Pafetikbazerkas foray into 15mm Flames of War

FYI I don’t expect readers to get much from this as it is more or less a simple reminder for me of a cracking afternoon. But some may like to take note of our novel approach to introducing new players to FoW.

Essentially it was on of those rare moments when all the old school buddies travel from far and wide and get together for a spot of gaming. Most of us had varying degrees of experience with FoW but there were a couple who had never tried it and wanted a taste. Needless to say I wanted to give every one something to do and learn a bit, while not giving them too much and bogging things down.

I also thought it would be good to give it a grounded theme and with all the talk of D-D anniversaries going on I thought it would be cool to do a Normandy theme.

I then set about creating a manageable force for each player based on the units I had to hand. Though we could have pooled units and terrain it was simply more stream lined for me to pre plan and organize so I could rock up, set up and roll dice.

I decided with 6 players it would be fun to imagine a German occupied town by the coast getting pressured from both a beach landing and paras falling in behind.

Every one received a formation, each scraping the minimum requirements but comparable in weight and then I threw in some support units to balance the sides and address some shortfalls.

In the end the list looked like this. I think by the rules there’s some limitation to how much fortification you can have but it was atmospheric on the table and made it easy for me to divvy up the points.

For the table I opted for a long narrow setup, plenty of perimeter for folks to gather around and the narrow field kept things focused and moving in the right direction

We loosely followed Help is on its way from the American D-Day book but forgot the Over whelming force rule which may have weakened the landing attempt but we only gave the Americans 6 turns to reach the center of town to keep the game length in check.

I didn’t record every blow by blow accounts and to be fair the afternoon gradually turned into a whisky tasting and I wasn’t following every move.

In essence after the Stugs went down the Sherman’s landed on the beach and the tide started turning but we figured the Americans were still 2-3 turns away from decisive victory so we called the Germans victors and cleaned up for dinner.

After dinner we sat down to a good few hours of the Free Leagues latest Twilight 2000, and a few more whiskies. So great to spend a whole day and night gaming with my gamers.