North Africa mega battle event AAR 23/06/2012

This weekend Patrik arranged another "Mega battle" set in mid-war North Africa. The rules used were an updated v.2.0 version of the previous mega battle rules. Some things were added, others removed and most of it tweaked to add more balance.

We still had Patrik act as our game master, and both sides still had generals who drew command point cards for which they bought off table air and artillery support. Those command point cards could also be used to bring in reinforcements, or replacements for destroyed platoons. The point costs for the units had been tweaked to better reflect their FoW point value - so no longer did a cheap 70pts Divisional Support unit cost as much as a Tiger tank if you wanted to bring it onto the table using the command point cards.

The table setup was also slightly different, the city was pushed a bit onto the table center instead of being a 4x4 deep table edge of its own. Additional flanking deployments were made available if you paid extra for it which made things on the left and right flank a bit more interesting and kept the battle pretty much evenly spread out on the table for most of the game.

Some of the more major changes was that the points on both sides were lower. The 4 defenders had 1000pts instead of 1250, and the 4 attackers had 1250 instead of 1500pts. Both sides also received more starting command points to spend on deploying platoons on the table prior to the start of the battle. And some of the event cards in the command deck had been toned down or rewritten to be less powerful. The "intelligence" card no longer cause the enemy to come over and mess up your hand of command cards - instead they were allowed to move one platoon across the table.

A few new cards included the blowing up of bridges (which never came into play as I drew that one after all allied forces had crossed the river anyway) and a ruse of "dummy paratroopers" which were dropped down at the rear of the German lines inside the city which caused the German players to divert their forces inside the city to battle the intruders. A few turns later it was revealed that the US airborne were dummies and harmless (they had in fact not been shooting at the Germans at all).

I thought it was both clever and fun to include such a thing - and once again proves that FoW with a game master that throws in random events that no one knows the meaning off creates a damn good (and more fun) gaming experience to your vanilla FoW game.

Another new thing was that the generals got to pick missions at the start of the game and show them to their co-commanders, in our last mega battle event each player was handed a secret mission which he could not share with his co-players which created a bit of frustration. I think the open missions worked better - the whole team could help each other out better or at least be aware and have an understanding off the objectives of their army.

Patrik will be working on these version 2.0 rules in English for free release in the near future. Version 2 was all in English as opposed to version 1.0 which was in Swedish. When the time comes I think he aims to ask for the help of the WWPD guys to distribute the rules and make them available for a wider audience.

I did not write down anything this time around since people are in the end mostly interested in pictures. All I can say is that the battle lasted 13 turns (and 11 hours with food break) and that the Allies won with 15-12 in terms of accomplished objectives. Patrik said it was a very close call up untill the last turn.