Big Cats Prowl the Uni!

At the Uni club of a Thursday night we play a wide variety of games, Black Powder Napoleonics and ACW, Maurice SYW, and for the WW2 genre, Battle Group Kursk and Bolt Action, but mainly Flames of War. And so it was last week, as we were honing our FOW skills for the Easter Weekend's 'Gong Con' convention where we would be displaying a variety of FOW games.

Bryan wanted to try out a new force he was working on, centered around JagdTigers - Gulp!

So, as I got there first, I rather unsportingly set up the scenery to suit myself - a large wooded area, the better to sneak my T34s up onto his big cats, and hopefully take a few close range shots into his rear arcs...Thats how I reckon you deal with JagdTigers, that and some Fast Air....

By now, I'd had sufficient experience of my Guards IS2s to realise that they weren't the general panacea to big German cats I'd hoped them to be. A slow rate of fire and a standard range had

made them rather disappointing in past games - or that was my excuse for a string of losses, at any rate! But I was pinning high hopes on my IL2  'flying tanks', however....

However as usual Bryan was one step ahead of me and revealed a pretty formidable AA escort for his monsters...But surely my Sturmoviki would at least be able to knock out one of these beasts...wouldn't they?

So my T34s would stealthily creep through the woods on the right flank, hoping to infiltrate the German rear, my infantry would use the cover of the left woods to assault the objective by the 

 village, and my IS2s would duel with the big cats at long range...All the while my beloved 120mm Heavy mortars - quite my favourite bit of Russian kit - would keep the Boche occupied...And, as Bryan said himself, those mortars were annoying - forcing the big old Jagdtigers to bail a couple of times during the game!

 

What did come as a shock to me however, was that the JagdTigers has a rate of fire of 2 (big hull, lots of loaders), and a range of 40 inches! So what I thought was going to be a gentlemanly long range duel with my IS2's found them being taken under effective fire when I thought we were just trundling up into position to open the bowling....nasty JagdTigers!

By this point my T34's had worked their way throught the woods without too many getting bogged down, and were ready to burst out of cover into Bryan's rear and create alarm and despondency...

However at this point the dastardly Hun unleashed another weapon - some sort of mobile Werfer contraption, that proceeded to turn my sole infantry platoon into a pink mist. Which

platoon, I might add, was about to walk onto one of the objectives and win the game for me... Having taken so long to work my way through the woods, at this point it was getting late, so we agreed to leave the game where it was, although since Bryan had managed to manoeuvre the unwieldy JagdTigers to meet my flanking move, I reckoned he was letting me off lightly...And the the heroic Sturmoviki ? Driven off by the heavy AA every time, alas...

Still, I feel they added a touch of glamour to what might otherwise have been something of a cat fight!