Friday 1 May 2009

Gaming Weekend - Day Three

Air Assault on Cemetery Hill, 20 May 1941
For our third and final day we used Lenin's desert terrain mat and the figures he had been frantically painting on the day before the weekend.

The scenario was an adapted version of one from the SkirmishCampaigns booklet and involved a German parachute drop where the drop zone was between some Greek and New Zealand troops (whose presence and strength were a bit of a surprise to the Fallschirmsjaeger) with the objective of capturing the nearby cemetery hill.

The drop went well with the Fallschirmsjaeger not too widely scattered but unluckily for them a large number landed in the open in front of a Kiwi bren gun team. Their main problem was that the German dropped with only small arms with all the larger weapons (SMGs, riles, LMGs etc.) in separate containers. The paras took some serious casualties trying to retreive their weapons before being able to supress the Kiwi squad overlooking their position and using the cover to avoid the attentions of the bren gun team. With only about half of their number left they then advanced on cemetary hill which was being held by the Greeks. Fortunately these were lower rep troops and, after a short firefight, the hill was taken.

In this case the troops were all from Crusader and the rules were Two Hour Wargames' Chain Reaction 3.0.

The Third Droid
Our final tabletop game was a three act scenario using Rattrap's Fantastic Worlds rules and some figures from Lenin's extensive collection of 25mm Star Wars miniatures.

According to the scenario Episode 4: A New Hope failed to show that a third droid had been jettisoned from Princess Leia's ship with other Imperial plans. This one had made planetfall in a remote hidden valley on Tatooine.

The first encounter saw a unit of stormtroopers and another of rebels looking for a guide to lead them to the hidden valley. With both sides wanting to avoid a confrontation which might have eliminated the guide in the crossfire the rebels found the Gamorrean guide first and left being followed by the Imperial troops.

The second act opened with the two groups looking for the rock formation which showed the way into the hidden valley. Unfortunately there were a number of Tusken Raiders waiting to ambush unsuspecting visitors. After a little skirmish the rebels managed to find the rock formation and the two groups made their way into the valley.

The final act saw the rebels and stormtroopers in a desperate race to find the droid amongst some ancient ruins. Unfortunately they were not alone in the ruins. It turns out that Jabba the Hutt didn't have the only Rancor on the planet! The stormtroopers stumbled into some more sand people and whilst they were fighting them off the rebels found the droid. A heroic fight between a Jedi and the Rancor gave the rebels time to escape with the droid despite taking, and indeed causing, some casualties.

We finished the weekend of gaming with a game of Ticket to Ride using the original rules but with the larger USA 1910 expansion cards (including the Mystery Train ones).

I'll follow up with a post linking to the photos from the weekend.

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