Operation Barbarossa II or The Tale of Wooden Crosses

The gaming group, aka Scandinavian Lardies, went to Flemcon, a local and rather small con, this weekend. Our plan was to continue the Operation Barbarossa game we played at Stockcon earlier this autumn, using the new I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum! v3 rules for the first time.  Our ultimate plan was to make people interested in gaming with miniatures, and hopefully join us.

The game: We continue a couple of kilometers up the road to Minsk. A Kampfgruppe is exploiting the breakthrough made in the earlier game, but this time the Germans are in for a match, they happen upon prepared positions…

The board before the action starts. Germans will enter from the left.

Two of our men played the Russian defenders, and prepared their defenses before the public came. Everyone interested were able to get a unit of Germans and be part of the glorious advance on Minsk and Moscow.

We have two obvious routes in for the Germans, the central road going through the board, and one road going through the woods on the right flank.

The first German recce units went for the central road, and they sent one empty blind by the right road. That blind went a bit forward, started spotting and promptly found traces of tampering on the road ahead – a clever ruse by the Russian, they didn’t have one mine. That stopped all advances on the right flank.  Job well done J

For the rest of the action I let my pictures tell the tale.

The first recce unit leaves the road.

A platoon of motorcycle infantry drives happily forward. Ignoring a lone anti-tank rifle-man.

This doesn’t look good…

Oh dear, more infantry..

…and even more. Darn they shoot at us.

Ooops. Where is everyone?

The heavy armored car continues, until…

Reinforcements.

Panzer grenadiers attack on the left flank. There’s an AT-gun there, and a MG bunker. It was good to have a flame thrower.

More troops.

Even more troops, this time HQ with mortars, HMG and a Kfz 4, and an infantry gun. Unfortunately the German players forgot to give the appropriate cards to the umpire, so they just stood there for a couple of turns. Some things you learn the hard way.

Action near the village, assaulting a tank was a bad idea

Stop! Be quite, they might not have seen us.

Russian counter-attack on the right flank

Darn, another tank!

At the same time, the Russian counter attack hit the right flank, now with a T-28…

… and after a while a T-34!

Breakthrough on the left flank, supported by Pz IV:s. The Russians retreat.

What’s that, coming through the village? A moving bunker? A KV-2!

About now we called it a day, after about ten hours of gaming.  The Germans had a break-through, but a lot of angry Russians in their back and flank and rather heavy losses - and therefore an urgent need for wooden crosses. Would the Russians cooperate and the Germans get a Kessel, or was this an early set-back? Who knows?

 A nice game, and I hope everyone enjoyed themselves. We were seven people from the gaming group playing, umpiring, explaining and having a good time, about ten people participating during the day and a bunch of spectators coming and going.

I was exhausted when I came home at half past eleven.