2/29/2020

Door to door. Nuts! Blood upon the Risers third scenario

Before sunrise, June 6th, 1944 - Fresville, France.
"Fresville? Damn, we are waaay too far north, smack in the middle of Jerryland".
"Still, maybe we should wipe out that Battalion HQ they told us about in the briefing before we head off..."
  
The objective in this mission is to search all buildings until I find and eliminate the command staff of the German 1058th Battalion, in less than 20 turns.
As I won the previous mission, there are no PEFs present on the table at the start of the game, but all buildings may contain German troops, and also some more may appear as reinforcements.

The first picture belongs to the second turn in which my paratroopers split in two squads, moving forward on both flanks, checking all the houses ASAP as well as looking for bundles in the field grass. The first house was empty.

The two following houses were also empty. I needed to score a 5+ on a D6 to find somebody in.

The fourth house was also empty, but two of my men found a bundle with some gammon grenades.

I kept them fast moving forward but all the houses were empty! I neither scored a seven in the activation dice so no enemy reinforcements could appear.

I looked in another field and found another bundle, but was as empty as all the houses in this damned village.

In the third field I finally found a .30 cal MG. Now I just needed to find some Jerries to shoot with it!

Turn six and still nothing. I was tempted to cheat myself and deploy some Germans, but I resisted.

On turn seven I had already checked all buildings except the last one, so I decided that the German HQ staff would be there. You can see in the picture below my three teams converging into it from three different points.

Finally! The Battalion staff, consisting of 3 officers Rep 5 with pistols, one officer Rep 4 with MP-40 and one NCO Rep 5 with MP-40.

In the following two activations Americans scored a six, so only the team in the centre with an officer Rep 6 with pistol, leading two paratroopers with M-1 Garand SA rifles, could activate.
Germans reacted and fired, but before ducking back all of them they could snap fire and kill the officer with SMG.

Two turns later, some paratroopers reached the two store house on the left and supported their comrades. In the exchange of fire one paratrooper with rifle and the German NCO with SMG died.

A second German officer went down by fire from the front house and the rest of the German ducked back, so my Star seeing the opportunity, moved from the right flank, reached the door and threw a hand grenade inside, but without effect. Then, the accompanying NCO with a Thompson entered and fired at the two surviving officers, putting them out of combat.

At the next turn all paratroopers could leave the table unmolested from two opposite exit points. The mission was successfully finished on turn 13. From all those 13 turns there was only one seven scored in the activations on each turn, which turned into German reinforcements, although no one came as they passed zero dice in the Enemy Activity Level roll, and after that scored a 2 in the reinforcement chart.

There could have been German soldiers in every house, and there could have been German reinforcements, even with tanks, a few times if the dice gods would have wanted. I expected a very hard mission to accomplish but in the end it turned into another walk in the park.

BTW, I forgot to roll three times in the American reinforcement chart for extra paratroopers at the beginning of the mission, so I played with fewer soldiers that I was supposed to.



6 comments:

  1. That sounds like a really simple way to create tension in a solo game. I will definitely have to give Nuts a try. The card buildings look great. Ive just started on some of those Dave Graffam ones myself and hadn't thought about using them for WWII as well. Did you need to scale them down for this?

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  2. Very cool! Have to go NUTS as well soon...

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    1. Do it with this campaign. It's very good and you need just a bunch of miniatures.

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  3. I cannot recommend you Nuts! hard enough for WWII solo gaming; I haven't seen anything better so far.
    Yes, I've downscaled them a little bit. I printed them at 75% of their size. BTW, the last building where the German were, is from Warhammer second edition and it is exactly of the same size as the rest of the buildings! Compare the door to the 1/72 miniatures next to it. But I think you can print Graffam's houses for 32mm miniatures and they will be fine for 1/72 (23-25mm) as well.
    Cheers Alan,

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