First up was Mike running home brew rules for ANZACs vs Turks at Gallopoli. The Turks had a full division with 4 offboard artillery batteries, two onboard artilleries, and two machinegun batteries. The Aussies and Kiwis had three battalions, three MG batteries, and 4 batteries. Here is the battlefield with the Turks on the left attacking the entrenched ANZACs:
I had the Kiwis (having been binge watching Outrageous Fortune over the summer) on the ANZAC left and this was what I was looking at:
The Turks surged forward (moving 2 zones per turn, shooting, or removing wire). On the first turn, the Turks used their artillery to remove wire from in front of the MG position. Our rifle fire was pretty ineffective (as was the Turks when they finally tried shooting) but artillery was nasty. We chose to target the onboard Turk guns to get rid of them. (In hindsight, we should have targeted their offboard stuff afterwards).
The Turks overwhelmed the MG position rather easily and swept up to the first trench line.
The Turkish assault removed 3 of my 4 stands (as a consequence of being a bit softened up by artillery and then not rolling very well infantry vs infantry). The lone stand fell back and reinforced the 2nd line. On my right, the Aussies were in a similar pickle. But way over on the right, Stephen's Aussies were repulsing the Turks and then wiping them out.
I was holding on and gradually wearing down the Turks. But on my immediate right, the Turkish artillery managed to wipe out the troops in the second line. We had no choice but to put our last reserve unit into the open and assault the Turks occupying our second line. Atrocious shooting by our artillery meant that our assault was repulsed. The Turkish artillery then blasted our troops into oblivion, leading the way open to the beach.
The rules were a one page affair and very simple. Maybe a little too much was sacrificed to make sure the troops moved and did not get shot up. It's impossible, for example, for one infantry battalion to kill other infantry battalion by rifle fire alone. I'm not sure rifle fire killed a single stand all game. The other thing that bothered me was how quickly battalions recovered. If you took some hits, you roll a die. Beat the number of hits and you recover automatically and can do stuff. Fail and you don't do anything. But you rally all of the hits at the end of your turn. Perhaps it shouldn't be so easy to rally hits. Give the player the choice of falling back one square and rally all hits or roll. If you roll and pass, you rally the number of hits the die roll exceeds the number of hits and do an action. If you fail, stay in place and rally 1 hit at the end of the turn.
The game was still enjoyable as it was but it really was just a game of artillery wiping out opposing units.
We also played a game of Chain of Command with two full Russian platoons facing off against 1 2/3rds German platoons (all I had painted at the time, which I am rectifying). The Germans lost the patrol phase and then consequently lost the game. I had the German left and was the focus of the Soviet attack. I really should have been far more aggressive from the start. I probably would have ended up with the same result though. No pictures (conveniently) of this defeat.
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