Too Many Big Cats

I'm back and suffering holiday blues along with jet lag, I really do not want to serve the great British public at the moment, but needs must. I was going to give the club a miss this week as by late afternoon all I want to do is lie down in a darkened room and for people to leave me alone. But I thought it might help to keep me from doing just that so I dropped a text to Simon and off I went.

I wasn't too keen to organise anything myself so took the lazy route and joined in a Battlegroup game being run by Rob and Andy, somewhere in NW Europe in '44 I think. The scenario was historically based on an attack by a group of Panthers on a Canadian position, they had comms problems and took severe fire from some 17pdr's which spooked them and they beat a hasty retreat.

I thought once we (the Canadians) had deployed that we could have problems recreating history, sure enough the first four Panthers rumbled on to the table while our totally useless shells bounced off them. At first the German fire was rather dismal, but soon they got the range and our Sherman's were knocked out one after the other while our anti-tank guns were pinned by machine gun fire. Our infantry crouching in their foxholes looked on in dismay as the impervious monsters came ever closer. Just as the last of our first wave brewed up our second wave of tanks arrived and once again achieved nothing except to add to the burning piles of Allied steel. Our off table, hidden, 17pdr was particularly useless.

By the end of the night the Canadians had lost almost all their tanks and had nothing left with which to halt the German advance, the Hun had lost a few infantrymen and their tanks a bit of paintwork. The scenario obviously did not work, we found it almost impossible to hit and then knock out the German tanks, I found it odd that the rules made the 17pdr and the Panther's 75mm gun the same as I was under the impression that the former was as good if not better than the 88.

What else is on the wargaming horizon now that reality is once again biting, well, Kevin has bought the new Command and Colours game on the American War of Independence 'Tricorne', I have the rules to download and will be reading them over the weekend as we have a game on Monday afternoon. You can fight the entire war with this game so expect a few reports in the future. We will also be continuing with War and Conquest as Kevin completes his several armies and brings them along to test the Twelfth. I have a cavalry unit of Carolingians to finish for my son, the horses are done and I just have to find time to do the riders, I also need a couple of Centurion figures for the Thunderbolts at some point. I have decided to do a new army over the winter and am coming down on the side of a Pyrrhic force, although I cannot see me buying any figures until late November.

Map projects are coming out of my ears at the moment, several have built up while I was away and several more have come in in the last few days, they range across the ages from 1711 to 1988.