The Corinth Canal

Played a small WW2 game at the club last night with Tim Gow using his WW2 version of NATO Brigade Commander, very similar to my WW2 version, but also different.... Tim has managed to retain the snappy NBC ancronym for the title.

I took the Allies (a mixed force of Greeks and New Zealanders) and proceeded to fight the mother of all battles against a regiment of grizzled German Fallschirmjaeger who very unfairly landed all over the canal bridge in gliders and by parachute, blocking the retreat of the entire Allied army. My chaps attempted to retake it, and in the process both sides were virtually annihiliated. The game ended with my brigade reduced to a company of infantry and a weak squadron of Vickers Light Tanks, and the German regiment reduced to a company of Fallschirmpioniere still grimly (and very annoyingly) hanging onto the bridge.

Highlights of the game for me were:

• The Greek Infantry refusing to move from Corinth for several turns, then finally advancing only be be virtually wiped out in a desparate battle around the railway station.
• Stukas managing to bomb their own troops, putting them to flight and saving a Bofors battery from being overrun.
• The Vickers Mark VI tank company dominating the battlefield like a small Tiger tank. Well, it helps if your opponents don't have any anti-tank weapons....

Great fun and resolved fairly quickly.

On the rest of the gaming front, I'm fairly happy with Drumfire now after last weeks test game. I've made a few minor revisions, but I think the system is now essentially set and I've just re-worded a lot of it to make it more internally consistent. I need to do some work on French and German attacks, but that is more on the scenario side than mechanisms, and I expect this will be the game I bring to COW 2010. We'll probably give it a rest for a while, but at some point we'll try out a 1917 attack in the ongoing campaign.

I'm still doing the rest of my 20mm WW1 French, just finishing off the paintwork on the infantry before varnishing and basing. They are all inkwashed and drybrushed now and I've just been finishing off details. Now I need to work up a scenario so all three French divisions can attack something!

I've still got a load of 20mm vehicles left from last year which are assembled and undercoated, but I need to finish them off. Mainly late war NWE stuff, and I've got a few more scenarios in mind for Megablitz. Thoughts are now turning to Triples which is only a few months away, so I need to start on my shopping list for this year.

Just downloaded some WW2 Divisional rules by Pz8 http://panzer8.webs.com/ which look interesting. Another KISS Rommel variant but with more of a DBA type combat system with step losses. I'll give that a go at the club at some point.

Finally, I went to Venice for a few days before Christmas, and in between dodging the floods and admiring the thick snow over everything, found time to pop into the Naval History Museum. Plenty of exhibits about the exploits of Italian frogmen and manned torpedoes!

There was also this rather interesting 37mm trench gun, I might have to build one of these. It is absolutely minute.

Lots of scale models, as you would expect. This was a rather beautiful one of the Roma.

Something you don't see very often, a piece of Austrian battleship . This is from the stern of the Monarch class SMS Wien, torpedoed in 1917.

Along with the military wonders there was stuff like St Marks Square, the Accademia etc, but I'm sure you don't need any photos of those.