Nothing is Sirte-an...

No Bloody Picnic try out on Friday night; entirely my fault as my brain broke over the week and I couldn't assimilate the rules.  Sorry, Dillon!

As such, I ran a game of Peter Pig's Squarebashing (of which there may be a new version in the future) for four of the chaps, set in August 1914, each pair sharing a division apiece; continuing the confessionals, the Hun forces were barely undercoated, let alone base coated.

There appears to be an oasis ahead, sir...

As a result of German pre-game decisions and some significantly worse-than-average German dice rolling, a distinctly under-strength German division was to fend off a full-strength British Division's advance.  The British gained a clear victory, driving through to the enemy baseline.  Whilst this was not necessarily a foregone conclusion, a major factor was the German decision to split their limited force between the flanks of the deployment zone, leaving the centre entirely clear.  This caught most of us by surprise, including myself, and I'm not the sharpest tool in the box.  Even then, the British still ensured that their assaults were well supported, as opposed to the penny-packet attacks of the Germans.  

The German players didn't mind losing too much (after all, it's what eventually happened in 1918).  The British were quite pleased- they were up against a game countdown, and managed to sneak in under both that and real-time constraints.  Given the fact it was an early war game, and at divisional level, it was felt the level of abstraction found in Squarebashing was appropriate- the difference made to assaults by rear and flank support was also noted in particular.  

There was more gaming today as it was Club Sunday.  This time we had an excellent trio of linked Force On Force scenarios set in Libya, based around the search for a recently deceased North African leader's son...our referee having created a very topical day for us!  It's been the first time in a long while where I've had to number crunch modifiers, and the noggin is still hurting, but it was well worth the effort.  I 'got' the idea that different die types represent different levels of training, morale etc, and we also quite liked the Stress mechanism that was used across the three scenarios.  As for the results, our NTC forces managed to whizz along a dried wadi to reach our destination with the loss of one technical (scenario 1),  eliminated an urban enemy HQ en-route (scenario 2) but fell at the last hurdle!  Whilst a fog of war card meant that our target was inadvertantly revealed due to some media types interviewing him, NTC forces were unable to get into the compound or eliminate the attached squads of bodyguards.  To compound this, a friendly special forces team that might have snatched our target was blown out of the sky by an AA missile.  Curses.  As a result, our victory point ratio dropped from 5:1 to 3:1.  Nevertheless, an excellent day's gaming.

Next Friday sees a return to the 7TV campaign , as various shows- Spyforce UK and The Man From S.P.A.C.E., for example- vie for audience ratings, and Saturday should see a visit to the Warfare show in Reading...