The 'Five Men In Normandy' campaign continues. And I guess it's a real campaign if you manage to play at least two games.
After their losses, and one unexplained granting of leave, the squad acquired some new members. In Addition to Sgt Alexsei Petrov and Pvt Iosef Gurin, we now have:
Pvt Oleg Davidoff - Oleg is a career soldier and strong Party man. The latter had seen him mostly serving in a political role, but he'd recently been reassigned to front-line combat duties; maybe he upset someone higher up? Oleg is armed with a rifle.
Pvt Evgenii Ivanov - Evgenii was a tram-driver before the war. With his home town overrun by the Germans he found himself picking up a rifle to fight simply to stay alive. That said he hasn't seen a lot of action yet. He is also armed with a rifle.
Pvt Petya Chabin - Pvt Chabin is the son of a senior bureaucrat, and almost sees himself as royalty compared to the rest of the squad.. His parents were killed in Leningrad and he's now out for Nazi blood. Having seen a few fights he's certainly totted up a few kills, but is always looking to add more to his total. Petya is armed with an SMG.
So the squad has five men (Sgt Pavlov, Iosef, Oleg, Evgenii and Petya), and morale is good.
Alexsei kept Iosef and Petya with him behind a small farm-building, whilst the two riflemen, Oleg and Evgenii lurked off to the left. The field of battle was very open; this would be a difficult mission.
I put the Germans in randomly determined positions but in a straight line. I also geared their random patrol movement so it emphasised them moving forward; if the Russians sat tight the Germans would eventually stumble onto them. The Germans had three riflemen, an NCO with an SMG and a sniper. The sniper set himself up behind a boulder to cover the advance of the rest of the patrol.
Initial wild fire from the German patrol saw Iosef and Petya seek better cover, briefly pinning them down.
Worse was to come. The German NCO threw a grenade towards the building, and Petya was caught in the blast. It was quite obvious that he was stone-dead.
Unfortunately the sniper then hit Oleg, putting him out of the fight. It was unclear how badly injured he was. This now left Iosef and Alexsei as the only active Soviets, so they both had to get across the table, or the mission would fail.
But the sniper was so focused on Alexsei that he missed Iosef coming in from the flank. A burst of SMG fire stunned him.
The surviving German rifleman rejoined the fight, evening the odds, and allowing the sniper time to recover. This would be the final showdown.
Iosef fired his SMG again, and the sniper decided that he'd had enough and quit the field. Iosef followed up with a charge against the rifleman. He dodged the shot ...
So this mission was a total failure, and it showed up in the squad morale, which plummeted.
What of the wounded members?
Petya Chabin was obviously dead from the start. Fortunately Evgenii was only lightly wounded and would be back in action within a few days. And Oleg was simply stunned; reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated and he returned to camp tired and hungry but otherwise OK. He also brought back Iosef. He'd fared less well - he was badly wounded and the prognosis wasn't good. He'd live, but he'd be assigned to non-combat duties and would no longer be part of the squad.
Sgt Petrov picked up a new skill, the squad, such as it was, made sure they were even better equipped with grenades, and a few days passed during which they got some replacements. We'll hear about them in the next post.
Glad to see this game getting some love. I tried Five Men in Normandy and quite enjoyed it's cinematic/comic book feel, it looks like you had a similar experience.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.
Cheers, Mike
Really enjoying reading the battle reports. I have dug out these rules again and you have so made me what to run a short campaign with some soldiers. When I first played them I was more into NUTS type reaction games but I think I would really like them playing them today. I would possibly change the activation dice roll to more like 5MaK (e.g. roll 3 dice and assign them to 3 figures - the die tells you what they can do). But maybe not!
ReplyDeleteAnd three games is a campaign. With only two, the second is simply a sequel :-)
I quite like the massed scurry and firefight turns, but I can see the benefits of the 5MaK system too.
DeleteAs for the third game - I'd actually played it before I wrote this post. I just need to write it up :)
It is a different feel of a gam with allocating dice compared to one die roll for a side.. I found that with the mass firefight, you spend time getting everyone into great positions ready and waiting for roll of a 6. Even Ivan years ago said that was one of the main strategies to the game :-) The individual dice allocation shakes that up a bit. But I am thinking I may then have to introduce into the random events a mass Scurry or Firefight, just to keep that part of the game.
DeleteI've played a few games recently with this system as well, and found it quite good. Did some "black ops" type stuff (commando raid on a compound) with the sneak/stealth moves and sentries moving in random directions trying to detect the attackers.
ReplyDeleteI've just played a few games of this myself recently using the .30 Caliber edition (there are some slight differences between them and the original version). While I decided against it for a campaign I have in mind, I quite enjoyed the games. Looking forward to the next post and learning about the replacements!
ReplyDelete