Will there be a Horsham Gaming Group?

Last night we discussed the forming of a proper Horsham Gaming Group and the up and coming Horsham Gaming Event which is to be held at Nigel Heather's scout hut. The discussions were long and in-depth - sometimes to the point that there are a lot of strong opinions so you just say yes. Hopefully the club will be organised soon. 

Humans ALMOST win at Battlestar Galactica!

 Tonight was a rare visit to Andys shop on a BattleQuest games night. I opted to play Battlestar Galactica with Brian, Kevin, Nigel and Andy. Initially things went very well for us as Kevin was outed as a Cylon virtually straight away as we were playing the add on rules from the Pegasus expansion. This left the humans in a very good position to win, although we didn't know at the time we had another Cylon (Nigel) in our midst. Battling on long and hard (This can be a very long game), the odds became insurmountable - and when Nigel opted to leave for Cylon shores, things went from bad to worse and even though we were only one jump from winning, we suffered too much damage and Galactica went down ...again!!

D-Day fails!! Allies take heavy casualties!

Today was the day - today we decided to take on the behemoth that is Memoir '44:Overlord - both in organisation, number of components and number of players. Within minutes of sending out the initial email asking if anyone in Horsham was interested, the 7 available seats were taken (I was taking the place of one player naturally!). Several people missed out and they wanted to play! This was one popular event!

The location was Brians house and the players were Brian, myself as the Axis and Allied general apiece, and Nigel Heather, Jack and Steve as the Axis field commanders and Andy, Tom and Dale as the Allied field commanders. The layout for the Overlord Omaha beach landing scenario is huge - two beach boards are required with a massive amount of beach objects, wire, tank obstacles etc. The allies had a huge amount of men and tanks to attack the French coast is in reality of 6th June 1944 whilst the Germans had heavily fortified and well dug in infantry and artillery defenders. I could tell it was going to be tough.

Top left a pensive Andy prepares for Orders to attack whilst top right
Nigel thinks about how effectively to wipe out the attackers! 

The idea of Overlord in Memoir '44 is that the General is given a hand of cards and then hands out at least one to each field commander as he sees fit, or if not, relying on the local field commander to make their own initiative calls using dice - which to excuse the pun, can be dicey. The general is also allowed to verbally communicate with one and only one local commander to execute his orders and with the others, hope for the best.

There was a lot of thinking and rule checking at first
as this was new to everyone, me included!

The attack started in earnest and at first, Dale started to make head way with his Rangers in the right hand flank and in his two sectors - each commander controlling two sectors of the 6 sector map. Yes this game is huge! Luckily Nigel had kindly leant me his Memoir '44 for the extra figures and obstacles required.

Then things started to go badly wrong - tank after tank was destroyed and Tom was repelled several times in the centre. Poor Andy on the far left was being ground up by withering fire from Nigel! We were making huge losses for little gains - just like in reality...

The medals to win on this scenario were 8 on either side - luckily the Germans held several objective medals which we the allies could exploit to win. Unfortunately it didn't get that far - Andys attack was blunted against the beach defences and whilst Tom managed to inflict losses on the German centre, it wasn't enough to get over the dunes.

Dale had better luck and managed to force a breach on the right and started up from the beach and into the mainland.

Dale takes a chance and forces a breach which works,
the Germans under Steves command start to fall away!

Unfortunately, the Germans rallied and hit back and the Allies suffered huge losses, at one point it was 7-0!! With few more lucky dice rolls it was pulled back to 7-2, but then Dale took a heavy beating and the Germans won!! 8-2!! D-Day, like Operation Jubilee at Dieppe before it, failed!!

The final result - the Allies are crushed 8-2!

For all it's complexity of having 8 players and many figures and rules, Memoir '44 Overlord moved very swiftly, even with the few down times of rule checks - the Air Pack cards were very handy for this. We leant  a few lessons, but I thought that a few of the guys, especially Jack and Tom, were not that impressed with it all. But that was ok - it was fun.

Afterwards there was a lot of talk - a lot of people wanted to know about the large Overlord papermaps I have. They liked the idea of pre-printed terrain and starting locations for troops and vehicles. the large array of missions plus they are double sided means at least two massive games per map - and there are 4 paper maps!

Later on at Battlequest, Andy relayed how much he had enjoyed the game, even though he had been shredded by Nigel. He also told me that Jack and Tom had said they had thoroughly enjoyed the game and wanted to play again which buoyed me up. Plans are afoot for a rematch or another game with some others who missed out before.