Arnhem Bridge

On Thursday I took along Memoir '44 just in case there was anyone looking for a game; I thought that in keeping with the evening's theme we could try the Arnhem scenario. As it was there was no-one available, so on the following evening I got it out at home. Here's the setup. In terms of terrain it has a weird long bridge setup, with units only being able to enter and exit it at the very ends, creating a real challenge for the attacking Germans. The Allies simply have a load of dug-in infantry and (oddly) a couple of artillery units. I think these are there to stop the Germans from simply sitting back and bombarding the Allied infantry from the other side of the river.

The Germans have a formidable group of elite infantry and armour, but it's all queued up at the back of the board and has terrain to negotiate before it can get into action. It's actually quite a neat mechanism to slow down how quickly the reinforcements can be deployed.

Initial German attacks from across the river and from the infantry on the flanks of Arnhem were broken up fairly easily.

The Germans kept pushing.

And slowly the paratroopers' positions fell.

An air attack on the reinforcements ...

... caused a fair bit of damage.

The paratroopers consolidated their position, but the Germans had a lot of armour attacking them now.

Paratroopers fell back from the end of the bridge ...

... and a final thrust by the Germans finished them off. The Germans won 5-4, so it was pretty close. The German reinforcements never moved.

I set it up again and this time decided to have the Germans allow some of the reinforcements to come up before pushing their attack. This left the paratroopers trying to pick off any units in range with their artillery but otherwise playing a waiting game. With some of their heavy armour in play, the Germans pushed forward aggressively...

... but despite some successes they were driven back across the bridge.

However the paratroopers had a couple of vulnerable units, so the Germans tried a risky attack with their weakened armour units. They failed to break the British force ...

... and were wiped out by the return fire. The Paratroopers won this one 5-2, although the battle was closer than the scores suggested.

Yesterday I was leafing through the book for one of the expansion packs and saw that there was a scenario for the XXX Corps attack on Nijmegen, so I set that up and gave it a go.

The Allies have a ton of tanks, but the Germans have a load of infantry dug in, including in bunkers, so it's a tough fight. However the Allies got plenty of cards to keep the momentum going on an attack on their right and in the centre, and won it 6-2. A few of their units were looking weak towards the end, so a good counter-attack may have tipped the balance towards a German win, but they'd committed their armour early and lost it, so weren't really in much of a position to exploit the Allied weakness.