Sunday dawned after I had gotten perhaps the only eight hours of sleep the entire week. WBC West is not about sleep, but at some point you have to let it catch up with you, and Sunday morning was that morning. I still got up around 8, and was off to a very good start with closing up the house. The only game that seemed to be going on was an OCS demo, using a DAK2 scenario, run by Eric with Roger and Chris on the learning end. It seemed to go very well. There was, of course, some Ascension being played by Alex and Dan, which seemed to be their standard filler game (I got one in as well, although I barely count it because Dan spanked me *so* badly when he got a ton of Mechana constructs all working together within a couple of turns).
So it was that at 10am I decided that I could get in a game of Combat Commander: Pacific with Matt, who wanted to play a roll-your-own scenario. These work surprisingly well - the only real downside is that there are no special rules to take a specific action into account, but since you never know what sort of situation is going to pop up it makes for a very cool anything can happen type of game. Matt says he may only play this game using DIY setups in the future, and I can see why.
Matt took the US and I took the Japanese. Matt was defending a bridge over a deep ravine in the middle of a jungle, and the initial open objective was indeed that bridge for 5 points. He set up along the top of the ridge on my right side, with his other force flanking the bridge on my left. However, there was an unobserved path leading through the stream at the bottom of the ravine, and I sent a large force over there to both contest his high ground as well as dash out and take control of the bridge, which worked in the latter case. However, my strong melee force, which had the advantage of an Ambush card, failed miserably in melee and I lost my best leader right away, leaving three squads leaderless on that side of the map. Even a surprise hero that came onto the map got shot down almost immediately with no success. The last squad on that side of the map managed to get into melee against two Marine Rifle squads, aided by a combination of Ambush cards and Bayonets, but I got my usual low roll for melee while Matt had a huge roll. He kept the Initiative card throughout the entire game, btw, a wise move.
That left my small force of two squads and an average leader on the left flank, where I had had a single successful melee against a Rifle unit. When Matt knocked me down to a single squad and leader after two fast time events, I conceded. It was still a blast to play, and I felt I'd played in a very Japanese manner, with aggressive play trying to leverage decent melee situations, and had that first attempt worked I would have been in good position. A nice way to end the gaming, and we finished getting the house closed up and were home for dinner.
Quite an array of games played, and extremely good camaraderie.
Wrap up to follow...
No comments:
Post a Comment