Over the last 3 days I've been involved in a Stalingrad FOW campaign organised by the Kingston Bunker Rats. It wasn't a map based campaign but a typically FOW style structured system for linking a series of battles in 5 rounds of 5 battles each - one battle on each of Thursday & Friday nights, then 3 on Saturday. Each player had his own 750 pt force and each side had a pool of support troops that the CIC's could allocate out to the players according to the importance, mission, terrain & likely opponent in each of their battles. Between each round the CIC's determined which tables could be fought on by who & the allocation of supports. VPs were accumulated by each side by battle results, but also be holding key objectives. The airfield table was particularly important because if the Russians took it, the Germans suffered even worse supply problems until they took it back.
Mark & I fought for the Germans, Leigh for the Soviets. It was hard work fighting for the Riech. After deployment we had to test every platoon for "Deprivation" with the test worse still after the Airfield was lost (by me) in the first round. This test lead to most of my units being "Cold & Hungry", Low on Ammo", Too Week to Fight" or Lost the Will to Fight" with penalties regrettably appropriate to the title of the condition. They might also roll "You'll never Take Me Alive" or "Fanatical Will to Survive", but these didn't seem to happen often, and certainly not to the poor platoon that happened to be in the very front of the onrushing horde.
There was one long table set up fro a long grind with the front moved back each round as the Soviets pushed the Germans back a bit more each round.
In the other room there were 8 other smaller tables, an airport table, one open ground "flanking" table and several city tables, all with pretty amazing terrain.
The airfield table that I lost in round one & no one managed to take back. In this battle and the next my panzergrenadiers were screwed by a combination of lack of ammo for the MG42's & fog which let the Ivans get up close before we could kill them.
The wheat silo table finally gave me a win, when good work by the previous German player had gained ground (the strings mark the front lines after the previous round) and my Cold and Hungry stormtroopers from support threw enough 6's to overcome their handicaps to storm the silo.
My last battle was on the long table where the Germans had retreated almost far as they could & I had to hold the line. But I was also closer the back of the table & would get my reserves sooner. The fact that my opponent had to stand on a stool to reach over the table was little consolation when faced a massed battery of heavy guns, a full T34 platoon & the usual infantry dripping with flamethrowers. The big guns blew my front line away, but they bought time for me to bring up my reserves and stop the Ivans at the river (which was frozen so crossable).
Mark & I had to leave before the paperwork was completed, but I expect the overall result was a Soviet win. I'll add more info here when I get it.
Edit by Nick
After Jim left the Bunker Rats re-arranged the city tables into one big table. Pictures below
4 comments:
Never got into FOW but that looks fun.
Spectacular looking tables! Sounds like a really well run campaign, hard work for the Germans though :-)
As a German player it was pretty grim to have your veteran panzer grenadiers loaded up with MG42's knackered by the Deprivation Rule, but one has to admit that's what it was like at Stalingrad, so can't complain.
Oh wow that looks spectacular. Well done!
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