Gaming Weekend - Day One

As you may have spotted from Twitter last weekend was another of Lenin's visits and we managed to pack quite a few games in.

On Saturday we decided to use my terrain mat and so two winter games were on the agenda:

Lake Kokkojärvi, 30 November 1939, 15:00 hours
I adapted a scenario from the SkirmishCampaigns Winter War booklet for the Two Hour Wargames reaction system. We decided to give the new Chain Reaction 3.0 rules a try to see how they differed from the standard Nuts! WW2 rules which we normally use.

That gave me a chance to not only use my newly painted 28mm Bolt Action Russians but to get my Brigade, Bolt Action and Baker Company Finns out again.

The scenario was set shortly after the initial Russian invasion and the Russian objective was to try to prevent the smaller Finnish force from withdrawing off the table. The Russians tried to advance across a frozen marsh in order to outflank the Finns but unfortunately the ice cracked and they were forced to seek a safer route. Their main force was spotted by the Finnish LMG team who managed to keep them pinned down and another flanking manouver by the Russian maxim team was halted as they tried to set up. The main squad of Finns then began a withdrawal to the ridge at the back of the board and it was then a race to see whether the Russians could catch the LMG team before they joined them.

In hindsight when I scaled down the scenario to suit the figures I had available I gave the Russians a much harder task as they would have been able to deploy another force to pin down the Finns giving them a much more challenging withdrawal.

The new Chain Reaction rules are indeed laid out more clearly (but obviously don't include the WW2 campaign information that Nuts! has) and so will form the basis of our skirmish games from now on.

Fantasy Napoleonics

In the afternoon we moved on to a Fantasy Napoleonics game to allow Lenin to table his Alternative Armies figures and give the Too Fat Lardies' Sharp Practice another outing.

The scenario consisted of three units of zombie infantry and one unit of zombie Cossacks assaulting two units of elven infantry in their camp. We started the game on blinds with the elves having posted sentries and initially things went well for the undead. But then the elves revealed their artillery piece and one of the zombie units tooks a serious pounding. The zombie unit which deployed on the elves' flank was held up by fire from one of the houses and, whilst the cavalry managed to outflank the elves on the other side they didn't get the chance to activate before the elves had withdrawn into the camp. The cossacks then moved to outflank the elves once again and then inflicted a devastating charge. The breakthrough allowed them to chase the artillery crew away too. Then the elven light infantry returned from a scouting mission and managed to inflict some serious damage on the flanking zombies. A further charge from the cossacks was easily seen off as the light infantry were still in the woods.

With the cossacks spent and two zombie units having taken a beating the undead withdrew leaving an elven force which was in an equally bad way.