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Another ASL free weekend for me, but I at least I had a new product to pour over.
HOB's The Long March showed up my mailbox last week. It's a 17 scenario pack from the iconic period of the Chinese civil war, as Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists chase Mao's Red Army all over China.
$32 is a bit high for just a scenario pack, but it's ASL, and Heat of Battle has a well deserved reputation for quality products, so....what else are you going to spend your $32 on?
With one exception, the scenarios are all infantry. Standard Chinese counters are used for the Nationals and partisan counters represent Red Army troops. Scenario size runs the gamut. There are rules for linking the scenarios at a quasi-campaign game. The folder features a historical summary.
Many of the scenarios have unique SSR's to add historical flavor (and frankly, to give the all infantry scenarios each something distinctive.) For example, LM 11 ,Medieval Warfare, is played on DASL boards and depicts the Red Army scaling city walls and being attacked by cauldrons of boiling rice porridge. A Porridge Cauldron apparently attacks with 12FP (duh!), and is not penalized for use as advancing fire. Yeah. I guess not!
Looking forward to trying one of these.
I'm signed up for the Chinese mini at ASLOK this year, so maybe Bret will pull something from this pack.
On the Two Half Squads podcast this past week, they covered the rules involving Molotov cocktails. I realized that this is one of those rules I never take full advantage of. Usually when my side has Molotov ability, either I forget about it, or I'm hesitant because I don't want to do the rules dive and figure it isn't worth it.
I'm typing this post as a quick exercise in committing to memory the basics of Mol rules once and for all.
A) When does your unit have one?
On a Mol check dr 1-3. Mods are: CX +1, HS +1, SMC +2, vs, non-AFV +1.
There is no penalty for rolling a '6' on your Mol check dr.
A Mol check counts as use of a SW
B) What happens vs infantry?
A unit with a Mol adds 4FP to it's IFT attack.
c) What happens vs an AVF?
A unit with a Mol attacks an AFV on the HE & Flame TK table.
D) What's the funky part?
It's all about the colored dr. Again, the chrome on the mol rules are all about
the colored dr.
If the colored dr of the IFT attack is '6', the unit possessing the mol is
broken, and if in burnable terrain, a flame is placed in it's location.
If the colored dr of the IFT attack is a '1', a flame is place in the target
location.
And the rule I never knew until T2HS mentioned it: You can not use a mol across a woods or orchard hexside.
Now I just have to re-read this post 400 times, and maybe I'll remember it all when it matters.
...adding. Trying to come up with a mnemonic device for this. Something like "Roll a one, burn the hun, roll a six, ...uh...flick your bics.."? Guess it needs work.
For those who may not be aware, there is a podcast devoted to ASL! The 2 Half-Squads are Dave and Jeff, two Chicago area ASL players who host the lighthearted discussion of all things ASL.
They sometimes have a third voice in in the mix (Joe), and have even done interviews with ASL luminaries like Keith Dalton and Lars Thuring. They've already produced 20+ episodes.
This past week, they took another step on the technology ladder by doing a live show broadcast on the internet. There were some technical bugs with the call-in feature, but still it was fun interact with the hosts and the other listeners in the chat room.
You can find about about their various goings on at their site. They usually announce their upcoming shows on the Gamesquad forums, or you can follow them on twitter!
http://twitter.com/the2halfsquads
Well, it's been a while.
A combination of real life workload and general blog-laziness have conspired to keep Blind Hex dark for the last few months, but I'll try to breath some life back in.
First of all, The ABTF CG is over, ending in the British concession predicted by absolutely everyone.
At the end of the second CG date my British were holding only block H. We had about 27 squads (nearly half of which were walking wounded), ELR had dropped and the ammo shortage had gotten worse. The worst blow was the attrition in the leadership ranks.
The Germans on the other hand had lost the vast majority of their AVF's, and also had about 27 or so squads. However, the majority of them were elite. Most importantly there were a lot more of them available for CPP purchase, while the Brits of course can not get ANY additional infantry at all.
As I considered my strategy for the next CG date, the only thing to do would be to max-out on fortifications and dummies, and bump up the sniper. I would try to keep him shooting at ghosts and try to get some open ground shots.
As my scheduling problem drew on, and I considered the travel time between Joe's place and mine, I decided that I had to call it. I would have loved to have played one more CG date to see how it would go. As I told Joe, if we lived 10 minutes apart I would certainly not concede yet.
In the end, it just seemed like the chance for victory was so slight, that calling it a day was best the course.
I also left the SP101 Jura Juggernaut AAR hanging.
I've been unable to find my notes, but the Russians won. Here is the endgame photo:
Jim got his exit points pretty easily by the appointed time, and the game continued. My Russians were able to work the shrinking perimeter defense around the southern bridge as the Germans pressed in.
In the last turn, Russian squads at either end of the bridge were in place as roadblocks to prevent any German infantry from getting on the bridge (without some kind of miracle). However, Jim still had some vehicles that could drive through get onto the bridge.
He tried to get there from both directions. As a tank from the eastern bank was rushing through, it was engaged in CC reaction fire which eliminated it.
Another vehicle from the west rolled right through the squad guarding on that side. I thought I had lost as the tank would easily move through both bridge hexes and gain control, right? Wrong.
As Jim correctly pointed out, a vehicle can only control the location it is in. Once it leaves, control reverts to it's previous status: enemy or uncontrolled (A 26.12). Woo-hoo, Russians win!!
I'm certainly not the first to say that this is a terrific scenario. It's very spread out, there are lots of options for both sides, and there is a lot going on. I would take either side.
SP101 Jura Juggernaut gets the Blind Hex stamp of approval.
Will be posting a bunch more often hopefully in the near future as my schedule starts to settle back down.
It was my turn to suggest scenarios for a game with Jim, one of my regular opponents. From my short list he chose this one, saying he had wanted to play it since it was released by Schwerepunkt a few years ago. I agreed that it looked pretty cool.
This is not a the sort of small, quick and dirty scenario Schwerepunkt has a reputation for producing. This Brian Williams design pits 20 elite German squads with 7 halftracks, supported by 9 tanks of the 1st Panzer Division, againt 20 Russian squads reinforced by 7 tanks of their own. It takes place during the opening hours of Barbarossa.
The German task is to enter from the west and exit 49 CVP off the east edge by the end of turn 4, and capture all three of the bridges over the Jura River by game's end (turn 8). Jim chose the German side, leaving me to come up with a defense.
Most of the Russian force is restricted to setting up in buildings on board 49, west of the river. Furthermore, the Russians are permitted no more than one MMC per building (exclusive of gun crews).
I decided fairly quickly that preventing the German exit would be very a difficult gamble, requiring my defense to spread out. The more viable strategy for victory seemed to be concentrating on holding a bridge. Just one would do. I chose the southernmost bridge, in the shadow of hill 520.
Given the setup restrictions, there really aren't many obviously good places to put the two Russian 37mm guns. I chose to put them both in the area of the southern bridge. One in F8 with a long line of sight down the board 49 road, the other in K10. K10 itself is not a good place for the gun, but the little m12 could be pushed with relative ease into the woods of 40L0, for a good look at two of the bridges and much of the western bank.
I was pretty thin in the north, with just a few squads and somne dummies to try to slow down the German onslaught.
Jim entered all of his turn one force in the north, in a "hit 'em where they ain't attack." I opted to let him maintain concealment rather than reveal by default which units might be dummies.
Meanwhile in the South, the 9-1 and a squad with an HMG high-tailed it across the bridge to set up on the western side. They would eventually dig foxholes at the foot of the bridge, with two other squads sliding down from hill 520 and to doing the same in the grain.
More to come soon..............
Not much blog-love going on lately. Blind Hex has been dormant since December. Hopefully that will change somewhat in the near future.
I had a case of post-Winter Offensive ASL burnout, which has now thankfully passed. I've Also been involved with helping to playtest some Top Secret projects, which don't make the blog for obivous reasons.
I did get in a game of (SP98) Jura Juggernaut with Jim, one of my regular opponents, which I'll posting an AAR for sometime soon. Also hope to pick up the ABTF game in the not too distant future.
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