Circle of Doom J143 Steadman Vs. DeVries

Saturday Mark (AKA big-loud-goof-ball-jarhead) and I decided to take on Shelling's new Journal 9 mini-campaign game and set up played through Circle of Doom (great ASL title).

Mark loves to attack and even though I offered him the Germans he wanted the US. Mark drools almost as much for late war Germans as he does for marines but he likes to attack more. With our sides set I started setting up my heroic German defense and he went to take a shower and make pancakes for his kids. (I showed up an hour early). Mark first thing in morning is pretty interesting. I am on a winning streak against Mark, and so offered him the Germans after my first glace thinking the US would be harder to play. Don't want him to start making excuses not to play me.

In this mini-campaign Pete allows you to pick one of three groups from a force pool that is used for all three battles. Once you pick a group the column the group came from is off limits for the next battles to where in the end each column will have been used once. So, I picked the Panther, thought I would hit him hard in the first battle and coast for the other two. I placed my AA guns and limited infantry almost all on my right and bore-sighted where I thought he might come from. My over all plan was to try to hold one of the two bonus VP buildings and inflict more then 40 CVP and thus take the battle 4-1. With this plan I could afford to play risky with my AA guns, knowing that if I lost them it didn't really matter as long as I took enough US junk with them to trigger the auto-loss for Mark.

I went upstairs to let Mark setup after breakfast and watching his odd little dog eat the poop of his other little dog before his wife had a chance to clean it up. Self cleaning dog partners? That was pretty gross.

Mark also took the tank option and off we went.

Around turn 3 I was a bit nervous, uncharacteristically Mark was attacking slowly and methodically and things were looking bad for valiant defenders of Nuremberg. SO... I got aggressive and try to flank him with my Panther... that turned out bad as Mark snaked a side shot on him (through some alleys, buildings, orchards, only one hex in his sight) with his 76L and armor leader and so POOF no more Panther.... while this was really bad it turned out to be a blessing. The Americans seeing this Panther blow up got over confident and launched a massive all out attack (perhaps a turn to soon). It seems Mark forgot how deadly two 88 AA guns can be as they starting eating his tanks and the magic 40 CVP came and went. Hit, rate, kill, hit, rate, kill, lovely words... or "Hit-Rate, zu töten" even better...

Mark played well, and he was able to salvage 2 points from the battle even though he actually did lose the battle.

Final score 3-2!

We will be playing Three for the Third in a few weeks.