Hospital visits, surgery and recovery slowed performance a bit this month but the front and back end were bracketed by two conventions so I’ll talk about them first.
First up was Hammerehead (photo isn’t from the show, somehow I lost the pics I took 🙄). In theory this is smaller than it used to be as it now just uses the one hall at the Newark Showground but in fact is as big as it ever was pre Covid and you could argue a little overcrowded. The two main attractions are the many participation games and the table top sale rental in the middle of the hall both of which, in my opinion, are ill served by everything being packed into one hall. The table top sale space needs to be bigger to enable more sellers and alleviate the rugby scrum effect – I could have doubled the space with the number of guys I chatted with who couldn’t get a table this year, and maybe the organisers need to look at the people who are clearly traders in one form or another. The games this year were a bit meh, plenty of choice but no choice really and many just didn’t seem to have anyone playing. The second show was Overlord down in Abingdon but I’ve already posted about that on here so I won’t repeat myself.
Our first game was a Wars of Religion affair, Dutch v Spanish at the Bunker.
Both sides were pre deployed and consisted of an infantry wing facing each other and a cavalry wing facing each other. The cavalry battle got underway first and took up most of the day as each side threw in reserves. Ultimately the Spanish prevailed and stood bloodied but victorious on the field.
The infantry wing was a lot slower coming to grips so the bulk of that play was enfants perdus and carabins skirmishing and being a nuisance. Ultimately the Tercio’s got to grips with the waiting Dutch and saw the first line off but the day was done before we could really get a definitive result.
On reflection the battle suffered from being staged as an encounter game but there was no incentive for the Dutch infantry to advance and risk getting stomped on by fully intact Tercio’s so they stood back, lined some hedgerows and blazed away which made it a pretty boring game. The need for a scenario with clear objectives that could be measured at game’s end was obvious but we just didn’t follow the lessons we’ve already learnt from so many games 🙄.
After a medical interlude our next game was another of our much loved Successors clashes – although there wasn’t much love when the pikes on two blocks were broken one after another 😒
The setting for our clash was the Imperial army immediately post Alexanders death marching to chastise a recalcitrant Antipater. The Imperial army had all the good stuff; multiple squadrons of Hetairoi, Hypaspists, Pezhetairoi, Argyraspides, Elephants, Rhodians, Cretans and a smattering of average and not so good stuff. Antipater had his own Pezhetairoi, Cretans and Rhodians plus a single body of Hetairoi, his infantry was built around a couple of blocks of pikes and a host of mercenary hoplites while his cavalry relied upon Greek and Thessalian horse.
Antipater deployed all his cavalry on his left wing, the flank protected by a stream, in a twist away from tradition, and found himself facing the Imperial Hetairoi across the sands. Not surprisingly this became the predominant clash in the early rounds of fighting.
In the centre the inevitable infantry clash took shape. Antipater’s 2 blocks of phalangites (seen here) were facing out toward the Imperial Pezhetairoi and Argyraspides and their flanks were uncovered by the hoplites being spread further out to cover the plain of battle.
In the cavalry clash the Imperial Hetairoi ultimately prevailed (but not without loss) and pursued the enemy to their camp where they failed to rally and were lost leaving the Hetairoi free to indulge in a little looting.
Out on the Imperial left flank the elephants, screened by Asiatic and Scythian horse held up the Antipatrid hoplites nicely and became the first elephants in all our games so far not to, panic or die 😂🤣
The centre smash ’em up took it’s time a coming but was worth it. Lots of back and forth, command figures jumping in to steady the line (Casander died 😢), units breaking; just what we play for 😉
Ultimately class won out and Antipater was forced to cede the field, his cavalry were gone, his son dead and half his infantry in rout. A good day.
Our final game became the game of two halves as we ended up playing it twice but with different players.
Obviously an Iran Iraq game and another with a written scenario. This one was set in 1984 and notionally an action from Operation Khyber where the Iranians are trying to take back previously lost territory. The Iranians comprised the 37th Armoured Brigade comprising the 231st & 233rd Armoured and the 145th Mechanised tasked with taking the towns of Qurnah and Nashwah to the west of the playing area and they could advance from more or less anywhere along the eastern edge. The Iraqi’s were the 15th Mechanised Brigade deployed anywhere in the west up the main highway and featured the 1st & 2nd Mechanised and the 9th Armoured plus an air wing of SU22M’s on call.
In the first game the Iraqi’s took the game to the Iranians, well the tank commander did at least, because ignoring all previous game evidence about how bad T54’s & T55’s were against anything Iranian he rolled out from Nashwah shouting the Iraqi equivalent of “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”
To the north the sensible Iraqi player decided to see how aircraft performed (this was a first for all of us) and this was, well, variable 😀 The calling in of the air went well but performance over target was abysmal to start – I was worried we’d got the mechanisms wrong but in fact we hadn’t; having the FAO a long way from the target is a problem.
Later the air power became deadly. The Iraqi player decided to persevere and so called for air on every turn he could and his luck in rolling to arrive continued, well outside the laws of average, and in the turn he dropped napalm the deviation was low and the hits were horrendous. Suffice to say the 145th Mechanised was destroyed 😨
The sheer enormity of the loss did cause a bit of a debate (not an argument) and in the calmness of a reflective moment I did realise we (well me!) had got a couple of things wrong the most serious of which was forgetting that the command elements have in built AA stats which meant that for every run the planes would have received AA fire which could drive off or down an aircraft. Oh well, lesson learnt 🙂
Elsewhere the tank shoot out favoured the Iranians but the Iraqis knocked out enough Iranian tanks to tip the whole force into a Breakpoint test which they duly failed and retired – fortune does sometimes favour the bold.
Because another group of players were coming round in only a couple of days time and I wasn’t completely happy with how I’d played the rules, I reset the table for exactly the same game.
Spookily the Iranians deployed the same battalions at the same jump off points but their advance was a lot more cautious, which ultimately cost them the game. The Iraqis were equally cautious in that they kept their armour hidden behind Nashwah for as long as they could. In terms of the air though the Iraqis went for it early on but it was such a different result. First off they just couldn’t roll the dice to get the planes over the target and when they did the AA fire was effective enough to down one plane and abort another attack, the couple of attacks that did hit were significantly off target and inflicted minimal losses.
Pleasingly this game was a bit more nuanced and the Iranians deployed their infantry to assault the town of Qurnah which we found is nigh on impossible, but in the after game discussion we realised it can be done with the right use of firepower and not wasting units in unsupported assaults.
Hiding the T54/55’s back worked well for the Iraqi’s and when they had to be revealed the Iranians were within range and being fired on by RPG’s from Nashwah so it was a bit more of an equal contest. It didn’t stop the tanks from brewing up but it was a proper lesson of war.
Ultimately we had to call it, neither side had reached their Breakpoint but the Iranians were nowhere near achieving their objective. Iraqi victory.
In other 10mm news my mate banged me out some more 3D prints so that’s me occupied for a while!
In terms of finished hobby stuff, nothing completed at the moment but plenty of things ongoing 🤣 So until the next time, be good, be fair.