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| A German Assault card used primarily to bring reinforcements forward, is about to be counter attacked followed by an initiative flip and an all arms assault which will take out both German tanks and a unit of militia. |
The ranges and movement was left as per the rules but for each Grant scenario unit we placed 2 memoir units. To spice things up we drew an ordinary playing card each turn to determine who had the initiative and got to go first that turn (Red for the Reds).
The game played well but after a dozen turns and maybe 3 hours, we were barely half through the game and had barely half our units on table.
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| An earlier overview shot. I entered along the road with the mission of capturing the 2 bridges. Ron started off with some units defending the town and others arriving later at various randomly selected turns at 1 of 3 randomly selected roads. |
After much debate we decided that we would go back to double ranges and double movement except that close assault still requires being adjacent. In addition, we decided to expand the zone size by 1 to allow more units to be activated by the cards affecting "all units in Sector X" etc.. This should allow us to often activate more units per turn.
Next game, (hopefully) in 2 weeks.
What made the scenarios difficult to adapt to zone-based play?
ReplyDeleteThe scenarios and objectives are not designed into left , centre and right. In some case have troops entering from multiple points or having to move diagonally across the board.
DeleteIn this case, because of the way the map, objectives and entry points are laid out, all of my troops would have been in the centre zone for the whole battle with no use for left and right zone cards except to convert them to "order 1 unit". To move a significant percentage of my 26 units across 18 hexes plus combat would have probably taken some 30+ turns with lengthy pauses between significant actions and giving plenty of time for Ron to get his reinforcements in place.
He would also have had his own issues since his reinforcements didn't roll to see which of 3 roads they arrived on until they actually arrived so he would have no idea where would need appropriate cards.
Past experience is that is makes it very hard if not impossible to form and execute a battle plan and removes a HUGE hunk of the generalship and satisfaction from the game. In some cases in the past it proved impossible for one side to draw enough appropriate cards to get anywhere near achieving their objectives with the time/number of turns allowed. Frustrating for both players and making it a waste of a day instead of a fun game.
At least most of the scenarios for the original game as intended seem to be designed with the zones in mind.
Ross,
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "18 x 18", does this refer to hexes?
Yes that's the number of hexes. Its a bit of a optical illusion' for me since the table is physically a rectangle but functionally is a square.
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