All this spare time at home has given Mark Luther a chance to write up an AAR that has previously just been a collection of pictures.
So here’s the Operation Express battle report again, but this time with the pictures correctly labelled and ordered.
Click on the picture below to see all. This is a magnificent report of a great looking game, so recommended!
Fantastic battle report from Tim Whitworth on a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum played just before we all went into lockdown.
Tim and his friends have been playing through a Blenneville or Bust! campaign taken from the scenario pack of the same name. This was the final game in the series, and a chance for the Germans to achieve maximum victory points.
Find out what happened by clicking on the link below. Highly recommended: this is a serious after action report!
Some nice pictures from a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum run by Julian Whippy and friends, and taken from the IABSM Facebook page.
British Paras hold a bridge waiting for their relieving armour to arrive. Click on the pic below to see all:
George Anderson reports on his second game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum, taken from his excellent blog Musing on Wargames and Life.
George still isn’t sold on the game, but let’s hope he gives it a few more tries. Click on the picture below to see what he thinks.
Lovely After Action Report from the pen of Tim Whitworth, taken from the IABSM Facebook page and his own blog Eagles & Lions Wargaming.
As the Germans had halted the American attack at Pierrecourt they were back on the counter offensive again, this time with a combined force of 30th Panther and 30th Panzer Grenadier regiments.
Click on the picture below to see all…
Time to break out the I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum again with a scenario taken from the second September War scenario book: #60 Szack.
Szack was a small village in what was south-eastern Poland (it’s now just inside Ukraine) that was the site of a backwards-and-forwards series of actions between the Poles and the Soviets in very late September 1939. The scenario covers the first Soviet attack:
Soviet troops consisting of the 112th Infantry Regiment, some 13,000 soldiers supported by fifteen T-26 tanks and fifteen guns, arrived at the village of Szack on September 28th.
The Polish force near the village numbered 4,000 men of the Border Protection Corp, including General Wilhelm Orlik-Rückermann, and sixteen anti-tank guns.
Having taken the village, the Soviets then charged the Polish positions with infantry supported by the T-26 tanks. The Poles waited until the Soviets were right on top of them before opening fire with their anti-tank guns, destroying eight tanks.
Click on the picture below to see the action:
The TFL Specials are a great source of scenarios and gaming ideas. Here’s a battle report from Dan Albrecht and the Vermont Historical Gamers Group playing the Walking in a Winter Wonderland scenario from the TFL 2005 Summer Special.
Click on the picture below to see all:
One of the great things about the world of Lard is the growing profusion of Lardy Days, where Lard-minded gamers can get together and indulge in their favourite pastime.
One of the early events on the 2020 Lard calendar was the Big Winter Wonder-Lard day held by Bristol Independent Gamers at the end of February. About twelve games, all fully participation, were run in each of the morning and afternoon sessions, covering just about the whole spectrum of Lard: What A Tanker; Chain of Command; Bag the Hun; Sharp Practice and, of course, I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum.
That game was run by Phil and Jenny, and featured action from the Arras Counter-Attack in May 1940. Click on the picture below to see an excellent pictorial report of the day’s events (lifted from the IABSM Facebook Group):
I was browsing the Internet the other day when I came across George Anderson’s excellent blog Musings on Wargaming and Life. Some really good content on the site, including a battle report from his first time playing IABSM.
George has played other TFL games but, as I said, this was his first time playing IABSM. Hopefully he’ll give it another go, but this does go to show that here on VL you’ll find every IABSM battle report, even the ones that aren’t totally positive.
Click on the pic below to see all:
Tim Whitworth and chums continue to play the Blenneville or Bust! campaign. We seem to have missed out on an AAR for the second scenario, but here’s the report for their third game: Pierrecourt.
The Germans are defending, the Americans attacking. Who will prevail? Click on the picture, below, to see all.
Tim Whitworth and friends have started playing through the Blenneville or Bust! scenario pack: a pyramid campaign set in Normandy in 1944.
In the first encounter, #01 West of Pierrecourt, American reconnaissance troops probe forward looking for a bridge over the river that will take the weight of their armour, but the Germans lie in wait…
Click on the picture, below, to see what happened.
Here’s another of Mark Luther’s superb 6mm games of IABSM: West of Verba.
Set on the Eastern Front in June 1941 (i.e. as part of Barbarossa) it involves a German Panzer attack on a Soviet position in rolling countryside.
Click on the picture below to see all:
Desmondo and Iain played their superb Sword Beach terrain again last weekend. Rather than using pure IABSM, they used the I Ain’t Been CoC’d Mum variant that uses Chain of Command dice rather than cards for activation.
Click on the picture below to see a pictorial report of their rather lovely game:
Here’s an After Action Report from a game from this weekend that I was due to play in but eventually could not make because of scheduling issues!
Friends Bevan, Mark and Dave have started to play through the Bashnya or Bust! scenario pack for I Ain’t Been Shot Mum, and here’s the battle report from the first game: #01: Near Osen.
Click on the picture below to see all:
Must…resist…
I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to resist all the new Team Yankee Cold War kit from Battlefront. As I’m already in the middle of building up armies for a new period (English Civil War for those of you not paying attention. Yes, I mean you, Clarke, at the back!) I just can’t handle anything else at the moment.
All this Cold War goodness, however, got me thinking about what rules to use. Regular browsers will know that I play Arab/Israeli games with an adapted form of Charlie Don’t Surf!, but the early 70’s is just about as far as they will go without more work.
More thinki, and I remembered I Ain’t Been Nuked Mum! : a proper Cold Wars adaptation of IABSM that I remembered seeing at the third Operation Market Garden games day in Evesham.
A little bit of Googling and I found the Maxim to Milan blog, featuring some excellent IABNM battle reports. Sadly, the blog hasn’t been updated since 2015 but (and I hope Nick doesn’t mind) here’s one of them recreated here on VL. Those of you who’d prefer to see the original on MtM can click here to do so.
Click on the picture below to see all:
Great little I Ain’t Been Shot Mum After Action Report from Rob Goodfellow covering a game played using the second scenario of the Blenneville or Bust! scenario pack.
After an American recon force drives off its German opposition, British armour tries a thrust through Avaux..but the Germans are waiting for them.
Click on the picture below to see all.
Here’s another of |Mark Luther’s great 6mm IABSM battle reports.
Click on the picture to see all:
Yes, I know we have had two lots of Arras already (three if you count the 15mm game from a couple of weeks ago) but here is another set of photographs taken from this last weekend’s Salute-warm-up Arras game.
These are all by Phil Turner, one of the players in the game, and are lifted from the IABSM Facebook Group.
I would recommend a look at these, even if you think you’ve “seen it all before”: there are some cracking close ups well worth gander!
Click on the picture below…
Here are more great shots of Michael Curtis and Friends’ Arras Counter-Attack demo game planned for Salute this year.
This was the second run-through of the weekend, with a slight change to the British start position to see whether that would speed up the “action” part of the game.
Click on the picture below to see all.
I’ve been playing the Ancients rules To The Strongest for some months now, and really enjoying it as a fun, fast-play, grid-based game that gets plenty of figures onto the table and avoids most arguments about whether one unit is 33mm or 35mm from another etc. Looking for some army lists (free to download), I noticed that BigRedBat also do an English Civil War variant to TTS called For King and Parliament. I’ve never really played Pike & Shot before, but this sounded like a good way to start, so I bought a copy and started working out what figures I would need.
Conveniently, there’s a sample scenario with OBs in the back of the rulebook covering the Battle of Montgomery, 1644, so I used that as the basis for the start of my collection. As those of you who visit this website regularly know, the Christmas holiday provided time to paint enough troops to field the Parliamentarian side of the battle, so when John offered to bring round his collection, we were ready to give FK&P a go.
Setting up the battle is simple. Royalists are up on a ridge. They outnumber the Roundheads with two cavalry brigades and two infantry brigades. Parliamentarian infantry, one brigade, is on a hill opposite, with a cavalry brigade next to them. Off table is another brigade of cavalry which is currently out foraging.
view from the roundhead right
As I was badly outnumbered in the centre, my plan was to win on my left flank, hopefully helped by my returning foragers, and then roll up his line from the left before he could beat me in the center and on the right.
I had the first turn, and therefore concentrated my efforts on my cavalry: my infantry remaining still. One regiment of cavalry swept forward and charged one of their opposite number. Unlike TTS, multiple combat cards are regular in FK&P with, in this instance, five going down. Result: three hits, not enough saves, enemy cavalry destroyed. This was a good start, but the same thing happened to me on the Royalist go, so after one turn we were honours-even and no sign of the foragers.
Fortunately his infantry were obviously still having their hair done (Royalist fops!) so hadn’t moved towards me.
Second turn, same sort of result as the first, but disastrously my Commanding General had (somewhat foolishly) joined the cavalry charge and was killed in the melee. This cost me a serious number of victory coins as, in FK&P, losing officers is really painful, and that’s in addition to losing their command abilities. Worse, this time some of his infantry were on the move. Things were looking a bit grim.
Third turn, however, my foragers arrived and tipped the balance on the left. Now here’s the real fun of FK&P compared to TTS: if you charge on the flank you don’t get a measly one extra attack card: you get double what you’ve earned for a frontal attack!
Here’s two shots of my returning foragers hitting the right flank of his cavalry:
And here’s all the lovely attack cards I got to play!
Note that despite the huge numbers of cards played, a couple of cavalry units did survive being hit in the flank…but not when they were hit again and again.
End result: a cavalry victory…but would it be enough bearing in mind what was happening in the centre?
No more Royalist cavalry to fight!
By now the advancing Royalist infantry had cleared away my Forlorn Hopes and had just engaged my main battle line. By this time, I was suffering from a bad loss of victory coins: one more lost unit and that was it! You can see the cavalry melee just finishing in the background, so I wasn’t getting any help from them yet, and the only high point was that the Royalist infantry (pike heavy, so at an advantage in combat) were attacking piecemeal as they hadn’t been able to co-ordinate their attack.
Royalists coming up the hill
But wait, I hear you cry, what’s that other unit in the distance, by the bridge. well that, my friends, is the Derbyshire Horse: an untried regiment that had passed its first test and already seen off a partially blown enemy cavalry regiment.
The Derbyshire’s charged forward gloriously and, just as my left hand infantry battalia was about to crumble, smashed into the open flank of the enemy infantry assaulting them.
Huzzah for the Derbyshires
The enemy infantry were smashed from the field, relieving John of the last of his victory coins: Parliament was victorious!
A very successful game that literally came down to the last action. Had the Derbyshire’s not done as they did, I would likely have lost that last one unit: the red-clad infantry battalia was on its last legs.
John and I both agreed that For King & Parliament gives a great game and will be fighting other battles of the English Civil War soon. For me, as well, it’s back to the painting table to add some more units to my forces, so the old credit card is about to take a hammering!
My only regret: I have a horrible feeling that I shall be missing all the attack cards next time I play TTS!
Robert Avery
Vis Lardica is a website devoted to wargaming and military history, with a special emphasis on the company-sized rulesets produced by the TooFatLardies: I Ain't Been Shot Mum (WW2); Charlie Don't Surf (Vietnam); and Quadrant 13 (science fiction)
Welcome to Vis Lardica, a not-for-profit website mostly dedicated to the company-sized wargaming rules produced by the TooFatLardies, but encompassing my other gaming interests as well.
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