After a fairly long hiatus, I recently started playing Advanced Squad Leader again. I played a match with Tobias, with whom I had played a lot around 2014-2015, who informed me that he was organizing a tournament in North Bavaria and invited me to come play.

Day 1

So this Friday I stuffed my ASL kit and a blahaj into my luggage and hopped on a train, then a bus, and ended up in a chicken coop.

The venue was in Kleineibstadt, in the northwestern tip of Bavaria. We had a building (apparently a former restaurant?) to ourselves, and a nice backyard in addition to that.

There was one turn on Friday, two turns on Saturday and one on Sunday, played in a Swiss system. Scenarios were randomly determined on site, so participants could not prepare in detail for them, leveling the playing field between people who have time to do lots of in-depth prep and those who don't.

The first-turn scenario was "Loosening the Noose" (FT304), which sees a small German detachment defend against a French counterattack in June 1940. On top of their infantry, the French side brings two tanks to the battle, the only German defense to which is a single 32L.

I was assigned the German side and promptly got my face punched in.

Another player kindly offered to drive me to my hotel room (I didn't feel confident about sharing a room with someone else due to some health issues), and I had a good night of sleep.

My bighaj (100cm long) usually stays at home, but I had a lot of space in my luggage case (the same one i used for my trip to Japan) and needed to stop all the counter boxes from bouncing around somehow, so she got to come along.

Day 2

For our second scenario, we played "One-Eyed Jacques" (WO33), another French-German scenario set in 1940 by pure coincidence. This time, the French (a.k.a. me) were defending and trying to hold two specific large buildings (one of which was a factory). The Germans brought five tanks and one armored car, which the French had to somehow hold back using a 75mm artillery piece, a 25LL AT gun, some OBA and two roadblocks (that I had to block three roads with).

Ultimately, my OBA (which I had never played with before) didn't get a single hit, the artillery piece broke on its first shot and got overrun shortly after, and the AT gun faced a road that not a single tank actually used. They took out the PSW 221 armored car eventually, but it didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. The five tanks all broke through my line of defense, and while I could hold the forwardmost building, the two conscript squads holding the rear building eventually found themselves surrounded and cut off from reinforcements.

The French defense here looks stronger than it is - there's only two conscript squads and a 6+1 leader in there, and they are prevented by SSR from leaving the building, so they can't even try to punch the tanks to death. Meanwhile, simply parking three tanks adjacent to the buildings would be enough for the German player to fulfil his win condition.

Since we were already past the official time limit for the round, I decided to surrender, although some very lucky dice rolls could still have saved me and playing at least one more turn might have been interesting.

The third round saw us playing "Red Tears Shed On Gray" (FrF89), a scenario set in Ukraine, 1941, with Romanian forces trying to wrestle control of several factory buildings from Russian defenders. There's three LT vz 35 in the Romanian lineup, but I (playing the attacker for the first time in the tournament) did not manage to get any decent results with them.

My assault along the right flank managed to take the G1 building eventually, but failed at securing the factory building on the other side of the road. Ultimately, my attrition losses were too high and when the Russian reinforcements arrived in turn 4, I had no hope left of winning.

The highlight of the day was the Churrasco grill, apparently a tradition of the tournament, which was burning during the first few hours of the third round.

Day 3

By this point, I was thoroughly exhausted, mildly hung over and deeply worried about my original travel plan (which would have had me arrive at home around 11pm, with no chance of recuperating my sleep deficit before the work week). So I spontaneously decided to go home early. Along the way, I encountered some trouble with the trains, got stuck in Erlangen and had some candied almonds at a fair, encountered some more trouble with the trains and eventually arrived in Munich after about 8 hours of travel. As a "consolation prize", the train I originally had planned to take was also heavily delayed. At least, I still had time for a relaxed evening.