Northern Conspiracy January 2017 Game Night

Last Friday evening was our club's first game night of 2017. We had a good turn-out with over 20 members attending. I played in Mark D's game "Kittyhawk Down". Follow the link for Mark's blog post about the game. Mark will be re-running this excellent scenario at the upcoming Adler Hobby Game Day mini-convention.

The scenario is set in a hypothetical area of modern day Africa, with a French and local Fracno-loyal Africans and local African insurgents are fighting for control of a small village, expected to be the location of a soon to crash-land Kittyhawk observation plane.  The game uses Mark's own modifications to Bolt Action for the modern period, and they work quite nicely.

As the insurgents, were Warren and Paul. On our side, were Phil, Dave and myself. I'd played the scenario once before so I gave Phil and Dave first pick of the forces. Dave picked an African force with a Mortar, HMG Jeep and MMG squad, plus infantry. Phil selected an African force with a  Helicopter, an HMG Jeep and plenty of infantry squads. That left me with the smaller, elite French force with a wheeled armored car and some smaller, but elite infantry squads.

 

The game went well. Warren embraced the insurgent role and immediately made a suicide attack with an insurgent with an AK-47 riding a civilian motorcycle. The attack destroyed Dave's HMG Jeep and Warren's insurgent was then immediately killed. This is the stuff out of a bad B-movie, but we all had great fun with it, particularly Warren. To the left you can see the burning wreck of Dave's jeep.

The game progressed normally until the Kittyhawk finally crashed on the table. This is a randomized location, but it ended up smack dab in the middle of the road near the compound Dave's Africans controlled and a hill my French occupied. Warren's Command team and sniper were opposite Dave.  Warren made the first move to capture the downed plane with one of his depleted squads. I counter-attacked with a fresh French squad and took out Warren's insurgents. I followed up by bringing a second squad out in front of the plane to insure that at least one of my squads could hold the objective.

Warren's sniper was a terror in this game, taking out my sniper team and several other Franco-allied figures, but in the end the lone sniper and small command team weren't sufficient to push my French off the plane. Good game. Well played by all and quite fun. Warren's play was particularly enjoyable since he added immensely to the flavor of the game.

The other two games played were Charlie running a Napoleonic game with his rules, Napoleon's Rules of War and Early running a French and Indian skirmish game using 'Bloody Tomahawks' rules.