Brink of Battle After Action Reports

Over the Christmas period my brother and I managed to squeeze in 3 Brink of Battle games, which was pretty much on plan, I had 1 spare scenario but I can keep that for later.

The games went pretty well and as I spectacularly failed to take any photos of the first couple so I'll leave it to my brother to do complete write ups over at his blog here:

http://infrequentwargamer.blogspot.co.uk/

Whilst he is doing that I'll cover the 3 scenarios we played and ruminate on the rules.

Game 1

The first game we played was the assault on the gate of the German Facility, Phil has filled out the background a little more in his report and I'll not repeat it here. The scenario itself was a simple take and hold the British forces had 12 turns to cover around 3' of board to the gate and must hold the gate. For each turn the gate is held the Brits would gain an advantage in the next game. The forces were an even 700 points each.

We tried a few variants on the rules, the Germans deployed under markers and I allowed some dice rolls for the Brits to represent Intel on the area. The Brits rolled badly and only revealed 1 marker. The mechanic worked OK but it didn't really add a huge amount to the game and did slow it down quite a bit. 

The Germans also only received half orders to represent the static nature of the sentry forces. This worked fine and they gained full orders once half the tokens were revealed.

Overall the scenario worked well until we got in a firefight in the center of the board, this took several turns to resolve as both sides were in cover and difficult to kill. Phil lost a little too much time and too many men and the game appeared to be unwinnable and the Brits retreated.

I suspect the sides were in balanced with the scenario, perhaps the Germans should have had a couple of hundred less which may have evened up their chances as little.

The British Advanced force makes it's approach to the Facility Entrance

Panzershrek action, taking out the Giant Claymore Wielding Scotsman

Some Guard Dogs very effectively taking out one of the British Soldiers in the wheatfield.

Game 2 

The second game was a counter attack from the German forces and allowed me to try some of the weird forces I have, the Germans had to destroy a British Steel Suit charging station at the Allied base of operations. Again this was an even 700 points as side.

This played out pretty quickly and ended in German defeat due to losses. 

The stats for the battle suits worked well, they were a little difficult to damage and took multiple hits to down, a good invention but not unkillable. 

Once again I feel the defender should have had less points. as I hardly got more than a few inches closer than in the shot below before my force broke.

2 PanzerKampfSoldats approach the British defenses under heavy fire. 

Game 3
The 3rd game was more of a dungeon crawl, a 2'x2' board over multiple levels leading to 3 objective rooms which the Brits must destroy. Blighted by poor customer service and Christmas postage my Westwind Cloning Tanks didn't arrive in time for this scenario so I had to adlib a little and the 3 objectives were the ammunition stores, the pumping station and the generator room.

Whilst the game worked well  the firefights descended into back and forth fire with few casualties, meaning that the Brits didn't get particularly far into the facility before they had lost too many men.

Initial Board Set Up

The British Steelsuits lead the fight into the Complex.

2 German Abomination are incinerated by one of the Steelsuits

The PanzerShrek armed PanzerkampfSoldat makes short work of a British Steel Suit

Conclusion...

After discussions with my Brother our main concern is the stagnant firefights and non-result of shocking an activated model. We've kicked around a couple of ideas around stacking shock, you get shocked once fine lose your action token, you get shocked again then you may fall back, shocked a 3rd time and you're removed from play, either dead or combat ineffective. Not sure how this will play out in practice. 

We also discussed dropping the Con of everything by 1, we already have a lot of armour in the game and this compounds the effect. Dropping the Con may mean casualties pile up quicker. 

It was a good fun set of games, we're going to continue the fight in February when we get together again at my house. We'll probably cover level 2 of the complex, the cloning rooms and then some fights with really weird abominations. So for now that's our Brink of Battle gaming.