We had an opportunity to play a scenario from WO18, Deluxe scenario Dew of Death which pitted Japanese against Chinese, a run through situation spiced up with poison gas. Chinese 1st class troops have certain disadvantages even without the harassing poison gas.
Terrain has very limited cover since all forests are brush. Buildings are clustered such a way that they can be subject to the poison FFE rather easily. Because of the 1MC FFE, defense needs to be spread out. Chinese have broken morale of 6, so any hope to have them recovered once they lose it is very unlikely.
Japanese do not have much time, and they have to exit a lot of troops, so if Chinese can make Japanese to pay for every step, however lightly, they will not make it. Hence, I planned to take advantage of every single 1.5FP shot I could muster if I would benefit from FFMO.
Initial placement, very, very distributed.
FFE lands on the worst possible place, in the middle. It killed my MMG and blocked LOS from the other MMG. It was pure luck. Japanese entered all over the edge but progress was slowish. I tried to maintain my concealment as long as practicable not wasting shots against + hindrance TEM.
Chinese casualties are mounting and retreating to orchard. Japanese got their mortar in place and smoke started to fly about. I managed to stop the advance on the hills but on the left Japanese got through.
That meant they got through until a Chinese Hero appeared! It the moment of despair when Chinese LMG managed to pin the DC squad. Japanese entered in close combat, not realizing that Japanese undoing was waiting in the cloud of smoke..
Japanese were ambushed in the building by Chinese lead by 9-1 HtH. That pretty much ended the Japanese game because my opponent would have been really hard pressed to get all of the remaining troops unharmed off the board.
Well, this is what I got for present recently. I like the idea, and I like the execution of the system. Because it is published by Ares and not some unnamed company, there is a decent chance this time around that it is not overburdened by errata upon errata… Anyways, components are beautiful… except the figures. Why, oh why has someone made the call to use figures in this kind of game? Figures add precisely nothing to the game but confusion and reduce playability. Anything would work better. Wooden cubes, or better still, counters.
Think about it how great would war of the ring look if the armies would be nice big colorful counters like in Age of Napoleon? Wouldn’t it be outstanding! Just think about it. Of course I would not mind some figures to represent individual heroes, like the “standing” counters used in games such as Hannibal, but now this is just a mess and identifying factions not to mention setup without some labeling system is a nightmare. O why! why!
ASL. Yay! What’s better than that? Deluxe ASL. What else could it possible be? Of course it could be many, many things, such as Armies Oblivion preorder? Indeed, that too.
