19 September 2020

April 9th: A Virtual Campaign from Finland

 

I was recently invited by some gamers in Finland to join a Chain of Command campaign based on the German invasion of Denmark in 1940. The campaign itself can be found here. It is based on the Danish film appropriately called April 9th. I can highly recommend the film, I was able to stream it on Amazon.

Tuesdays, is the GeMiGaBok club meeting night, so we gathered this week virtually through Discord for our first game. Somehow or another, I ended up being the Danish SL, which I suspect after our first game will be a very tough task. I was assisted by 2 JL's, Alessandro from Italy and Sabbath, a club member. Opposing us was the German team, headed by Petri, with assistance from Janne and Bill, again all club members. The game was GMed by Eero, with whom I have been communicating with for some years. I have always been interested in the Winter War between the Finns and the Soviets in 1939-40 and he has been an excellent reference for me. I was quite happy, that  I was invited to join the game.

I had not played a full game through Discord before and I was impressed on how well it worked. You can run multiple cameras through the server and at the same time in the text channels roll dice and post still photos of the action. It is also possible to send private messages while the game is ongoing to members of your platoon and the GM. I will be looking at this further for sure. The below photo gives you a sense on how it looks. As you can see there was an overview camera with 2 other cameras, each showing the opposing sides edge, this was followed in the right panel by the avatars of each player, I am the Revenant!
Anyway on to the game, we had played the patrol phase a couple of days before and the starting map with the JOP's is as below. The German approach is marked by the red dot on the road, with the blue circles being the rough position of the German JOP's, while the red circles were the Danish JOP's.
The above game was the Probe scenario from the CoC rulebook, the Germans diced for support and got a 1, I took a Medic and I think the Germans took an adjutant. You can find the Danish Platoon composition in the campaign booklet, but to simply describe things, we both had regular platoons with 4 squads each. The German platoon was a 7th Wave Division platoon from Army Group C as laid out in the CoC Blitzkrieg 1940 sourcebook. The main difference between the platoons was that the Danes have 2 SL's and the Germans one, but the Germans have MG34 LMG (8d6) while the Danes have a Madsen M24 LMG (6d6). The German squads were 10 men, while the Danish squads were 8 men, but the Danes had bicycles! The Danes started with a FM of 9 and the Germans 8.


Rather, then redoing the report here, I will direct you to Eero's superb AR with plenty of photos. Things did not go that well for the Danes, but where there is life there is hope!

2 comments:

  1. Well that was an excellent report on a truly international game!

    As I am still working on hosting virtual gaming, tell me more about Discord...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks good John, technology, you got to love it.

    ReplyDelete