Spreading the Lard in Montreal

 

I have recently retired, so now have much more time to game and am also now able, after almost 23 years, to spend much more time in my native land. It has been a long sojourn in the US but even after all that time, I remain culturally Canadian. I would move back permanently, but I am still putting in 3 shifts a month in the ED, my wife is an American and she is not yet retired. She also really likes our condo in Massachusetts; she likes Montreal, but I suspect it will never be home for her. Anyway enough of all that, I am now spending half my time in Quebec so I am excited to meet some new gamers.

I started gaming here about 10 years ago, I had my first Wargame with my friend Iannick and over the next few years we played a fair amount of Napoleonics as well as skirmish French Indian War games. It was a lot of back and forth with me staying with my daughter, Jane. During this time we also played with Nico, a French expatriate as well as Rusty from Vermont. They both had young children, so were soon lost. Over the last 3 years, I connected with Pierre-Yves, another expatriate Frenchman as well as Luis, a Quebec native. I met P-Y, through the TFL forums and Luis through the now defunct Montreal SAGA FB page. Myself and Luis got in quite a few in-person games, but myself and P-Y carried ourselves through the pandemic by figuring out how to play war-games virtually. I suspect we have played close to weekly for the last couple of years, now in person more often but still playing virtually on Discord when I am in the US.

Since retiring a month ago, my focus has been on meeting more Montreal war-gamers. Luis has been embedded in the Montreal gaming community for years so through him I recently connected with Graham, a British expatriate, who like Luis is a life long war-gamer. Neither had played Chain of Command so they were both interested in seeing how it worked. We got together last night at my apartment and had a game!

I decided to go with "The Probe", scenario 2 in the rulebook with a British regular rifle platoon attacking a German grenadier platoon. I set up a basic table with quite a bit of terrain, but decided not to have any vehicles in the game. Luis took the defending German platoon while Graham played the attacking British.

The German edge

The British LOS

We played the Patrol phase twice, I really did not want to leave it out and I felt after the second go, both players had reasonable JOP positions. 

It looks like the attack will be on the British left flank

No real need for a battle report, the Brits diced for 3 supports and took a flamethrower team. Their starting FM was 9. The Germans started with a FM of 8 and took an adjutant as their sole support. Both players caught on quite quickly and after 5-6 phases I was able to prepare a light lunch. Here are so photos taken at the end of the game.

Luis's main defence line, his yellow squad is intact but as you can see from the many dead soldiers, the adjacent squad was obliterated by the Flamethrower Team. The remnants routed back off the table unfortunately taking the Germam SL with them.

Over view of final positions

British green squad going for the opposite baseline for Victory!

Yellow British squad, the dead men on their right flank the remnants of the broken blue squad.

High cost when an SL routs

Breaking British blue squad

The German green squad JL surrounded by his dead men, hoping to get a shot off at the Brits.

So we put in about 3 hours, which I believe is excellent for a teaching game, and we ended up with a clear winner. 

I will look forward to our next engagement and thanks to Luis and Graham for coming over. Tonight is a game of "O" Group with P-Y so retirement is going well!