IABSM AAR: Le Hamel

Another great After Action Report from Mark Luther.

It’s I Ain’t Been Shot Mum and Normandy 1944. This was going to be a two part battle, with this AAR describing the first contest covering the attack by 46 Royal Marine Commando and the Fort Garry Horse on the village of le Hamel on June 11, 1944.

Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Relieving St Omer

Another excellent battle report from the equally excellent Bleaseworld blog.

Set during the Blitzkrieg in May 1940 the game was based around efforts by the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment attempting to relieve the French defenders of St Omer who were under attack by the 1st Panzer Division.

This AAR features a beautiful table put together by Phil and Jenny, so is well worth a look. Click on the picture, below, to see all.

IABSM AAR: Take the Ztarmerski Bridge!

Lovely looking game of IABSM posted onto the IABSM Facebook Group by Phil Turner.

The Wehrmacht is advancing across the Russian Steppe at speed. It is of vital importance that the Ztarmerski bridge over the river Korbynskia is taken before the Ivan’s have the opportunity to destroy it.

Click on the picture below to see the full AAR:

IABSM AAR: D-Day Spectacular

Here’s a superb write up of what looked like an absolutely cracking game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum featuring another of Desmondo’s brilliant Sword Beach D-Day spectaculars.

The report is taken from Iain Fuller’s marvellous Tracks and Threads blog, and with extra pictures from the IABSM Facebook group.

Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Break-Through

For those of you who are on Facebook, I recommend joining the I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum group. People there answer questions about the rules, post up pictures of their forces, ideas for scenarios and, of course, after action reports.

Here’s one from James Moulding featuring late war action in a break-through scenario. Click on the picture below to see all.

IABSM AAR: Return to Le Haut-Perrier

I was adding another IABSM battle report to the 500+ already on the site (plenty more room: keep sending them in) when I noticed the links to five reports in particular were broken.

The reports were all from from the extremely talented Sergeant Perry: five different AAR featuring the same scenario from the Welsh Guards scenario pack played at the same convention back in August 2012.

The table set up and games look magnificent so, having repaired the links, I thought it worthwhile to highlight them again. Click on the links below to see all:

Sergeant Perry/01

Sergeant Perry/02

Sergeant Perry/03

Sergeant Perry/04

Sergeant Perry/05

And here are a couple of photos to whet your whistle:

IABSM AAR: September War #24: Ambush in the Beskides

My turn to host a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum, so I chose a scenario from the first September War scenario pack that would allow me to field some of my new motorised infantry vehicles: #24 Ambush in the Beskides.

The game would feature a German attack on a prepared Polish position. The Germans would have the numbers, but had a time limit, and those Poles were very well dug in!

Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Beyond Le Plessy

Yesterday’s post featured an After Action report from Des Darkin covering a game he ran for Iain Fuller and Philip Andrews.

Today’s post is the same game, but written up by Iain.

Usually I would combine the two AAR into one massive report, but both are such good AAR that I’ve decided to keep them separate.

Click on the picture below to see Iain’s colossal report on the second Plessy game:

IABSM at Winter Wonder Lard

Last weekend saw another excellent Winter Wonder Lard at Bristol Independent Gamers. On show were games of Chain of Command, Sharp Practice, Strength & Honour, What a Cowboy and, of course, I Ain’t Been Shot Mum.

The IABSM game was based on the tank battle on the Calais - Dunkirk Road, near St.Omer on 22nd May 1940.

On That day a patrol sent out from the Calais defences reported German tanks on the road between Calais and Dunkirk and fighting towards St.Omer. Staff Officers at Calais disputed this, stating that there were no substantial German forces within 30 miles of St. Omer and this could only be a stray reconnaissance patrol.

A British Force was ordered towards St.Omer to drive off these random German troops, but came into contact with lead elements of 1st Panzer Division, who were attacking French troops on the edge of the town.

Click on the picture below to see all:

IABSM AAR: Home Run at Osmanville

An excellent I Ain’t Been Shot Mum battle report for you to look at today, from Scott Miquelon’s equally excellent Little Soldier Painting Studio blog.

Scott has created a comic-book style AAR showcasing his solo game using the Home Run at Osmanville scenario from the 29 Let’s Go Large article in the TFL 2014 Christmas Special.

Click on the picture below to see all:

Free IABSM Early War Polish List Re-Vamped

I’ve been doing some work on my collection of 15mm WW2 Poles (for the early, 1939 September War rather than the later periods) and whilst looking through the I Ain’t Been Shot Mum theatre book on the subject I noticed a somewhat embarrassing omission in one of the lists.

This has been corrected, and the v2 edition is now available to download from the Buy IABSM Theatre Supplements section of this website. Click here to go straight to the page.

Don’t worry about the “buy” bit, this theatre book remains FOC both here and on the TFL site to start players off on their IABSM journey: and where better to start than the beginning of the war (let’s not think about the Marco Polo bridge incident!).

The early war period is one of my favourite to play, and the German, and the Soviet, invasion of Poland has got a little bit of everything in it. There are also sixty (yes: sixty) scenarios available for IABSM across the two September War scenario books. You will have to pay for them, but at under a tenner for each (£8.29 to be exact) that’s only 28p per scenario.

If you’d like to read some of the After Action Reports from games that have used the scenarios, there are about twenty of them on this website, not all of them from me. Here’s a link to a good one featuring scenario #03 and you should be able to find more by navigating from there.

Re-reading a lot of them whilst writing this post, one thread that seems to run through them is how close the games are…that and how disastrous it is to put me in charge of Polish cavalry. There’s something about massed cavalry in IABSM that just screams “Charge!” to me, usually with unfortunate results for the horsemen involved!

A rare victory for the Polish line cavalry and lancers

So if your new year’s resolution is to start a new theatre or period, please do give some thought to choosing the September War: I’m certainly dusting off my figures and looking forward to working my way through the scenario books again.

IABSM AAR: South of Cherbourg

Here’s a quick IABSM battle report from Sergeant Steiner’s excellent blog.

The Sergeant played through one of the free scenarios in the main rulebook: the South of Cherbourg game. This is an all infantry scenario with regular Wehrmacht defending against advancing US troops in Normandy in 1944.

Click on the picture below to see all: