S28 Out of Ideas!

I just finished playing S28 Out of Luck, which you can get for free at MMP’s wobsite. I lost so badly that not even blaming it on the dice makes it any better. Was it the scenario’s fault? Probably not.

As most of the times, I completely screwed up my setup, leaving a large blind spot on the hard-to-defend hills in the northwest corner and concentrating on the open ground in the northeast and the city in the southwest, near the exits. My opponent, of course, used this weak spot to utterly destroy me. I didn’t even need bad luck to lose.

Of course, I still had a metric ton of that. First turn, the crew of my 122mm ART gets a NMC during Advancing Fire and, of course, rolls boxcarts. They were the keystone of the way too weak defense in the hills, too. Then, one of my three IS-2s rolls boxcarts for an attack. A bit later, it gets shocked and UK’d, but recovers, fortunately. While trying to outflank a Hetzer in the city with its MA still malf’d, it gets shocked and UK’d again. This time, it has no luck. Meanwhile, my MG crews try to take out some of the Hetzers in the city – with their 3 points of side armor, that’s actually a viable strategy. Of course, my first two TH MG attacks ever both malf the respective MGs, and one of these gets taken out of the equation by a 6 on the repair roll. The other one recovers and even gets to destroy a Hetzer!

Meanwhile, my second IS gets stuck on the meadow by a SSR requiring a DR < 11 to be taken on every vehicular movement in Open Ground to avoid getting immobilized. My third one was dug in by SSR in the most inconvenient of all places.

My opponent tries to rush his tanks through the city to quickly achieve his victory conditions, but my experienced tank-punchers move into Close Combat against a Hetzer and a Panther. The Panther survives, the Hetzer does not.

At this point, my opponent had two thirds of the necessary victory points after just half the game and I resigned because the result of the game was becoming so obvious it wasn’t worth sacrificing another session of playtime for.

Lessons learned: Vehicular Close Combat is a viable strategy, even more so against tank destroyers. I need to think more about my setups (well, Captain Obvious is obvious). And the IS-2 only gets 2 out of 5 stars in my personal rating, because when it hits it’s devastating, but most of the time it does not.

The game was still fun, because it was the first time I saw the Nahverteidigungswaffe, ATRs and MGs in an AT role in action. I’d say I like the scenario.

Next up is S13 Priority Target.