My friends Ralph, AJ and Bob came over to the house to help me with the playtest. All in all it went pretty well. The scenario is 'Kittyhawk Down' from the 2016 Bolt Action additional scenarios. In this scenario there is plane carrying sensitive documents coming down slowly due to engine trouble. Your force has to get to the plane and have at least one unit within 3" of the plane where it crashes by the end of the game.
We did not use all of the forces available due to there only being four of us to play.
We split up the forces by drawing cards randomly. Most of the African forces (Bob and Ralp) were vehicles. They only had one infantry squad. They also had an FO controlling off-board medium mortar and to top it off they had a Huey Cobra Attack Helicopter.
AJ and I had primarily infantry for the insurgents, but we did have three heavy weapons and more importantly, we had a medium truck with ZU-23-2.
It was a very close game throughout with both sides rolling very hot or very cold - as always happens in a wargame! The help came on when we botched up and brought the truck on too soon. Then Bob whiffed on the shot and the truck survived. Then we traded shots until the plane crashed right into the middle of the board between our forces.
There were two turns of fierce fighting and right at the end, the command group (LT an done other soldier) of the African forces managed to get within the required 3" of the crash site. AJ and I failed to get our forces within 3" and we were not able to kill the command squad so the African government troops were able to eek out a victory.
Here are some photos of the game in action and before I cleaned up the terrain.
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| The table. Government troops came in from the left, insurgents from the right. |
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| The crash site after the battle. Red markers show where figures were killed during the fight. The markers around the aircraft on the right was where one of my squads was wiped out trying to hold the objective. |
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| The last turn of the game and I couldn't get the fresh squad in the cover area to pass their cohesion test and go out towards the aircraft. |
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| My 14.5mm AA gun which did some real damage during the game including wiping out one of Bob's infantry units and destroying an Armored Car. |
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| The heroic Lieutenant and his radio operator fighting to within 3" of the crashed plane and securing it for the win! We just couldn't root them out of that cover! |
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| African government troops and even a French Special Forces sniper team upper right of the photo. |
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| The truck with ZU-23-2 AA gun. The smoke/fire marker just below it was where the helicopter crashed. My daughter's cat loves to try to destroy the helicopter so I had to move it to a safe location before I had a chance to take a photo. |
Overall I am very happy with the scenario and I think it will go over very well at the convention. I have to get the forces split up into "commands" which I can give to each player and that will also allow me to balance the game depending on how many players show up at the table.
