I’ve been very lax with updating the blog recently for which I apologise. This has been due to feeling shite due to my medical condition being a bastard, I am switching to some new medication so having a crossover period as one wears off and the other kicks in, which has left me extremely fatigued and fuggy in the brain department which is not conducive for getting this done. However after getting venesected the other day things are a lot better, a good old fashioned remedy of just draining off blood helps no end! When I have been feeling ok I have been painting though so not all wasted time.
Ok, so this week at the club saw both Des and Daren wanting to play another game of Chain of Command so I agreed to umpire again to give them another go at getting their heads round the rules. Again it was a simple attack/defend scenario but this time with Des defending with the Brits and Daren attacking. To make things quicker to set up on the night I rolled for support points and asked the chaps to let me know beforehand what they wanted – this is not how it should be done as I found out from the Lardies forum and might have been a problem as Des spent all his 3 points on minefields and Daren didn’t go for any engineers but a FOO and an extra section. However, I had a cunning plan to get round this! Apologies for the lack of photos again but I was a tad busy with the umpiring.
Daren started by deploying his chaps on the table quickly, two with the Panzerschreck team on the right and one with the ‘extra’ Green team in the orchard. Des responded by putting a section in the farmhouse with the Bren team on the roof which gave a great field of fire covering the right hand side of the table waiting for the section there to hit the gap in the hedge or enter the field.
The Bren opened up and did quite a bit of damage over the next couple of phases, causing major casualties but hardly any shock on one section crossing the gap and pinning them by the time they crossed the hedge into the field even with Daren deploying a smoke grenade to try and get some extra cover. Des also deployed another section onto the hedgeline at the junction where the farm track met the road to further cover Darens advance.
However, Daren had been activating his FOO at this point and then brought a barrage down on the farmhouse bang on target (with his Royal Artillery background I’d expect nothing less) which pinned the pesky Tomkins and also the section Des had just deployed along the junction. The other benefit of the barrage was that it had a chance to take out the minefield – I got Daren to roll a d6 for each section of mines, blowing them on a 4+ first attempt and going down by one for each subsequent activation.
We now all learnt the power of a barrage as Daren kept rolling to activate each turn, meaning that Des spent his activations rallying off shock whilst, thankfully, only suffering a few casualties (even though they did slowly start to mount). Daren slowly moved the 2 sections in the orchard forward to the edge of the barrage waiting for it to lift as he planned to walk it forwards. Over on the right though his intact section was curiously hesitant and spent a few phases sat in the field, he was wary of Des’ uncommitted section that could deploy on the hedgeline across the open ground to the objective so a stalemate developed. Des was unlucky in not being able to build up a CoC dice quickly and by the time he did Daren had one so even if he did use it to end the turn Daren could keep the barrage going. When he did finally get one together he used it to good effect, springing an ambush with a Bren team on the section sitting in the field causing some mischief.
We had to stop shortly afterwards and although it didn’t seem like much happened the chaps really enjoyed the game and we all learnt more about the rules which is the important thing. I feel that maybe Daren could have been a bit more aggressive with his left hand attack but after having one section mauled I could understand his reticence in getting forwards out of cover. Des was canny in keeping his third section off table which kept the threat of where he was entering which added to Daren’s caution, a great result of the tension that JOP’s add to the game. The barrage was really effective too, although as I have found out once it ends there is a chance that you lose it for good, but when you have it and it is active it really does the trick.
Good to see that both Daren and Des are liking the rules as much as Mike and I so looks like there will be much CoC’ing about in the near future!
Here’s some more snaps of the action…..
Tracks and Threads 