Strange happenings in Chain of Command

I made it for a long overdue session at Wyvern Wargamers last night. I had the pleasure of playtesting Ade's Benouville scenario that he's putting on the 'Operation Market Larden 2' in Evesham in a couple of weeks.

In two games (more on why we had chance for two later), I teamed up with Stu then newcomer Ian to play the German Panzergrenadiers counter-attacking the town.

I took a solitary photo, on my phone, as a section advances past a panzer IV knocked out earlier in the morning of the day the game is set.



In a bizarre series of events, the Germans were shafted in both games by single events. In game 1, a German SPG deploys and opens up on a farmhouse with a para team in. In response, the para PIAT team ambushes on a CoC dice. Rolling five hits (on 5+, with seven dice), with only two armour the SPG was destroyed.

A support choice, the SPG was crewed by a senior leader - that's two morale rolls right off the bat. To make things worse, it exploded from the PIAT hit - the blast catching a team that were sheltering nearby. Five hits. Three kills. The survivor routs (three morale rolls and counting). He takes the section leader with him. Four morale rolls. A healthy 10 morale down to 2 in one shot - ouch!

The Germans three in the towel and with hours to spare, we reset. That was some darned good/bad luck and hard to prevent without flooding the nearby terrain with sections - just a one-off, surely?!

It gets weirder. Game two - German SPG deploys and fires a round at paras in a farmhouse. Para PIAT ambushes on a CoC dice. Five hits. SPG destroyed. Senior leader and support choice lost. Explodes (!). Catches a nearby section. Five hits (what?!). Junior leader wounded. Three morale rolls - 10 down to 4 in one shot.

Ian's and I fought on and made some decent gains despite those pesky paras sniping away to slow us down and opening up then melting away from our superior firepower.

Strange game-changing events aside, Ade put on a very well researched and visual game - the terrain looked great and is apparently accurate down to the height of the walls, breed of tree and placement of windows and shutter on the houses*! It was a challenge for the Germans so I suggested some minor rebalancing tweaks to make their lives a little easier.



*one of these is true, anyway. Gentle ribbing of Ade aside, he's out in a damned lot of effort to recreate the ground accurately.