Anders Christian Böss sent through an after action report for his Crossfire game “Assault of the Pontville Bridge”. All words and photos by Anders.
|
|||||
Category: Crossfire AAR
Jamie Wish and Chris Harrod played “Advance from Ian Ishora” (KB1F), the first game of my Krasny Bor Campaign featuring the Blue Division defending against overwhelming odds in an epic Crossfire campaign. 
Immediately following our successful experiment on Ambush scenarios for the Portuguese Colonial War, Jamie Wish and I tried another type of scenario. The goal of our second game was to defend a water party, which is an idea from FNG of Two Hour Wargames. Of course, our version of the scenario was for Crossfire and my Fogo Cruzado variant. As a scenario design experiment, this one failed in a pretty spectacular fashion. But maybe I’m biased because Jamie won, and very quickly. 😉 Anyway, the good news is that we learnt a few things. 
I’m in the process of writing a solo campaign for Portuguese Colonial War called “African Tour”. This process has been dragging on for years. Instead of sitting with my computer imagining what might make a good game, I decided to experiment with some of my ideas. So I invited Jamie Wish over, we got out my (previously unused) figures and tried an ambush scenario for Crossfire and my Fogo Cruzado variant. Despite the scenario design misgivings I had before we started, it was actually a pretty good game. Exciting and novel. 
Jamie Wish and I had a play test of Crossfire Missions v2. Mac’s automatically generated Crossfire Missions provided another great game of Crossfire. In what turned out to be a fighting withdrawal, I managed to blunt the attack of Jamie’s Germans and withdraw the majority of my Soviet force. If anybody wants to try a nice little scenario with a reinforced company a side, you could try refighting this game. I’ve included the orders of battle with victory conditions of each side to enable you to do this. 
“Jungle Hell – The Battle of LZ Tusk and Hill 731” is a scenario in which the US 173rd Airborne meet the NVA 174th Regiment. Barrie Lovell wrote it for Incoming! / Vietnam and published it on the Grunt! website around 2000. As Grunt! has disappeared I have republished it here. All words and images are Barrie’s. 
Brett Simpson played an impromptu game of Crossfire over lunch. He sent through both the scenario and battle report. Called “Operation Tommy Cooker” or “La Rochelle” after the village. 
Jamie Wish and I played my Moroccan Knives scenario set in the Spanish Civil War. Jamie started work at 05:00 hours the next morning so we wanted something quick. This scenario is guaranteed to take less than two hours so was a good candidate. It was a bit one sided and I’ve suggested a couple of changes. 
Brett Simpson ran a Crossfire mini-campaign over a weekend. Four games were played in total: two Meeting Engagements and Two Bridgeheads. Saturday’s scenario was a Meeting Engagement with the objective of taking the rail hotel (Provincial Beige Building). Sunday used the same table layout, but switched to a Bridgehead. This simulates a counter-attack by whichever force lost on Saturday. There were four games because the players swapped side on each day. Brett wrote up two of the games. 
There has been a flurry of interest in Nikolas Lloyd’s Scenarios on Lloydian Aspects including StuG Smuggling. We tried to smuggle a StuG last week. This week Brett Simpson has a go. 
I hosted a couple of games between Chris Harrod and Jamie Wish. We tried StuG Smuggling by Nikolas Lloyd. Both games saw the Russian “defenders” go on a successful “StuG hunting” rampage. 
Brett Simpson sent through another small Crossfire Scenario and battle report. This time for “Holding the Fort” where a small German force had to fend off British troops and French resistance forces. It is tiny, there is only one German platoon (although they get a Panther) and two British platoons, which illustrates you can have a good game with Crossfire without a lot of figures. 
Chris Harrod, Jamie Wish and I played Crossfiregrad by Doctor Phalanx. Three times in fact. “Cracking” is how Jamie described it. I’d say “Ripping”. We will definitely play this again. We managed three games in one evening because each game takes only 45-50 minutes with a theoretical hard limit of 60 minutes. The game represents a German company-level attack on Soviet positions. The map is “a very crude attempt to bathtub the whole of Stalingrad” and turns into a table only 3′ x 2′ 3″ given the size of my building sectors. We had a fantastic time but 
Brett Simpson has kindly been sharing photos of his Crossfire kit as he builds it up. He is doing some nice scratch building for his scenery. This time, however, Brett shared the battle report from his first Crossfire game. Called the “Assault on Chez Patrick” after the British objective or “Operation Whitehall” after the British operational code name. Most words are Brett’s. 
Mark Bretherton played my SU-152s Up Close and Personal scenario again. In his previous battle report he described the scenario as “cracking”. It seems he still likes it. This time Mark included some photos of his game and of his urban Crossfire set up. I really like the effect Mark has achieved with his terrain and table so asked him for more details on how he did it. Everything is scratch built and looks fantastic. An inspiration. All words and photos are Mark’s… |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2001-2019 Steven Thomas - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||||