September wargames weekend
- Friday evening - epic five player, late-night Shadowfist game. Modesty stops me from revealing who won the game - save to say it was, of course, the player who looked to be in the weakest position for most of the game
- Saturday morning and afternoon- the big game was an ancient naval engagement (The battle of Side) between Carthaginians/Syrians and Romans/Rhodians. Contrary to normal expectations of Punic War naval battles the Roman forces were better crews and the Carthaginians had much better marines. The quality of the crews on the Roman side won out, as the Carthaginians couldn't grapple often enough to make their marine superiority tell. The highlight of the game was the ring of ships (several of them on fire) locked together surrounding the Carthaginian admiral and threatening to go down together as soon as one of the flaming vessels burned to the waterline.
- Saturday evening - Full Thrust game with a force of dashing, swashbuckling buccaneers (consisting a mixture of small and very small ships together with a large force of fighters) facing a combined NAC and FSE force (of fewer ships, but generally bigger than the pirates). The pirates were defending their home base from the allies who had finished a war and combined to destroy the pirates who had been preying on their commerce. The base was located in a nebula so a lot of the table was covered with areas where rolls were required to lock on before being able to fire - plus a few bits which were dangerous to enter.
The pirates did pretty well initially destroying the entire FSE force (sadly this gave the NAC player victory points as he was supposed to get rid of the senior FSE admiral) with a mixture of fighters and their larger ships. The NAC cruisers proved to be a much tougher obstacle and the pirates suffered badly as they tried to get at them and their assault transports. Cutting their loses the pirates eventually jumped out with the ships they had left and abandoned their base.
- Sunday - Arras 1940
This was a Spearhead game with a British mainly armoured force counterattacking to try and pinch off the corridor the Germans have punched between them and the main French forces.
The British attacked from the flank of the German line of advance and initially pushed back the lead German motorised infantry elements fairly easily. The Germans were horrified by the number of British tanks opposing them, but the British took quite a while to get them into action as them became somewhat bottled up crossing one of the two river bridges that gave them access to the German positions.
The German's only armour battalion was committed and moved forward to bolster the center of their position which was under significant pressure. They then became involved in a long, but almost bloodless battle with half of the British armour - the British tanks were very poor against armoured targets (in the case of about half of them they couldn't attack tanks), but were so heavily armoured that the German tank guns had great difficulty doing any damage.
While the armour battle began the lead two battalions of the British infantry force moved into contact with German panzergrenadiers and suffered from the superior German firepower and were destroyed when they tried to counterattack.
On the other flank a German infantry battalion waded across the river and then began to pick off the British infantry as they advanced towards them. The British turned their second tank battalion to try and break the Germans - they were fairly successful, driving in the front defensive line and overunning a couple of platoons, but the second line proved tougher and eventually they spent themselves trying to break it.
As the game came to a close the Germans had consolidated their initially very precarious postion and done enough damage to make the British pull back and break off their attack.