Wednesday 27 January 2010

Wargames Weekend: Ranger Roadblock

Next up was another playtest, this time with the TooFatLardies Troops, Weapons & Tactics (TW&T) rules and a 28mm WW2 Normandy scenario. We have played TW&T once before but didn't warm to it. Having now played their other initiative card rules Sharp Practice and Through the Mud & the Blood we thought we should give TW&T another go. The objective was to see if these rules offered something Nuts! and I Ain't Been Shot, Mum! (IABSM) didn't.

Lenin has been painting up his collection of Crusader WW2 figures and was keen to let some of his US Rangers see the table. Unfortunately he didn't have time to finish enough Germans so I had to fill the gap with some of my Foundry and Crusader collection (hence the varied basing).

The scenario was a pretty challenging one for the Rangers as they had a similar number of troops as the Germans but were attacking. I secretly deployed my German units (two sections each with an LMG team and a tripod mounted LMG team) and selected a location for my pre-plotted mortar fire.

Lenin chose to concentrate on my left but I managed to pin him down as he advance across the first open area and this gave me enough time to redeploy my second section to reinforce the first. I had set up a fire lane down the road from the tripod LMG team but initially it had no targets.

With the initial assault stalled Lenin called in some mortar fire and then tried to outflank me. Unfortunately the mortar fire wasn't terribly effective and the outflanking troops were pinned down in my firelane.

With things starting to look a little bleak for the US troops with the mortar running out of HE it switched to smoke and Lenin tried another assault. Fortunately for me I had the foresight to withdraw my first squad from their initial positions and when the assault came I managed to catch it with some nasty combined LMG fire. So the game ended in the US withdrawing.

Whilst I enjoyed the game I felt it would have played quite differently using Nuts! and I wasn't sure that the extra complexity had given the rules a real edge over IABSM. I am going to take some time to reflect but TW&T certainly wasn't the instant hit that both Sharp Practice and Through the Mud & the Blood were.

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