Rommel:Kasserine Pass

We played a Kasserine Pass game last night using the ruleset Rommel. You can find a link to the modified scenario here. The original scenario was written by an Australian guy and was on the old Honour forum but you can now find all his scenarios here on the Sam Mustafa Facebook.

Here are the initial dispositions, I essentially created a map, chose my initial dispositions, I send it on to Pierre-Yves and he adds his dispositions and sends it back to me. I place everything on the table so we are all set to play immediately once we sign in.

This is how it looked on the table.

Essentially the Germans were the attackers and had to capture 3 of the 4 Allied objectives to win. They started with 6 ops while the Allies had 3 ops, the Allies had 6 dug in markers to start the game. The game was 16 turns.

My plan, as I was playing the Americans, was just to dig in and try to repel the Germans. P-Y played a real blinder by playing the Intercepted Signals Event in the 1st turn, moving my only Sherman to grid D4, and then attacking it, as it was unsupported. He had 9 units to attack with so after a few goes it was gone! He then advanced his whole line to Row D, and the battle started. I was a little surprised he had focused on his right flank but it worked well for him and by turn 7 it was impossible for me to win the game as I was down to my infantry only and had lost 3 objectives. Here are a couple of other photos.

Thoughts:

Well it was going to be a tough game for etc US as they were really overpowered. At the same time I noticed that every time I attacked I lost so I think the trick here is just to defend for the US. 

I had made some changes to the scenarios and as you will notice I changed the size of the table from 12 x 8 grids to 9x6 grids. I did this for Virtual Gaming purposes but really I think that it is too small an area to properly manoeuvre for a grand tactical game. I think further Rommel games will be full scale. 

I should also say that I changed the tracks on the German tanks from 432 to 543 as outlined in the rulebook for midway, all the US tracks were 321, so this was a major advantage. I will have to check why the original designer did this.

In respect to Virtual Wargaming I have come to a decision nexus now: Do you change the games to accommodate playing over the internet or do you work on improving the Virtual Wargaming setup to play the games as they were written? I am I think in the latter camp, for sure maybe the more difficult path. I do appreciate that there are games that just might not work over the internet, ie. Napoleonic games with 2000 figures on the table. 

Virtual Lard is coming up in a couple of weeks, so that will be a good place to see what others are doing. I am really coming to the conclusion that it is necessary for the games master just to set up the game and cameras and to allow the players to chose which view (camera), from what I understand things can work so the players can also zoom in from there end. It really sounds exciting.