Tag Archives: Europa

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Boardgames, Sessions

She’s away with the trailer this weekend and my salmon hunting expedition postponed (the biomass has not moved into the Columbia yet), so I’ve set up two games on the dining room table.

The first is another try at the Luzon Scenario from The Damned Die Hard (TDDH).  The second is an old Europa Magazine scenario, Operation Icarus.

I found a nice TDDH series replay at a fellow Oregonian’s site.

The Icarus scenario is one that I’ve played before.  As Hitler is quoted in The Eagle Has Landed, it’s a “simple matter of logistics”.  How to get German units from Norway to Iceland, repair ports, build airfields, resupply what units you have, and, yeah…….stop the British.  If only I had one more para unit!

I’ll post a session(s) report later on.

The Damned Die Hard

Boardgames, Review + Session Report, ,

Tim and I decided our next FTF game will be a scenario from War of Resistance (WOR), one of two games in HMS/GRD’s Glory series.

I have both games, so he took the rules for WOR, and I set up the Luzon scenario from The Damned Die Hard (TDDH).  Interesting scenario, with the US player having to decide where to defend against a relatively strong but disorganized Japanese invasion force that is already ashore, and then a fighting withdrawal further south through terrain that is no easily defended.  To make things tougher, the Japanese have air supremacy.

As the British say, “All battles occur at the junction of two maps”, and this game is not an exception.  The break between the two map sheets is right across the best initial line of defense.  I’m going to get copies made and scotch tape the damn things together.

The unit sizes are small – battalions, reduced battalions, and regiments.  ZOCs are reduced for many units, and the smaller artillery units can only support one Regimental Equivalent (RE).   Special rules for jungle, and jungle rough terrain that provide the Japanese with some real advantages, as well as exploitation movement for light infantry and certain infantry units based on their intrinsic movement factors.  So, while it looks like Europa, it isn’t Europa. Closest Europa comparison I can come up with is Winter War. The similarities that come to mind are small  unit size , ZOC limitations, and special terrain features having a real effect on play.

Here’s the link for the WOR designer notes.  These notes are detailed, and give a good feel for the rules.

Company’s coming over so I had to take the game down.  Here’s a picture of the Dec IV turn after the Japanese pushed through the initial US MLR.

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Seems like a fun game, and I am looking forward to setting it up again late this week.

Europa: Battle Of The Bulge Scenario

Boardgames, Sessions

Finally getting around to posting up about last weekend’s Europa game.  It was a hard-fought contest, coming down to the last impulse.  The scenario uses a modified Europa turn sequence, with a non-phasing reaction phase placed between the phasing player’s movement and exploitation phase.  It’s air-on-demand, regardless of impulse.  The scenario involved the Dec I  through Jan II turns.

Victory points are awarded to the German player if able to exit units off the North map side (Brussels/Antwerp), or if the Allied player activates either the 9th or 3rd Armies.  For the Allied player, it’s simply a matter of avoiding German VPs.   We did not play the Boddenplatte option – which also involves VPs. Too much for the time available.

Tim’s axis of advance was South to North, using high-odds armored attacks to shatter outlying US units.  As Allied commander, I decided to activate either the 9th and/or 3d Army only as a last resort, way too many VPs involved.  The Allied reinforcement schedule is fairly generous, and it looked as though it was worth the risk to attempt a bend-but-not-break defense.

By mid-game, Tim’s pressure forced me to abandon Aachen in order to shorten up my defensive line, in order to create minimal reserves if needed to plug gaps of support weakened units.  The modified turn sequence saved me.  His January I attack attrited my unsupported southern units, forcing them to fall back.  However, during the reaction phase, I was able to reinforce these faltering units and seal off a penetration that would have given him access to the road grid leading to Brussels and Antwerp, and victory.

Early last week, Tim sent me an e-mail summarizing his impressions of the game.  Here they are…..

  1.   We forgot to halve the bombing factors of aircraft during the snow weather turns….oops…one for your rules screw-up files. We’d even talked about it during the set up.
  2. I wonder if it would be more useful to have the Luftwaffe fly harassment. They did help some on the attacks, but if they’d been halved, they wouldn’t have been all that useful (of course, they’d be halved for harassment, too). Making it harder for the allies to move up reserves would be a very good thing.
  3. I didn’t do a very good job of handling negative modifiers– I should have been a more cognizant of whether a defending stack was capable of AECD and if it wasn’t, used enough infantry to bring the attack below the threshold for ATEC. ATEC is very hard to overcome during bad weather. Of course, using more infantry lowers the German combat power. The other option, which I did use later in the scenario was to throw in more half capable units (I guess the Germans knew what they were doing when they made their panzer divisions into panzergrenadier divisions by detaching the panther battalions).
  4. I know we talked about it, but I was really surprised when you gave up Aachen. I was thinking that the allies would be very reluctant to abandon the first German city they’d captured and a west wall hex to boot. Given that the scenario didn’t penalize that decision, it was a good one.
  5. It was a bummer that my commandos got killed…I was hoping they would negate some of the negative modifiers from terrain and weather.
  6. I think I spent too much energy attacking the weak southern part of your line. I like to think I’m pretty good about focusing about what wins a scenario or a game, but not this time. In better weather, I might have been able to turn your flank, but its hard in the snow (and the axis fuel shortages hurt, too).
  7. I think you’re right that the Germans have to take some low odds attacks in order to try to crack the allied line.

BTW, the game involves a lot of counters in a very small area.  Tim liked that.  We did not use the black and white larger hex insert that accompanying the magazine.  Here’s the usual crummy picture, shot early in the day, so the beer mats are not yet in use.

 

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Fun game, Fun Time…….

Wargaming Weekend

General

My great friend Tim drove out from Portland on Friday for a short weekend of wargaming.  We hadn’t played Europa in ages so it had been agreed some weeks before to try a Battle of the Bulge scenario published in Europa Magazine.  More on that game in a separate post.

I met Tim back in 1998, just after moving to Portland.  Our meeting was prompted by my post in the old Lysator Europa discussion group about FTF opponents in Portland.

After two “get acquainted” meetings in brewpubs, we started playing Europa on a weekly basis.  Lots of games, lots of scenarios.  By our count we’ve played War In The Desert at least 4 times,  (by my reckoning the horrific) For Whom The Bell Tolls a couple of times, who knows how many tries at Second Front, including an epic 1943 Sledgehammer scenario (those P-40s just don’t get the job done….give me a P-47 every time) that made Dieppe look like a smashing success.  I can’t even guess at how many times we played Narvik, Balkan Front,  and Winter War.

We even played Second Front at GameStorm twice.  The first  time Tim invited a couple of players from his Newberg Saturday wargaming group to participate.  These gentlemen apparently expected some sort of preparation, order and discipline when it came to the setup.  According to Tim, they never recovered from the shock of watching me nonchalantly dumping a mass of  counters out of the box onto our assigned table.  I figured with four sets of hands and eyes, setup would be a snap.  Suffice to say it was not the most congenial of games after that.  I melted down on Sunday of our second appearance after our studious next door neighbors were replaced by  a group of children playing some type of miniature skittle bowling game, complete with screaming.  Words were exchanged.

By 2010,  Tim and I started playing GMT published card driven games.  Our favorites are Paths of Glory, Pursuit of Glory, Wilderness War and Thirty Years War.  This trend continued when I moved because it is damn near impossible to finish a Europa game in a couple of days.

One reason for this is that we don’t necessarily focus on the game all the time.  Lots of talking about current events, past games, horrendous die rolls, beer drinking, DVDs and (in season) football watching.

But no mistake about this,  Tim is an extremely skilled and focused player.  Much more so than I am.  He’s a Europa Experten who has gradually (and there have been years over which to do this) come to terms with the demise of that franchise, and HMS/GRD’s inability to deliver their remake of Scorched Earth; Total War.  Tim is happiest when playing games with very high counter density, so this game has been his Holy Grail.  Not even March To Victory has satisfied his need for towering stacks of counters.

I’m looking forward to our next meeting.