Roadblock on Hell's Highway

Roadblock!
Originally uploaded by The Gonk

We had a fun Flames of War game on Friday. We almost didn't, though! As we were determining the specifics of the scenario, I turned to the player that I had thought was bringing the Germans and asked, "How many platoons do you have?" At which point, he said, "I thought you said you had everything!" Well, that was a bit of a surprise, to say the least! Rather than punt to a board game, though, I whipped up as much as I could of my Gepanzerte Panzergrenadiers, and we had a 2,500 point game. That's not much less than the 3,000 point game I was expecting, so the evening turned out fine, despite the organizational hiccup.

The scenario was Mik's XXX Corps Irish Guards trying to get to Arnhem while we German's tried to cut them off. We played using the Roadblock scenario in the core Flames of War rulebook. Unfortunately, the unexpectedly lower point cost meant that Mik couldn't field some of his newly painted troops.




The game opened up with our 88 battery brewing up three out of four Shermans in one platoon. Even though the British artillery managed to destroy one gun, the other kept enough fear in the Brits that their second platoon on the board fled to cover and stayed there for most of the rest of the game.



The Germans rolled a PaK 40 battery up on the left to contest that objective as the Panzer IVs and the scouts, and eventually a Panzergrenadier squad, towards their target objective on the right. As the PaK 40s and artillery started to thin out the Sherman platoon on the left, a squad of Panzergrenadiers tried to make a last minute sprint towards that objective.

(Ignore the proxies in the picture! Those are all supposed to be Sd Kfz 251s. I thought I had just about enough Sd Kfz 251s for everything, but I hadn't counted on observers riding in half-tracks. The upside is they have Sd Kfz 250s, which means that recent mistaken purchase will work out better than expected. I'll just need to go buy a few more packs of 251s. Man, they're like American jeeps, you just apparently can't ever have enough of the things.)



The sudden appearance of reinforcements quickly put that plan out of action!

Despite their sudden stiffening of the German left, the Brits were spread too thinly in the end to contest both objectives, and the right was so thin and the night so late after turn six that we called the game for the Germans.