Flash: New Martian Landing Across the Harbour

After last month's Martian victory in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia was rocked by a completely unrelated invasion across the harbour in Halifax. Today a group of Veteran wargamers renewed a 35 year old alliance to stop their advance.

The Martian goal was to penetrate our defences within 6 turns. Our goal was to stop them or die trying. I commanded a thin front line of 2 infantry and 1 MG units, Paul commanded 2 tank units supporting the center and right. Bob had overall command and a reserve of tanks on the left and Rough Riders in the center. Ron commanded a scout tripod and a standard one, host Martin another tripod and Ian,  the Martian commander, also controlled another tripod.

While Ron probed the center the rest advanced upon our left. After some fierce fighting my infantry, backed by tanks had damaged 2 tripods but had lost 2 units. Paul commited the right wing tanks and took out the scout. Two turns left, human spirits rose.

The Martians responded by swiftly reversing direction striding right over our lines and Martin wiped out Paul's tank unit with a single (lucky) sweep. We scrambled to catch up but Martin followed this up on the last turn by routing Paul's last unit. He was about to follow up and disperse them but we talked him out of it, in good faith. All he had to do was survive our turn to win the game, umn unless we blew up one of the other tripods. As it happens, Ron had been ordered up with a damaged tripod against his best judgement. He lost control and ended up in assault range of the rough riders, facing away. To add injury to insult, the last damaged tripod tried to fire but a malfunction resulted in it blasting Ron instead. My colleagues allowed my infantry to fire the coup de grace.

Good to get together with several old friends and some new ones. Hopefully something that will happen more often this year.

It was only after the game that we discovered that Martin's move to disperse the routed tanks would have broken our army morale and ended the game before our last turn. To be fair we also learned that Bob could have used command tokens to replace 2 of our destroyed units in which case we wouldn't have broken. Not that it mattters. A good time was had by all, 4 new players introduced to the game and Jason got to field a small part of his All Quiet hordes.