Over the weekend of March 3-4, I got to enjoy another game play test of IABSM3. Steve was trying out a scenario for playability and wanted to see if the scenario was too unbalanced. Steve ran the game, Curtis was playing the Germans, and I was running the Russians. The scenario was set in 1941 with a Russian armor force attacking a German armor force. I don’t want to give too much detail, as there some scenario specific events/conditions that in the game and I don’t want to ruin anything for the actual players when this game is run officially. Later, when the game is actually played as an event, I will give a proper AAR.

The system went rather smoothly, even with the amount of armor on the table. The Russians have a major disadvantage of be poorly lead and trained, but have numbers and decent guns for anti-tank abilities. The Germans are better lead and trained, but lack numbers. I played a rather brash leader and failed to do over watches, as I was hoping that a continuous rolling push would get me to the objective and then I would sit it out for a gun battle with the Germans. I could have worked, but cards came up right for the Germans and they successful destroyed the armor unit that came close to seizing the objective. The battle shift heavily towards the Germans then, but by then I had stopped my advance with the remaining forces and battled it out with the Germans. In that aspect, the trade off was more even with the loss in vehicles. But I could not make up for the loss of my lead force, so it was a hands down German victory. But I could take some pleasure in knowing that the German tank ace was killed by the Russian Big Man, who was still alive at the time the game was called. But he ended in a dangerous spot, so it was very possible that I could have lost him in another couple of turns of combat as well.

Anyway, Steve was fairly happy with the scenario, but plans to tweak a couple of things before we run the game officially at a specific upcoming event. Once the officially game is run, I will hopefully get a bunch of pictures and will write up a better AAR on it.

Sapper Joe

IABSM AAR