Operation Brevity

[SteveBurt]

We played our first game of Rommel last night using this scenario. I marked little dots on my desert boards at the corners of the squares and that worked fine.
An excellent game which came down to the last roll in the last combat as the Germans tried to retake the central objective (which had changed hands several times). They needed at least a 3 on their combat roll but got a 1.
Both players got the hang of things after  a couple of turns. The British gave up on Sollum but took the other two objectives (the one in the mountains took a few turns but the British had concentrated a lot of force their). Once in place, they dug in and awaited the German counter-attack, which was ferocious (we had one combat with a double airstrike which caused 6 hits, but the trenches saved the defenders - one hit absorbed by the trench, 3 hits, one on each defending unit, two defenders evade to soak up two more hits, leaving one unit clinging on grimly). Several times a failed attack was hit by a counter-attack while the attackers were tipped. A couple of shots of the action

[fred]

Cool stuff - good to see how this looks in a different scale.

We played in 10mm and it looked like this.




We found that the German reinforcements mid-game swung won if for the Germans as they were fresh troops hitting battered British units which punch through decisively.

[Helen]

Thanks for your gaming report on these new rules.

[SteveBurt]

The German reinforcements nearly swung it - the critical thing was that the British dug in after seizing the objectives. That's what let them hang on at the end.

[fred]

Good to hear that slightly different tactics make a difference.

In our game I think the British initial attacks were a bit diffuse (probably as no-one was quite sure of the rules as it was our first game). And by the time the German reserves came on, we were all a bit more confident of how to play, so they were more effective.

I've been painting up some Italians ready for some more Western Desert games

[MartinR]

As a big fan of operational games, I'm looking forward to trying these out.