Urban Warfare Day - Urban Operations

 A recent trip to Tapton was loosely labelled 'Urban Warfare' day. I ran Arnhem in the morning and Pete put on the actual 'Urban Operations' game in the afternoon.

I gather this is a quite hard to get game, designed by a French(?) Officer as a military training aid. It comes with a double sided map, one European, the other Middle Eastern. featuring city layouts at a very brave 7m per hex! Oddly the units employed are then individual vehicles and infantry sections. I must say it would be pretty cosy having an entire section jammed into a 7m hex.

We played one of the introductory scenario which featured a weak US Company (a platoon each of mech infantry and engineers plus some support assets) being attacked by what appeared to be the best part of a Soviet battalion, a couple of companies anyway, somewhere in Central Europe.

The various types of elements have unit cards which give their characteristics in combat, movement etc. 

The chaps are represented by blocks on end, like a Columbia block game, which gives some fog of war. Green is the good guys, the Russians are red. We set up with strongpoints covering roads and a mobile reserve. We probably didn't pay enough attention to where the windows in the actual buildings were, as fields of fire turned out to be non existant. 

The Soviets led with a combat recce detachment, but the recce troops seemed very reluctant to actually do any recce, instead the Russians pushed forwards various AFVs. We then rapidly discovered that almost everything was under the minimum range for tank main guns, infantry AT weapons etc. The only things which actually worked were small arms, so we were treated to tanks and APCs trading MG fire in the streets, while we did manage to get off some LAW shots. 

Our 'piece de resistance' was a platoon of M1s which counterattacked from a flank - the green squares bottom left. Although tbh what use they would have been if they actually found the enemy is anyones guess.

We rather gave up at this point.

And instead ogled the lovely Middle Eastern City map, which I can see being useful for all sorts of stuff.

It was certainly an interesting game, and I could be generous and say it had some interesting ideas, but for me it just hadn't reconciled the ground scale with the level of unit representation, and the mechanisms veered between stupidly detailed and bizarrely abstract (air strikes just worked like laser beams from space, with no collateral damage into any of the hexes adjacent to the target 7m hex). 

Has it been playtested at all? I really can't imagine sending this around officers messes and hoping people are going to play it and gain some training value. They would be better playing SPIs Sniper.

I liked the  blocks thoughand the maps were pretty, so if you fancy getting hold of the components it might be worth a look, but otherwise save your money.  Thank you Pete for being brave enough to run it for us!