On Saturday the 13th of September Lawrence and I finished up the It Never Snows game we had been playing, we called it at the end of allied turn 8. The Germans felt like a punching bag and the wonky rules were getting to be a bit much for such a time investment.
Completed Turn 5 of It Never Snows last month (yup a bit behind on updates...)
Allied Turn, the 82nd is cutoff from supply...
Red Devils form a perimiter.
XXX Corps lined up on the road.
XXX Corps makes it across the Grave Bridge! Lucky bridge roll back at Zon. Another one of the quirky items in the rules - a bridge unit can create a bridge on the same turn it uses road movement. Rules specify it has to start the movement phase adjacent to the river - which it did, after the road movement.
German turn 5
Germans make a push to cut the highway, never really having a chance.
Red Devils are now surrounded.
Germans manage to cut the Grave Bridge off, but not for long.
The 101 with its tank support start clearing out the Valkensward area.
Also this turn the Germans managed to destroy the second bridge unit (bad placement on my part - allowing a german unit to overrun it)
Turn 6 (forgot to take pictures after the German turn, sorry about that)
101 area, the fighting is fierce but the Germans don't really have any chance.
Red Devils still encircled. Pushing the attack does not really help the Germans all that much but they do close in on their turns 6 and 7.
The Zon bridge is cleared but there is no highway bridge to the Nijmegan area...
Turn 8 (end of Allied turn pics)
The Germans cut the last remaining heavy bridge heading to Nijmegan, XXX Corps comes out the crossing from the Nijmegan side of the river (they are not allowed to cross the river to the other side due to zone line restrictions) while units of the 101 and 82 fight on the other side.
The way into Nijmegan. On Turn 7 the Allies bombed German units that had a ZOC (with airpower) across the railroad bridge. Managed to get one hit which removed the ZOC and DGd that stack. Thus allowing XXX corps to cross and create a strong line. This also put most of the 82nd back in supply. Turn 8 the Allies started clearing Nijmegan but rolled losts of 2s 3s and 4s...
The Pols land and spread out (oops, no movement when landing in Polder,silly rule)
The German threat near entry area B (Eindhoven) is pretty much done. Much of 101 would be moved to clear up the bridge to the 82nd.
At this point we called the game. In our opinion the game just did not work and was not worth the time investment to keep playing. The DUKWs were about to get up to the Nijmegan area and could have crossed the rivers with ease. The highway movement rules don't do much to allow movement up and down the main highway but DO allow a unit to snake around the roads if each crossroad is not guarded, with the ability of unit to road move and then regular move and attack it just felt silly. Add into that the inability of the airborne units to do anything if they land in polder (and thus not manage to reach places they reached in the actual operation). Last and not least the German player felt like a punching bag - he had very few powerful units and without them an attack is not really possible.
So I picked up Monty's Gamble Market Garden and plan to give it and Hell's Highway a try.
