COC - The Probe, part four

So I managed to get in a few more phases of turn two last night before heading out to the folk club at the Royal.  The developments were quite significant.

When we left the game the British were beginning to move forward to attack the German right.  This developed into a three section attack when the British commander used a Chain of Command die to move one of his Jump Off Points over to that flank and threw his last section into action.

The German had in the meantime deployed his third section (in entrenchments) centrally to block any advance along the Kartenspielerweg.

The British now had three squads attacking one on the (British) left.  Unfortunately I misjudged the situation.  Rather than wait to inflict more kills and shock on the isolated German unit and give the flanking British section time to get behind the German flank, I launched a hasty charge and had a British section wiped out to a man in the resulting close combat!  Did weaken that German section though.

This leaves us with the following position:

Three British sections face off against three German.  All three senior leaders are now deployed.  The British platoon sergeant is with the weakened squad on the right.  He also has the one remaining man from the platoon's 2" mortar team.  The British platoon commander is on the left facing the German squad that's currently playing host to his opposite number.

The only undeployed units are British.  The PIAT team may end up on the right just to add some extra bodies to resist any German counterattack, whilst the sniper will struggle to add much given the limited visibility.

Speaking of the sniper.  I started construction of him on Saturday at teatime and finished him Sunday morning so don't judge too harshly:

Body of an Airfix paratrooper, rifle and helmet from Esci British infantry.

COC - The Probe, part three

The first turn begins with the Germans rolling their five command dice:

The 6 we can ignore, it just tells us that the Brits will get the next phase.  With two ones the Germans could put two independent teams onto the table but they only have one - the Panzerschreck team.  They elect to leave it for now.  The two allows them to deploy a squad - they bring one on on their left flank.  The three would let them bring on another squad by means of activating its squad leader but they decide not to at this stage.

The British then roll:

The two fives immediately start them building pips on their first Chain of Command dice.  When this reaches six pips it'll be a valuable resource.  The two fours are ignored for now as the British player doesn't want to commit his platoon commander and platoon sergeant too soon.  The two is used to deploy a squad at the right flank jumping off point.

Play than swings back and forth for several phases with new units coming on and existing ones moving and firing. The two squads/sections on the right hand side of the table exchange shots at the limit of visibility through the trees (12").  Suddenly the British are taking casualties and picking up shock points.

The British platoon sergeant is suddenly right where he is needed.  He rallies two points of shock from the Bren gun team of the right flank section and has the whole section fire at the enemy squad inflicting two kills and two points of shock.

This is not enough to dampen the spirits of the enemy though.  Their left flank squad puts down fierce fire and wipes out the British section's Bren team!  British force morale falls from 9 to 8.

Knowing then that action is required, the British commander sends forward his 2" mortar team to support the right hand section whilst commencing a left hook attack with two of his four sections.  The 2" mortar fires smoke (off target) and the rifle team and section leader (all that's left of the right hand section) withdraw behind their jump off point.  Another section will be needed to drive forward on this flank.

But what's this?  The Germans roll four sixes!  The Turn ends, the Germans go first the next turn and there's a random event.  The Germans move their left flank squad into an better position, the 2" mortar smoke disperses, and it starts to rain, reducing maximum visibility to 18".  The last fact is pretty much irrelevant as the maximum visibility within the woods is only 12".

At the end of turn one the British have a badly mauled section on their right and two sections advancing through the woods in the centre of the table.  They are heading towards a single German section that's as yet untested.  Force morale stands 10:8 in favour of the Germans.

COC - The Probe, part two

The game begins with the  Patrol Phase.  This establishes the position and extent of No Man's Land between the two platoons.

Actually at this point I should declare who the two sides are in this game. The defenders are a platoon or German infantry - Regulars, nothing special but with enough entrenched positions for three teams.  

The attackers, meanwhile, are a British (dismounted) Motor Platoon.  I'm designating them as No1 platoon, 2nd King's Royal Rifle Corps.  They are reinforced by an additional section from No2 platoon, a medical orderly and, if I can get one pointed in time, a sniper team.

Anyway, back to the Patrol Phase.  The Germans start with four patrol markers spread across the table near their baseline.

I elected to take three patrol markers for the British.  They start stacked on the British baseline.  I thought the British would want to have the best possible chance of deploying across the Kartenspielerweg, which runs from bottom right to top left of the table. Having to cross it with Germans deployed to enfilade it would be unpleasant (though there are some undulations of the ground that break up line of sight).

After the Patrol Phase the German markers were spread across the middle of the board whilst the British ones were concentrated on the right. A German outflanking was possible but any Germans starting on the extreme right would be perhaps a little distant from the action.

The resulting Jump Off Points (these go on table a little behind the Patrol Markers and must be in cover) end up as shown below (German in red, British in yellow). Note that one of the JOPs is on the "correct" side of the Kartenspielerweg, albeit right next to an area of open ground.

More to come when I've actually started deploying troops!

COC - The Probe, part one

In which The Land of Counterpane returns to its cultural roots.

The Land of Counterpane takes its name from Robert Louis Stevenson's poem about playing with toy soldiers, buildings and ships when confined to bed with a childhood illness.  With the twins away at uni I have access to a couple of rooms that will remain undisturbed for a while.  Charlie's bed (overlaid with 2' square boards and a GW battlemat) has now become a battlefield.

I plan to play through, and document here, a full, solo game of Chain of Command.  This should get me sufficiently familiar with the rules to offer them as an option for a Saturday Afternoon Wargame.

My scenario is based on the fighting in the Reichswald, during Operation Veritable in early 1945.  I plan to use the standard scenario The Probe from the Chain of Command rule book.

The Reichswald (Imperial Forest) is an area of dense woodland right on the Dutch-German border.  My whole table is therefore wooded except a few areas of open ground and some long green lanes that cut straight through the forest.  I think of the long diagonal lane as the Kartenspielerweg, one of the main lanes still to be found on modern maps.

 
I'll try and blog regularly as I go through the game.  Hopefully this will be helpful to give you an idea of the rules in use. As usual the forces will be from my 20mm scale collection.

Crisis Point V - Sunday Report

On Sunday we played another three games; this time two Arc of Fire and one Force on Force.

Mark Kniveton and Ian Shaw continued their Force on Force game as Ian's NATO troops penetrated into the inner area of a medieval castle.

How fantastic is that?  It's a single acc-formed piece.  I understand Mark purchased it many years ago from Paul and Theresa Bailey of Keep Wargaming.

It was nice to see the blue bus in action again (below).  It was painted by Phil Gray and has appeared in past games that I've run and now resides in Mark Kniveton's collection.

While that went on Richard Phillips ran another game set in downtown Tchervbevan.  This was one Richard and I had discussed in the week running up to the event but I have to say that Richard took it far beyond what we'd covered.

I didn't know much about what was happening in this game at the time but Andy Canham's excellent account tells the story of a fantastic game that really tied up a lot of the remaining loose ends in the Andreivia story.

Finally, I ran Casevac, a scenario I'd prepared in advance in case it was needed.  This involved a NATO force that was tasked with taking a Mujaheddin-held village whilst dealing with the need to evacuate wounded soldiers after an IED explosion.

The NATO forces were Italian and commanded by Phil Gray.  This was a great opportunity to Use Richard P's Arietes and Centauros.

At one point the random events table gave the Mujaheddin air support - just enough to slow the Italian advance.  So out came the Hs-126.

Phil managed to call in the casevac helo quite early...

It soon became apparent that I'd given Jamie (who was playing the Mujaheddin) far to little in the way of anti-tank weapons with any decent range.  I provided him with reinforcement in the form of a T-55 but this was soon brewed up by the 105mm gun of the Centauro tank destroyer.

We wound up about 3pm with Phill clearly in command of the situation.

My thanks go to Ian, Andy, Richard and in particular Jamie for their tireless efforts in setting up and closing down Crisis Point V.

On Monday evening I attended a meeting of the Dungworth Village Hall committee and presented them with a cheque for £50 which represented the surplus after we'd paid for the hire of the venue.  My thanks to all who contributed to a terrific weekend.

Crisis Point V - Saturday Report

It's now Wednesday and I finally have time to report back on Crisis Point V at the weekend.  I have to say I'm incredibly pleased with how it went.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Crisis Point is the once-a-year wargames event first organised in 2012.  I wanted to bring trade to the village and I thought we could probably raise some money for charity along the way.  Mainly, though, I hoped that Crisis Point would create a community of gamers whose creativity and enthusiasm would be greater than the sum of its parts.  In all of these respects the event's been a real success.

This year there were some deliberate changes from previous years.  For the first time we aimed to play lots of short games.  We had a definite aim of finishing Saturday's games on Saturday and planning Sunday's games on Saturday evening.  We also had, for the first time, multiple different rules sets in use; three being the simultaneous maximum.

On Saturday morning there were three games.  I ran a game of Pulp Alley.  This used my dungeon terrain to represent the tunnels beneath Castle Myelikvis in Andreivia.

Developed from an idea by Rob Connolly, the scenario involved agents of MI6 (Benedict Sharrock) and Russian Military Intelligence (GRU, Phil Gray) trying to recover a vital piece of computer hardware from Andreivian Intelligence (Jamie Crawley).

Sadly there are hardly any photos as I was too busy running the game, which finished with the Andreivian agents still in possession of the vital "Slicer" hardware.

The Slicer was needed to decrypt reconnaissance images stored in a KH11 spy satellite recently misplaced by the American NSA.  The KH11 was the objective of an Arc of Fire game run by Richard Phillips on the adjacent, much larger, table.  I rather stuck Richard with the job of running this, umpiring Arc of Fire for the first time.  He did a sterling job as far as I could see.

Somewhere in the eastern hills of Andreivia Russian and NATO troops were converging on the area where the satellite was thought to have landed.  A group of Mujaheddin holding the nearby village knew exactly where the satellite had landed, if not exactly how valuable its contents were.  Finally, a unit of the Andreivian Army would arrive, somewhat delayed, to also contest possession of the prize.

Meanwhile, on the third table, Mark Kniveton put on a large game of Force on Force.  Sadly, I have very few pics of this but I'm very pleased with how thoroughly Mark got into the spirit of the Andreivian setting.

After the Pulp Alley game had finished I ran a second game, this time a small game of Arc of Fire.  This was based on a scene from the film Full Metal Jacket. It involved a suicidal attack (by Andreivian Armenians, not Viet Cong) on the gates of a military base (Dvimin Military Academy, not Da Nang).  This game was one I'd planned for some time but I had to rearrange the sides when the Andreivia Matrix Game saw the Italian NATO contingent take over the base a week or so before Crisis Point!

Armenian commandos storm the gate and take casualties from their own,
inaccurate mortar support!

This game was great fun.  The attacking Armenians were led into the camp by a BTR-40 APC heavily loaded with explosives.  Benedict, as the Armenian commander, knew the rules under which the explosive would go off but Phil, running the Italians, didn't.

Benedict took out the guards in the look out tower early in the game and some excellent dice rolling saw off the ready guard (Joker's lot in the film) in short order too.  That left the Turks relying on their reserves...

The reserve squad moves up.

In an unexpected twist, Phil managed to capture the BTR 40 and was driving it back towards the attackers when the required combination of cards caused it to explode...

BOOM!

So much for the games on Saturday.  Many thanks to all who participated and to those who brought much sustenance for the hungry gamers.  

That evening we repaired to the Royal Hotel and enjoyed Dave's excellent pies (and a little beer).  We also planned Sunday's games, of which more in the next post....

Crisis Point - First Shots

By way of an appetiser, here are the first shots from Saturday's play at Crisis Point V:

Andreivian Pulp Alley

Armenian commandos attack the Dvimin Military Academy

Andreivian Government commanders plan to recover a satellite