A WW1 game called "Get the pilot".
A French plane has gone down in a forest clearing containing a forester camp.
The Germans want to capture the pilot and have a Luftwaffe engineering officer examine the plane.
The British want to stop these happening, to the extent of blowing up the plane and either rescuing or assassinating the pilot.
Game using One hour skirmish wargames (OHSW).
Players
German : Jeremy Nixon.
British : David Maltman.
The field of battle.
There is plenty of terrain to break up line of site as OHSW gives rifles and machine guns infinite range ( the table roughly is 400m long in this scale ). Forests, individual trees, the foresters shacks, piles of equipment/supplies, abandoned trucks and cars and piles of cut logs.
The Germans arrive at the Eastern side, either at point C on the first phase, or they can try a flanking move to point D. But that requires a card draw, less than the current phase number. Jeremy opted to bring everything on at point C on the first move.
British were similar except entering from the West at points A and B. I choose to bring one section and an armoured car on at A on the first turn and gambled with the remainder of my force at point B.
Forces are roughly equal, 2 sections each. The British have 2 Rolls Royce armounded cars the Germans have one Ehrhardt E-V/4 armoured car, it has more resilience and fire power than the Rolls Royces. There were a few additional specialist officers to do with the German examination of the plane and a British Military intelligence officer to decide if the pilot should be assassinated to stop him falling into German hands.
The plane and pilot are slap in the middle of the table.
The final items to put in place are a wolf and a bear, I like some chaotic elements in my games. The wolf started of in the South Eastern forest, well in the German zone. Mama bear was foraging for food at one of the huts to the North of the plane.
The way OHSW works you get up to 13 activation points per phase to spend on actions ( card draw, ace is 1, king is 13 ). You get the most efficient use of points with the armoured cars, so both British and Germans rushed armoured cars to the center with any remaining points bringing up infantry in support.
The British got some luck with their flanking movement and arrived on at phase 5, top right of photo. Immediately sending the armoured car over to support its companion.
You can see the 3 way armoured car fight surrounding the plane. You can also see the bear just below the trees the plane crashed into. Though not inflicting any wounds on anyone it did block the Germans bringing any reinforcements through the gap between the hut and the big equipment pile.
Meanwhile back in the German lines the infantry are pushing up to support the armoured car. At this point Jeremy did something to annoy the wolf and its random moves brough it into it attack range and it put 3 Germans down. At the end of the turn these turned to be down and out, hurrah for the red, white and blue lupine.
Then Jeremys luck got even worse. He won most of the initiative draws, going first in the phase, drew high value cards, many of them face cards, giving lots of activation points. Then he went to fire his armoured cars HMGs and would draw a JOKER, thus immediately ending the turn and losing the rest of his activation points for this phase. The British got lower value cards on their turns but were able to slowly plug away at the Ehrhardt E-V/4, eventually causing enough damage to make the crew bail out thus ending its fighting ability, making it just another bit of terrain.
Jeremy brough up infantry to the side of the plane opposite from where the pilot was sheltering, so they could not get at him. They throw grenades at the armoured car with small effect. But on the next British phase the armoured car shoots them up. The Germans ended up with 8 dead but still managed to pass their morale test
On balance the British seemed to be well ahead with the rescue of the pilot only being a couple of phases away.
A good game, but probably with too many soldiers as both sides pretty much used only one of the sections. Would be nice to try with a reduced number of soldiers and no armoured cars.
The bear patrols the area to the North of the plane. The pilot can be seen hiding behind the plane.
Photos curtesy of Gary.
