Games Night - Memoir '44 Tigers in the Snow

A picture taken during the

Courland Pocket game as I was returning from the out house

While it has been quiet on the blog front, it's been rather busy otherwise. Catching up is going to take a while - but suffice to say that the last few days have been very happy ones. Mrs Kinch and I will be working on the house for quite some time, I imagine that it will be at least three years before we're happy with it and it is unlikely that we'll ever be entirely happy - life being what it is!

When we began working on the house, we set out goals - small steps along what we understood was going to be a long road. Mrs Kinch achieved her goal this week by having a shower in her own shower and cooking a meal on her enormous new cooker. Having hot water in the house and the opportunity to have a home cooked meal is fantastic and certainly beats living off Chinese.

My goal as you can probably imagine was rather less practical...

We had the inaugural evening of what was known amongst the initiated as "choir practice" last week and fantastic fun it was too. Unfortunately our only table is a little too small to fit my Hotz Mat so we weren't able to play with toy soldiers - but we did play a lot of Command & Colours, mainly Memoir '44. A few single board games were played before we got the real meat of the evening, three games of Memoir '44 Overlord. We had planned just to play single board games as there were only meant to be three of us, but some friends had a regular RPG night which was cancelled and came along to play wargames instead. This was delightful as I hadn't played Overlord in well over a year and I'd forgotten how much more interesting playing on a team was.

To save set up time, we played the two pre-printed scenarios from the Tigers in the Snow expansion. We played the Market Garden scenario twice with the honours being even. The Allied advance faltered in the first game when the commander XXX Corps didn't grasp that he needed to keep his tanks moving and moving all the time, whereupon the Germans overwhelmed the beleaguered paratroopers.

The second game was far more satisfactory with the Allies winning by a healthy margin. I had taken over XXX Corps (one of the privileges of playing host is that you don't have to play the baddies) and while I didn't get much further than my predecessor, the Germans had to put all their efforts into blocking my advance with the result that the formations surrounding the Airborne sorts were starved of resources and were unable to crush them.

The last game didn't go so well, the scenario was set during the battles for the Courland Pocket, I can't remember exactly which one. Sadly for our Fraternal Socialist Brethren, despite a superlative showing by the Peoples and Workers Airforce against a Fascist heavy tank concentration, it went rather badly thereafter. Stubborn Fascist infantry ensconced in a heavily wooded terrain managed to blunt our armoured spearhead and the Fascist counterattack with their remaining tanks was lethal.

Readers will be glad to hear that Comrade Siskington was shot for his treachery.