WWWII AAR: The Assault on Facility 621

Operation TESTUDO, Stage 2. 

Initial report of Father Jonathan Harkness 25 October 1944

Myself and a small party from the 1st Assault Infantry Brigade entered the facility through Entrance Alpha. At first all that we encountered was a chemical stench. Dark and grimy, the facility unsettled the men.

 

Windows offered a vantage point overlooking the facility, we noted our objectives below: almost certainly the pump room directly below and a storehouse across the corridor. We started to trade shots with defending German infantry.

Rounding the corner, the lead SteelSuit encountered two Nazi abominations. A burst of purifying flames followed by hot steel put paid to both.

Fwoooosh!

Meanwhile, reports came in that out staging post was under heavy assault from German battlesuits - the Panzerkampfsoldaten.  

 After a firefight lasting around an hour, the attackers were repulsed with minimal losses.

Sniped by Herr Flick!

 In Facility 621, with a burst of heroism worthy of merit, Corporal Wojeck clambered through the shattered window and jumped down to the lower level. We offered covering fire as be began laying the charges. But we were unable to prevent German infantryman shrugging off our fire, rounding the corner and gunning Wojeck down.

To add to our misfortune, a Panzerfaust scored a direct hit on the SteelSuit overlooking the facility, killing the pilot Jenkins and showering us with rubble. With both British casualties and German resistance mounting, the assault was paused in order to to bring up our reserves. To be continued...?



Direct hit!

To be continued...?

(This and Part 1 were the three WWWII games Gharak and I got in over Christmas. The miniatures are msotly West Wind or Artizan with a few other manufacturers thrown in for good measure. The Terrain is all from Gharak's collection. Markers were gems for an action allocated to a miniature and numbered poker chips with flags stuck on for Blinds or objectives, depending on the scenario.

The story is left hanging slightly, there is another level of the facility to explore, if the British have any men left to do so!

The makeshift explosion was idly constructed as we were playing out of the wrappers from a box of chocolates. Not a bad effort - that Gharak is quite brilliant at bulding things 'out' of 'stuff'!

We used the Brink of Battle rules which we agreed made it quite easy to set up a balanced and fun game and were perfectly servicable for this size of skirmish. We wrote a few extra skills to account for the Weird, including a basic multiple wound system to cover the armoured battlesuits. I do wonder if we had made our men too tough, I seemed to have a devil of a time actually taking any Germans out, hence the less than impressive British progress through the attack missions. I also find the wound system often comes up with an odd result  - if hit, you get no effect, 'shocked' or killed outright depending on damage score compared to defense score, but if a model has already taken their action 'shocked'  doesn't do anything. And to kill something outright you seem to need to roll average or well on D10s on hit and wound rolls and your opponent needs to roll poorly on both too. But we did have a lot of cover on the board which seems to makes things more survivable.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the writeup. Finally, a Happy New Year to you all.

EDIT: turns out we were playing the shocked rules wrong, there is a CBT penalty for becoming shocked and if you incur a second, the model is removed from play. SWhich makes quite a bit more sense. Apologies!