Boardgames

For one reason or another I haven't had much chance to do much miniatures gaming at home recently, which has obviously impacted the number of posts here. That said, Mrs Kobold and I are still generally playing boardgames of some kind on a Wednesday evening. Bananagrams has been a popular choice, but not really worth blogging about (aside from my propensity for winning it). 

However last night I had a yearning to play Memoir '44 (I've read a couple of WWII-related books recently) so we got that on the table for teh first time in a while.

I dug out a starter scenario I'd got off the 'net and hadn't played before - the June 1940 capture of Fort Capuzzo on the Libya/Egypt border.

The scenario doesn't have too many special rules - the British have a heavy tank unit, whilst the Italians get a heroic leader. However we added in the British and Italian nationality rules and also the Western Desert overrun combat change as well.

Anyway we played it through twice, swapping sides after the first game. I played the British in the first game and managed a strong attack on my left which pushed the Italians off the hills, and chewed up Catherine's attempts to reinforce them. However she managed a counter-attack on her left that saw me lose a couple of units, so I only won 4-3.

We swapped sides ...

I consolidated my defence and managed to get plenty of retreat results in combats to throw Catherine's British back. I also got the heroic leader into action as quickly as possible. However despite managing to inflict more losses in terms of actual figures on the British than Catherine had, I spread them across too many units and wasn't destroying enough to get medals. Catherine attacked strongly in the centre and picked up a 4-2 win, to win 7-6 on aggregate. 

A fun scenario.

We have also been playing Fire & Stone, an interesting boardgame about the 1683 siege of Vienna. 

It's heavily card-driven, and very much a race against time for the Ottomans who have a number of objectives to capture before teh Polish relief-force turns up. I don't think we've quite got the tactics sorted yet; in the two games we've played the Ottomans have pretty much failed to break through the first line of defences thanks to an extremely aggressive Austrian defence.

As you can see, it's a lovely looking game.