You're probably wondering what the all-fired hurry was with those terrain tiles.
Let me explain. No. It's too complicated. Let me sum up...
Today was a club all-day game, and Carl and I thought we'd try and get a good long game of IABSM in, since from experience the rulebook scenarios don't usually fit in an evening. This is partly because we don't play often enough, but also because most of the scenarios are very much two phases of operation, and it's a shame to miss out on this.
We went with scenario two from the rule book - basically the Americans have to capture the road off the southwest corner of the map (past the house on the hill, top centre). The roads, BTW, are the club's Battlefront roads, which I don't like, and will be replacing with someone else's flexible roads.
For me, fighting as the Germans, things started well - Carl's first American blind waltzed down the road, got spotted by the MG42 and Big Man in the house, and got one squad ripped to shreds, and then close-assaulted to heck and back. Needless to say, he was a bit more circumspect with the rest!
After a few runs through the activation deck, I had the river bridge (which with hindsight was a dumb and stupid place to deploy a section), Carl had a platoon in the walled courtyard by the house at the junction and most of the rest of his forces in the woods, and I was trying desperately to find cover along the road back towards the hill.
In short? Not a long term tenable position. With hindsight, I should have deployed at most one platoon and an MG42 where I could give his advance blinds a bloody nose, and set the remained up in and around the hill.
As it was, I wound up hightailing it back to the hill with the surviving forces, which was a trifle hairy. The platoon on the bridge got caught trying to cross the river, and the rest fetched up (under some woefully inaccurate mortar support from the FOO in the big house) in the scrub on the hill.
For a couple of runs through the deck, I got the upper hand - I'd have done better if one of my MG sections wasn't clinging on to life by a thread, but the other did get a blistering enfilade shot or two on one of the American sections, helped by the mortars finally landing a stonk in roughly the right place.
Unfortunately, weight of numbers and firepower told, and the Americans basically blasted away at the remains of the Germans and that was, as they say, all she wrote.
Great game, with an excellent opponent: my thanks to Carl. Hopefully we can get another game in a bit sooner.
Mike Whitacker