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Sunday, 4 November 2018

Portable Epic 40K - Positional Defence

I had another go with the Portable Wargame and my Epic 40K figures this afternoon, running the one of the classic C.S. Grant 'Positional Defence' scenarios.

The Imperial Guard held an area of high ground against an Ork attack. The Orks had to drive them off the hills before dusk.

On the left the Imperial Guard had three Infantry, one Light Infantry, one Tank and one Artillery. They also had the option to dig-in three units.

The Orks, on the right, had seven Infantry, one Assault Infantry, one Artillery, two Tanks and one lot of Bikes.

I'll cover the various special rules at the end of the post. I used the card-driven activation. I recorded each time the Joker (reshuffle) was drawn after any run of cards which included at least one Ork activation. The game would end on the fourth such reshuffle, so the Orks had to get a shift on. Effectively they had three runs through the deck in order to achieve their objective.


They skipped the artillery bombardment for the first couple of activations, pushing forward on one flank with the tanks and bikes, and with infantry on the other. The tanks and bikes drove one lot of Guard infantry out of their defences.


On the other flank the Guard light infantry held off a series of assaults from Ork boyz.


With the flanks pinned, the Orks assaulted the centre with their Madboyz assault infantry. The result was mutual annihilation.


They followed up with tanks.


The Guard committed their tank reserve in response, but it was destroyed the moment it got into action.


By now both flanks of the Guard position had collapsed, and they had reached their exhaustion point, so could no longer engage in offensive action. But they could still hold ground. And did.


The Orks launched an all-out assault, but still couldn't dislodge the Guard from the ruins in the centre.


They did take out the Guard artillery, however.


Eventually Ork tenacity prevailed; a combined tank/infantry and artillery assault ...


... pushed the Guard out of their defences. Follow up attacks pushed them to their baseline and I decided that whilst this last unit would escape, the Orks had won a victory.


As for the unit stats, I went with the following:

Guard Infantry - Move 2, Strength 4, Range 3
Guard Light Infantry - Move 2, Strength 3, Range 3, All units shooting at them take a -1
Ork Infantry - Move 2, Strength 4, Range 2, +1 in Close Combat
Ork Assault Infantry - Move 3, Strength 3, Range 0 (close combat only), +1 in Close Combat
Ork Bikes - Move 4, Range 3, Strength 3
Tanks - Move 3, Range 4, Strength 3, Infantry shooting at them take a -1
Artillery - Move 2, Range 12, Strength 2, Indirect Fire

I used the same rules as the previous game for hits. If a unit took a hit then I rolled a D6 and if the score was equal to or less than its strength it retreated, otherwise was destroyed. Units could retreat through one friendly unit behind them.

To be honest the Ork's +1 in close combat more than offset the field defences the Guard had, so I may rethink it. As I've said, adding in small bits of army-specific chrome is something I'd like to do, but I may reign back this desire until I have a feel for basic unit interactions. In the next game I may reduce the Guard infantry's quality (and offset it with more troops), and simply leave the Orks as normal foot.

1 comment:

  1. Nice little scenario
    I am getting interested in the Portable Wargame rules across many genres like yourself

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