Don's reserve rolls for turns 3 and 4 came up empty. With one last assault from my remaining few tanks and a spray of MG fire from behind the cover of a thin ridge I was finally able to eliminate Don's infantry platoon that was contesting the objective.

In turn five Don did get one reserve unit, but it was too far from the objective to contest it. Don attempted to storm trooper move a gun from his artillery battery to contest but it failed it's skill check to do so. Also in that turn Don's Stukas weren't able to kill enough of my force to force me to company morale so I squeaked out a narrow victory on turn six. If any one of a half dozen rolls that SHOULD have gone Don's way had, I'd be writing about a defeat instead of a victory. Don took it all in stride like the gentleman he is. This is why I like gaming with friends. Thanks for the fun game Don.