Commando raid

While browsing through Silver Whistle's Blog and admiring his beautiful terrain, I came across his CoC commando raid post, which I liked a lot: 

http://wargamingwithsilverwhistle.blogspot.com/2015/12/commando-raid-coc-picture-heavy.html

The scenario provided a nice opportunity to field my commando's. I did have to tweak the scenario a bit to fit my figures and terrain. I do not have a chateau or a radar station, so I built something resembling a Freya radar from a bit of sprue and moved the scenario from France to the Dutch coast where British reconnaissance has discovered a strange device on aerial photographs. It doesn't look like the Würzburg radar captured in another raid. Dutch resistance has confirmed the presence of Doctor Spitzenfinger, a notorious German scientist involved in Vergeltungswaffen research, at a house near the beach. Communications have been picked up referring to the device as the Schmetterling Gerät.

Doctor Spitzenfinger and his bodyguard and assistant Helga.

The Schmetterling device

The Commando's primary objective is to capture as much as possible of the Schmetterling Gerät. 

Secondary objective is to capture or, when capture is impossible, kill Doctor Spitzenfinger.

For the game we stuck to the force composition in the Silver Whistle post, replacing only the Panzer 38(t) with a Sdkfz 222.

A quiet night on the Dutch coast.

While my gaming buddy moved the commando's towards the dunes, I moved the sentries along the wire.

Commando's sneak up on a sentry....

But they fail the silent kill dice roll!

Alaaaaaaaarm!!

Commando's rush forward to overcome the other sentries.

Meanwhile a German flare goes up turning night into day while German squads pour out of their barracks.

2" mortar puts down smoke in front of the MG in the bunker.

The racket has woken the German commander and Doctor Spitzenfinger. The German commander urges Doctor Spitzenfinger to get out of here.

Not so fast Fritz! The commando sniper takes out Doctor Spitzenfinger.

Nevertheless, he is pulled in the car by his trusted bodyguard Helga and whisked away to a nearby hospital.

Under cover of the intermittent darkness, commando's advance towards German positions and try to outflank the bunker.

Alas, the Sdkfz 222 appears on the scene and the commando sections take a beating, wounding both the senior and junior leader.

The Commando engineering section succeeds in getting a grenade through the bunker aperture, but it fails to kill all the occupants. Another British senior leader is wounded when the remaining German opens fire with the MG in the bunker.

At this point every British leader was wounded while the Germans were in sound control of the radar station. Also the commando's had nothing but bren guns to fire at the Sdkfz 222. So they retreated to the boats, disappointed about the failure to secure the Schmetterling device but satisified that they were able to remove Doctor Spitzenfinger from the German war effort.

However, due to some pretty experimental and gruesome medical procedure, Doctor Spitzenfinger managed to recover from his near lethal wound, his commitment to the cause and hatred for the allies greater than ever.......

What a Walker first game

Ever since I bought the What a Tanker rules from Too Fat Lardies, I have been thinking about using them with my SciFi walker models. After playing a few regular WW2 tank games, I played the first game of What a Walker with my son.

Two Fire Toads faced off against 2 Golgoths (from the OOP game AT-43).

I used the Quadrant 13 ruleset (also from Too Fat Lardies) to "quadrulate"  the stats:

Fire toad: Armour 4, Strike 8, Fast, Small, Rapid Fire (2)

Golgoth: Armour 6, Strike 10, Fast

Extra rules: 

Entire board is short range.

Acquisition sensors: replaces (un)buttoned. Player has to decide to expose acquisition sensors.

Stabilizers: retain aim while moving

Walkers can step over obstacles up to half their leg hight.

Armour value includes active defense equipment, ECM, etc., etc.

I'm well aware that these modifications are insufficient to replicate future or even modern vehicle combat. Firing at each other from over 2 kilometers away would be more "realistic", but would require very small models at 6x4 feet table size. Since I like the big walker models and game play with a minimum of book keeping I wanted to stick as close as possible to What a Tanker.

Let's just say there is a reason to get in close and cause a minimum of collateral damage when gaming Sci Fi. (otherwise the attacker could just nuke the site from orbit), e.g. capturing vital supplies, a power generator, research facilities, prisoners, etc.

The game:

We played the Fat Boy scenario with 2 Walkers each. After some manouvering, my son stepped his Golgoth in front of a taxi trying to flee the battlefield. The taxi crashed into the Golgoth's legs, causing minor scratches on its paint. Towering over the taxi, the Golgoth fired its railguns at my Fire Toad: Hit! Temporary loss of 2 dice.

After this my son decided inexplicably to retreat behind a building with his Golgoth. I retrieved my dice with 2 6-s and advanced towards the second Golgoth, intending to blast it from the side.

Meanwhile the second Golgoth and Fire Toad were firing at each other across a road. Without achieving a single hit my Fire Toad was destroyed. This the repeated itself with my remaining Fire Toad, resulting in a sound victory for my son. Apart from the paint damage caused by the taxi, his Golgoths remained undamaged.

An extra Fire Toad would probably provide a more balanced game. Or I might throw in some larger Walkers....

This trip stops here.

In the line of fire...

One Fire Toad down.

Going down in a blaze of glory