Played Panzer Scenario 1 with Martin Lane from the UK Last Sunday and Saturday June 30th. We played with all the advanced rules and some of the optional ones as well.
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The setup. The line of counters is the edge of the playable area and the objective locations are listed along with the initial setup of the Russian and German forces.
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| End of turn 1. Both sides moving into position. |
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| First shot and first blood to the Germans! A track hit causes a Russian tank crew to bail out! |
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| End of turn 2 and the Russian return fire destroys 3 German tanks (I missed a fourth one down in the woods too, 4 German tanks destroyed. |
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| End of turn 3. The Germans take two of the VP locations but their losses mean they will have to kill Russians in order to get the win. So far it is 1 Russian killed to 4 Germans. |
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| Skipping to end of turn 6, the past few turns consisted of lots of firing back and forth with only 1 more dead German tank to show for it. |
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| End of turn 8. The Russians move out of LOS of Germans to the "south". They were in a disadvantageous position and only luck kept them from more losses. The woods and Hull Down made the Germans very hard to hit. |
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| End of turn 11 and the game. Germans conceded after this. The last Russian tank made a run for cover after destroying the final German tank up "North". This still left the Russians with 6 kills to 2 German kills and with the Russians now behind cover the Germans would have to move into LOS to get a shot at the Russians and the Russians would be on overwatch waiting for the chance to take the shots. |
I've not played the game for over a year now and was looking forward to it. Martin and I plan to play more of the scenarios (I'm hoping to play through all of them and the MBT ones as well). I like the order plotting step and how it is carried out - we also used the staggered initiative which helps to make the single initiative roll not so critical, losing the first one does not mean possibly losing all your tanks due to a single DR not going well.
Finally a nod to how awesome VASSAL is. Martin is in the UK and I'm on the East Coast of the USA. Since I like to play in the morning and early afternoon this works out with Martin's playing later in the day. It would take some long arms to play with a physical board and counters at that distance!
