Achtung!

Regular readers of the blog (all six of you.) will know I favour a more Hollywood approach to my wargaming. However, one of my esteemed wargaming opponents is a fan of the more accurate methods of gaming WW2, Rapid Fire! As I regularly subject him to my crazy homebrew rules, I should also sometimes humour his tastes.

A nifty little set of rules, I don't pretend to be particularly knowledgeable of them, more relying on the method of asking my opponent what I need to roll. (There are lots of tables.) Nonetheless, I do enjoy how they play. The need to "spot" your opponent before opening fire on them across the crowded table is more accurate than my usual experience of gaming like a general who has a super manoeuvrable helicopter and a powerful set of binoculars.

As it was D Day, we played a scenario based on the Battle of Perrier Ridge. I took command of the Germans, my opponent, the British. Having most of my force squeeze onto the table at the point where the road enters the table, somewhat limited my deployment. Having constraints on setup can sometimes help though as you really don't get the chance to think too hard about deployment.

My opponent wanted to make it clear that we weren't being perfectly historically accurate, mainly due to the limitations of his collection. This meant both forces were reduced slightly. As we were playing in an evening of limited time it wasn't a bad thing.

My reinforcements being due to arrive on turn six, all I had to do was hold my own against the dug in British forces until my extra six Stug 3's arrived and then I would surely roll over the opposition.

Of course I rolled terribly for spotting any of the British infantry holed up in the buildings of the town and having my force bottle-necked in the open road approach meant they were pretty much stuck there for the game.

One infantry platoon were convinced a building was occupied bit just couldn't spot anyone, so had to come out of cover and charge the building. Taking heavy casualties from the inevitable machine gun fire, they did manage to set fire to the building with their flamethrower and chase out the inevitable occupants.

My armour suffered drastically as the game went on, nothing but luck kept them alive for the first couple of turns, but eventually being a stationary target in the open road will lead to your downfall.

Turn five and supporting fire from the Allied navy wiped out an entire Platoon of my infantry in one fell swoop, a careful advance through the cover of woods may help against infantry, but some luckily accurate shelling from a battleship can't be defended against. This in turn meant my CO immediately surrendered to the nearest British Officer he could find, putting an end to my German counter attack.