Wednesday 23 May 2012

Flames of War, or how I became a historical gamer

I have had langishing upstair in the loft for a good few years some fantasic peter pig WW2 models but I didn't really like the PBI rule set and had no one else intrested in WW2. So they went upstairs surviving year after year of bring & buy clear outs because I couldn't quite rid myeslf of the itch to play some WW2 games in 15mm.
Now a few years ago when Battlefront sold their models through Hobbycraft here in the UK and I picked up their 2 player starter set from 2nd Ed. I had a read of the rules and really liked the idea of a reasonably quick play set of rules that combined all the section of forces involved in WW2, apart from naval(unless you play D Day and have naval bombardments).
I showed to my friend Ben and he really liked the idea as well (mainly as I would be supplying both sides), so we set about taking the infantry off the bases for PBI and putting them on the correct FoW bases. I needed to buy a couple of extra models to fill out the bases correctly which I picked up from Warfare in Reading form Peter Pig to make sure they matched.
After getting them already we had a go at playing a few games trail games and liked what it did but due to hobby butterflying were drawn off into other projects, and my brief stint at WW2 passed again. Once more they went upstairs and again they survived bring & buy as I love the models and told myself I just needed to get myself so terrian to make it good to play, but money has a habbit of slipping away from a hobby butterfly like water down a stream.

Now a few months ago a couple of new guys turned up to the Salisbury Wargaming Club and had FoW, looking for people to play against. I offered to play but didn't have an army to use, Paul and Nigel supplied everything form models to terrain and we played a great North Africa game of British Vs Germans.
I WAS HOOKED AGAIN!

I went home and hit the internet that night and found out about the new 3rd Ed and decided that I would get some new bits at the upcoming Salute show at ExCel in London.
So on the 21st of April Karl and myself drove up to biggest wargames show in the UK to give our money away for new shinny toys. We both got the new rulebook and after dropping off some other things to my car(such as 2 new cases in a backpack from KR mutlicase for my models to go in), we sat down with the basic army list and decided what we also needed to get to have legal forces and any extra toys.

The week after Salute I had my next game using my American Infantry Company at 1200pts against Martyn from club, with his bits I picked up from Stafford Games for him, a German Panzer Company. We used on of the simple fair fight scenarios and after 4 turns had to call it quits and ended up neither winning as we both had 2 objectives but I had wiped out one platoon.

The main thing I learnt were
1. How hard it is for people to get rid of my dug in infantry
2. Artillery can be awesome in the right places
3. My M4s die very quickly against German PZ IVs if I don't kill it first hit, but they don't like bazookas jumping out of trees next to them.
4. Attack, Attack, Attack keep the intative

We are planning on having a big game soon with 2 players each side at 1750pts each player so 3500 each side.

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