AAR: Swamp Fight, A Sort of Tank Demo Game.

    The other day, my wife and I got out of the house to play wargames over at our local Hobbytown U.S.A.  A big part of this was due to a lack of gaming and in my case, I needed to get out. I had come down with the Flu, which is rare. I do not normally get sick that often despite wearing shorts and sandals in 30 F degree weather. But this time, I was shared some loving Flu from my wife who is a Kindergarten teacher. Sharing means caring! So I must of finally got my own personal gift.
   In a way, I wanted to really play on this one mat I made, since tons of people have played on it at our Siege of Augusta Bolt Action Tournament and I have not. And I still have not, but that is a sick related event. Anyway, the intension was for my lovely violent wife and I to duke it out "Armored style." I got out a bunch of Panther Tanks, a Stug III G, a Jagdpanzer IV L70 (v), and a Marder III. All of these Germans were against my wife's ever growing Cromwells/ Sherman Firefly group with some M-10 Achilles Tank Destroyers. There is a running joke amongst our wargaming friends that we do not build new tanks, they just reproduce. If this is the case, I think I will have a major surprise when I look into the box of unbuilt Panzer III G's, because I have 11 that I have not built.
   It was in the point when I was about to play that a friend of ours' son was looking for a game to play. He was suppose to play his dad in a 3mm tank game of modern warfare, but they realized they forgot their rule books. I want to say his name was Patrick. It is driving me nuts, because it has been a year, since I last saw him. So Patrick it is. He decided to play the Germans against my homicidal tank commanding wife. So this became a demo game, since Patrick has never played Bolt Action before. If I only had Soviets, he thought. I will just have to get around to that.

    

   

    Everything seemed to be running smoothly. Patrick with his Germans knocked out a Cromwell in his first turn. However, he disabled his own Panther tank in one of the swamps which were being ran as acting like a Fuel Shortage. And in this game, two disables kills a tank. I found this to being an interesting twist to things, and it played hell with Kalissa's flanking forces.
    Then, the game took a turn against the Germans. My wife, Kalissa, naturally with her love for children gained some extra three-foot-tall dice throwers. Two kids of some gamers playing in a tournament came over to watch us play. Their mother mentioned that we were now cooler than Minecraft, since that was what was entertaining them on their Laptops. This was cool at first, but those darn evilly lucky kids rolled nothing but fives and sixes. This is very disheartening in a game, especially if it is your first game. Never minding the turn events, the Germans lived through the affair, mostly. They regained their advantage when the mother of the children came to take them home.
   Was the game a success? Of course, it was! The Germans pulled through a victory at the end of turn six with lots of burning British armor in their wake. That lady might want to rent her kids out for dice rolling at tournaments!

Of course, like all of our WW2 games, we have to have our blue car.

One of the road ways.

The darkest of grasses mixed with brown were the marshes.

After seeing a Panther get stuck first thing, the British decide to ignore the hazard a drive through it anyway!

Swamp rats!

Panthers making a stand!

Lots of wrecks. A Stug III was turned into a bunker.

Even a Marder III gets in on the action!

Several tanks tried to flank and got stuck making them easy targets for the Germans.

A Panther tank tries to pick off an M-10 in the distance that flanked their positions.

 

More destruction.

Survivors.

A bad day for a Stug crew!