AAR A Hill West of Port Stanley

Big Tony and his GPMG...

The last couple of weeks has been flat out on the day job - lots of travelling and not enough time at home for gaming related activity.

I did manage to squeeze in a solo Cold War 83 game yesterday afternoon though. I've been working on adapting the army lists and scenarios from Great Escape Games's 'Rules of Engagment' to the Falklands and Cold War 83.

My adapted 'Hold the Line' Scenario pitched a platoon of Paras with on call fire support in a night attack on a fortified Argentinian position held by a couple of infantry squads supported by two HMGs and a mortar.

Here are the Paras on the start line in canonical two up-one back formation (rather like England playing 4-4-2). In the foreground there is a firebase of two GPMGs in sustained fire mode.

The Argies used hidden deployment. The six elements in their force (1 x Pltn Command; 2 x rifle Squads; 2 x HMGs and a 81mm mortar) were deployed using hidden unit markers together with 3 dummy markers to add a bit of suspense. Given the Argies historically used a poorly deployed all round defence in most for the set piece battles I wasn't too worried where their troops popped up in the event. Here are their markers: the Brits are attacking from the right.with objective of capturing the central rocky hill. The white die marks the objective.

 It was a great scrap with the Paras going in silent on a cloudy night with no moon. Visibility was down to 100m so when the shooting started it was at close range. Things went noisy very quickly and the Paras soon moved in for some pretty desperate close quarter combat. The rules worked well with entrenched Argies holding out until the Para's platoon commander called in artillery right onto their position. The picture below shows the effect of this with the red circled figures suppressed and the pink dice showing their bottle rating (the Argies started on 6, except for their commander and squad NCOs who were on 7).

The picture below shows another British salvo hitting home - I got these markers from Early War Miniatures and I really like them.

I called it a day (night?) when the Argies started to take such heavy casualties that their position became hopeless. They had lost six killed, nine wounded and another dozen taken prisoner while the Paras had three dead and four wounded. The three British fatalities all falling to one surprise burst of HMG fire as they crossed the field of fire of a hitherto hidden machine gun...

I need to work on the orders of battle and tweak the rules for artillery support so it's not quite as devastating as it was in this game but I'm pleased with this little project so far - with a bit of work I'll have a good scenario based campaign going. And I have plenty of Argie marines and commandos to paint, not to mention the British marines and the SAS/SBS as well as some helicopters.

Now I just have to work out how to spend more evenings at home instead of in hotels like tonight...