Hello everyone!

We’re back with the second part of Tanksgiving. In the first part, I talked about Girls und Panzer, my first battle with my own tanks (which went poorly for me), and the first battle of Tanksgiving, which was a lot of fun with a super close outcome!

After a dinner and Kelly’s Heroes break, we returned to the table for a scenario in which there would be some bocage. I called it “Bocage aux Folles“. Here’s how it set up:

Okay, that’s not the setup. I forgot to take a picture until partway through the first turn. Anyway, Andrew was the attacker this time. The objectives were on my side of the table and I needed to defend them. To his advantage, he got to keep one of his tanks in reserve and deploy it from any table edge in turn 3. He chose to hold the StuG back. The way the bocage works is that they block line of sight, and unless your tank is touching the edge of it, you can’t see out at all either. You can see how I got my Shermans to the edge to be able to shoot out while taking advantage of an extra defense die from the cover.  I set up my Achilleses(?) side by side to take advantage of the “Coordinated Fire” rule which allows the second one to take a bonus attack die if it shoots the same target as the first one while within short range distance of the firing tank. We found out later on that this is a misprint on the Achilles card and it doesn’t actually have this rule, which explains why it is only listed as a Soviet rule in the rulebook. 

As you can see here, this battle seems to be going my way… I didn’t kill the Tiger in the first turn, but damaged it well enough to make it ineffective, starting with damaging the tracks.

The Panzer charged into the bocage to flush the Sherman out, but since I had a higher initiative rating, I moved next and promptly backed out of the hedge, leaving the Panzer to wonder where everyone had gone. The Puma here is dead, the StuG and Panzers are damaged, and the Tiger… oh my.  Andrew failed to repair the tracks during the end phase, and on the following turn I scored a critical hit that caused an engine fire, and one that caused the crew to bail out. So now it’s on fire, with the crew hiding behind it. With one hull point left, if he doesn’t put the fire out in the end phase, the tank would explode. Andrew makes his repair roll and… success! The fire is out! Luckily the crew had drunk a lot of tea earlier and were equipped to extinguish the flames. Next turn I shot the Tiger twice, but failed to finish it, and at the end of the turn the crew refused to get back in, which at this point, was probably the smarter decision.

But with that StuG entering from behind me, and that Panzer charging through the bocage, I was still in danger of losing the objectives! Just kidding, I destroyed the rest of the tanks on the next turn. And this time, no losses for me! It was like an exact opposite of the first game I played!

Following the obligatory “congratulations” and “now YOU know how that feels”, we decided to finish the evening with a couple episodes of Girls und Panzer.

It was a great, fun day of tank battling. So thank you very much to Andrew for supplying the place to play, and also super importantly, for giving me some tanks to get me started.

So what’s next? Well, more tanks and more games! Here’s the next one ready to go:

Thanks for checking out what I’ve been working on with this little gaming diversion! Keep checking back to see how we’re doing with Mathemagician’s Duel and our other games. We’re at Breakout this weekend, so I’m sure there’ll be a post soon about that, too!