To mark Dan A's return from the Army, Rich Uncle Pat ran a Rock the Casbah game at his place. The scenario was an Israeli penetration into a PLO controlled area in Lebanon. Each side had specific, and potentially asymmetric, objectives as well as very different forces and capabilities. This promised to be an interesting game.

The Scenario

A couple of notes on the next section:  at times you will see troops (or a Blind) standing on top of a building with a small brown die next to them. This is because some of the buildings do not have internal floors (yet) and the die indicates which floor the troops occupy. Having tried off-table book-keeping of hidden troop locations I can tell you this is a much quicker and more elegant, method. Also some of the PLO assets were in buildings and on Blinds, this creates a "double-Blind" situation where even the Blind is removed, effectively making the troops invisible.

Opening Moves

We join the game as the IDF Blinds come onto the table. For those not familiar with Two Fat Lardies rules, units are represented on the game table by "blinds" - a sort of generic marker - until an enemy unit identifies them by use of the spotting rules. This helps avoid the "thousand-meter tall general" situation that plagues many rules.

For the PLO players this is often the worst part, not knowing if it is a Jeep or a Merkava until you force the Blind to reveal, often with disastrous results for the unit forcing the reveal . For the IDF it is worse, you know you are a sitting duck but can doing nothing about it but move forward, scanning every window, hoping to spot enemy activity...

Things were getting serious now. The PLO had managed to reveal most of the IDF Blinds at small cost to themselves. The problem was this: what did they have that could slow down the IDF advance?

From the Israeli point of view, their advance had been slowed and they had not yet located the main body of the enemy forces.

The Denouement

The Killdozer Rules All!

The situation thus far. 

The IDF is making a major road-clearing incursion into a PLO held area, the PLO has been tasked with delaying the intruders long enough for reinforcements to arrive and counterattack. Both sides are sure that they don't have enough combat capability for the job, this means the GM had designed a near-perfect scenario.

At this point we called the game:  there simply was nothing left in the PLO arsenal to stop the IDF, and the PLO reinforcements were too weak and far away to make any difference.

By all accounts everyone enjoyed themselves greatly:  credit again to R.U.P. for setting up the scenario and providing all the toys. The Killdozer, through a streak of luck unparalleled in the forty years that I have been gaming, tipped the balance with its indestructibility. Hit after hit generated only the most minor of damage, it was amazing.

Anton Ryzbak