Hexsides and Hand Grenades

Dial 411 For Information is the name of the first scenario for LnLP's World at War expansion titled "Counterattack".  The Counterattack expansion is a single book loaded with scenarios that form two campaigns that revolve around the efforts of two groups of NATO soldiers in the middle of World War III.  I won't give too much of the background story away here for those who are interested in purchasing it. In this scenario, Task Force Eagle is given the overwhelming job of rescuing a group of prisoners with valuable information.  They are sent up against an entire Soviet Motorized Regiment, which is spread out through three cities on the western edge of the Blood and Bridges map.  This task is complicated by the fact that TF Eagle has no idea in which of the three cities the POWs are located (you have to roll a die to determine their location so I'm not giving any spoilers away here with this report) and they only get 8 turns to snatch the prisoners and get the he...

For three months, we had been going back and forth with the bugs on Planet H, a tiny cursed little ball that meandered around a sun several light years from where the main fighting took place.  For the folks back home, the fighting here popped up on their screens for ten seconds on a slow news day but for us, it was everything.  The death of a comrade, the misery of defeat, the elation of victory - events that we would never forget for the rest of our lives barely registered a blip in the collective consciousness of the civilized galaxy and news organs back home.  None of that mattered to us.  Despite being dumped on a backwater planet and forgotten by everyone, we were still Manni's Marauders and we thought of ourselves as one of the toughest fighting units in the Terran Federation.  We were also the most outnumbered. Without a single resupply ship to be seen or heard from in the last eight weeks, we were in bad shape.  Half of the platoon had been eithe...

Over the summer, I received a copy of Avalon Hill's version of Freedom in the Galaxy, a space wargame which was published in the middle of the Star Wars craze in the late 70s/early 80s (originally published by SPI in '79 and then by AH in '81).  Clearly using the Star Wars movies as its inspiration, Freedom in the Galaxy aspires to epic space opera as one player takes on the role of the ruler of a cruel galactic empire while the other player controls the idealistic rebellion.  The objective of the rebel player is to use his characters to start a successful revolution while the Imperial player must crush it. There are kind of two games in one going on here with Freedom in the Galaxy.  Military units engage in combat much like a standard wargame with the use of CRTs, etc., while at the same time there is an almost "roleplaying" type game happening with characters on both sides trying to influence events.  Imperial characters work together with their military units...

Today, I played through the first scenario of Operation Garbo, the Swedish front expansion for World at War.  Titled, "The Hammer of Thor", this particular battle features three Soviet formations against three Swedish formations as they duke it out for control of a city.  The objective for each side is very simple.  The Swedes need to attack and hold an entire city (Ranea, in the northeast corner of board B) in 8 turns while the Soviets need to hold them off. Swedes must capture Ranea in NE corner. In order to accomplish this task, the Swedes get the SN Tank Company, TN Tank Destroyer Company, and the QJ Mechanized Infantry Company.  The SN company consists of slow but deadly Centurion tanks while TN has faster but more vulnerable IKV91s.  The QJ Mechanized Company has three platoons of infantry each carried in extremely versatile PBV-302 armored personnel carriers. The Soviets, on the other hand, get the 22nd Naval Regiment, which has weak but very f...