We played the Prelude scenario from Grossdeutschland at Kursk by Scott Fisher and Nathan Forney. This takes place on the eve of the Kursk offensive and sees a German patrol attempting to destroy a Soviet forward outpost.
Jamie played the Germans with platoon HQ, two squads and a 8cm mortar team. As the Soviets, I had a forward observer team in the reinforced basement of a small house, a rifle squad, and a medium MG team. I also had a couple of fire missions of 76mm artillery support to call on.
The house can be seen on the left in the pic below. The Germans entered from the far end and chose not to advance along the gully (marked with lichen in the photo). This was probably a good move as my hidden deployment had the Maxim gun deployed in the gully.
Jamie's platoon HQ soon came under fire from my rifle squad. White counter = broken, red = wounded.
The mortar team set up on the far side of the gully but then discovered that they couldn't detect the hidden Soviet units at any range inside the minimum range for their mortar. I should have remembered that they could have sent the team commander up to 6" forward to spot for the rest of the crew.
Jamie's first squad established a base of fire on the hill...
... whilst his second squad made for the house needing to cross barbed wire to get there....
The assault squad crossed the barbed wire quite easily (Jamie rolled the minimum deduction from his move twice) and moved forward to attack the house.
By this time I'd managed to get my medium machine gun redeployed into a position from where they could fire laterally across the table and hit anyone assaulting the front of the house. Unfortunately it was only after the Germans had launched their close-assault that the MMG team managed to make the TAC roll they needed to spot and fire on them
I needn't have fretted, though. Assaulting an unsuppressed position is bloody and the forward observer's SMG played bloody havoc with the assaulting Germans. When Jamie called off the attack after six turns, the assault team was in tatters.
Arc of Fire remains my favourite modern skirmish system but I do an apology to Jamie for not fixing his problem with the mortars during the game. We should play this one again and get it right next time.
By the way, any comments on the last two photos? I think the faded look (courtesy of Photos on my Mac) gives a nice WW2 look to the images.
4 comments:
Nice - not played Arc of Fire in ages.
I've played the scenario you did and found it a difficult one for the Germans too....
Cheers,
Pete.
Cheers, Pete. It's certainly an interesting tactical challenge and one I'd like to try again.
Hi Richard C,
Great looking game, I really like AoF since being introduced to it at Crisis Point by your good self. Like the last two photos as they show colours better.
Cheers
Richard P
Cheers, Richard. I might try faded pics again.
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