I played in the 1750pt tournament, and Game Korps did a great job setting things up. The boards were beautiful, and best of all, there were multiple desert board for the mid-war tournament. Its so rare that you get to run mid-war desert equipment actually in the desert. There were also a number of really heavy city table that looked great, but I wasn’t particularly enthused about. City boards so heavily favor certain types of forces that I don’t think they have a lot of place in a tournament.

Tournament was 6 rounds- Encounter, No Retreat, Breakthrough, Cauldron, Free for All, and a new non-official one: Stem the Tide.  The new mission was interesting. It’s played long ways on the table with two objective near the center line. The closest of which will be 24″ away from deployment. You can’t win until turn 6 except for breaking the company or time. After that you take an objective or make sure your opponent has nobody within 12″ of either objective.

I ran Italians Bersagalieri. No thought what so-ever went into this list. I didn’t know I was going until that morning, and made the list on site in about 60 seconds. Consequently I ended up with no ‘real’ artillery, which is unusual for me. I even forgot my dice and counters I was is such a rush to leave.

Force List

HQ with Bombs

2x Bersagalieri Companies with Bombs

1x 81mm Mortar Platoon

5x M14/41 Tanks

4x Semovente 75/18 1x Carro Command

2x Lancia da 90/53 Heavy AA

Limited CR.42 Fiat Falcos

Round 1

This was a brutal slugfest vs Tankovy. I had virtually nothing that could hurt his armor from the front, but no matter how hard my opponent tired, my Lancias kept saving. The Lancias and the Falcos saved the day and managed to whittle down my opponent and eventually kill a t34 company. My armor wasn’t so lucky as it was obliterated as soon as it came on in reserve. Time ended and I got a 2-3 tie.

Round 2

I played my buddy Paul in this one. Another tankovy group, this time with calvary and Stuarts. I made a mistake and set my Bersaglieri up within assault distance of his Cossacks, but he didn’t manage to pin down the platoon and assaulted anyways. I think he forgot about the sheer weight of small arms fire 3 HMG, 3 47/32 and 6 r/mg teams can pump out. I repelled it and killed about half of his Cossacks. Next turn I finished them off with the HMG. Couple turns later he assaulted my Beraglieri again with the Stuarts. Between defensive fire and bogs I killed 9/10 of them on the way in. Shortly after the 90/53′s came and and started picking at his t34′s. He conceded shortly after. 6/1 for me.

Round 3

This was a city fight, breakthrough, vs a new player running Brit rifles. I was picking off all of his troops in deployment, and working up to a 6/1 or 5/2 at worst and made a colossal mistake. I didn’t get a platoon on the back object in time. His troops showed up a turn earlier than I expected. With all the slow going and blocked LOS in the city, I couldn’t get someone back there in time to do anything and went from a strong win to a 2/5 loss. Doh.

Round 4

This was Cauldron on a dessert board with a player who was running American Armor. He had alot of Stuarts and sort of gave up before we had begun because there were wadi’s preventing him from having 16″ unobstructed movement anywhere on the board. In any case, he had some infantry that never moved the entire game, and a platoon of Stuarts that was heavily damaged by my immediate ambush. After that it was mainly a case of sit and wait. Me dug in vets vs trained troops mostly in the open. In the end there wasn’t a fight because he wouldn’t commit. 6/1 for me.

Round 5

Another city board for free for all. I played vs American armored rifles with virtually no armor. My Lancia’s were worse than useless here. Basically they were just artillery targets so they spend all game hidden. My tanks couldn’t maneuver without risking getting assaulted with no defensive fire. Ended up being one of those long slow infantry on infantry grinds. We might have had a decisive game in another couple hours, but time came and it was 2-1 tie.

Round 6

So this was the new mission. I played against an Ostfront German Pioneer Company with lots of Goliaths. My opponent was a fine sport, but Goliaths are one of the few units in the game that get my hackles up balance wise. The board was a beautiful fully rolling desert one, probably my favorite of the con. Due to the impassible terrain on the board, my infantry was funneled into narrow corridors perfect for artillery bombardment. My force was torn up before it ever engaged. My planes didn’t manage to come once, nor did they block his planes once. I managed to severely damage a couple platoons, but making them break was another matter. Time was up before anything decisive happened, but it was starting to look pretty bad for my Italians at the end.  I think this was a 1-2, but I can’t remember if I killed a platoon to get a 2. I know for sure he killed my M14/41 tanks.

Results

I can’t find the results posted anywhere, but IIRC I placed about 10th out of 30-odd players at the event.

Prizes Etc.

Prize support was pretty good this year. Almost everyone walked with at least a boxed platoon set. I’m not sure that’s the $10k that was trumpeted awhile ago, but it was really nice. I really appreciate the way that Game Korps does prizes as well. Aka you only win the largest award you are eligible for. They let people win multiple awards at Gencon and is was pretty frustrating. Best overall usually means that you at least placed in best general, best painted, and best history. It pretty much makes it seem like unless you’re one of the top 5-6 players at a big tourney you’ll never win anything.

Some of the Battlefront guys were around to answer questions afterwords. I didn’t stick around long enough to listen to it all, but apparently I asked a question that got under their skin. “When are the allies getting SABOT rounds?” Fair enough as they should have had them long ago. Heck some units were using more SABOT than normal rounds. They didn’t want to discuss it, but eventually they conceded they were open to putting a gun with an entirely different stat line in upcoming books. They went on about not wanting to get down to the level of detail of ammo types (never mind many units already have multiple stat lines) I still think they just want to have a meta-game environment where the western allies have crappy equipment vs the big iron of the Germans and Soviets.

Closing Thoughts

I had a good time at the tourney. I generally don’t bring Italians expecting to be competitive.  I did better than I thought I would, and if I hadn’t made the mistake in round 3 I might have had a shot at placing. Its always good to play new folks, and nobody had any fits this time. I loved the tent cards. I really appreciated having trays on hand for us forgetful types.

Couple things I’d change- I’d lose the city boards. They’re cool, but excessive buildings makes for slow games. Make it woods instead. Infantry are a PITA enough to woods, let alone loads of rubble. I’d take a look at some boards before assigning length wise games on them. I saw several that clearly were designed as short way boards, and the balance would be wrong long way. I’d also start banning the older books. I know Battlefront doesn’t have the stones to do it, but its essential if the new point balances are to mean anything. I also like to see Eastern Front or North Africa only tournaments. Failing that, at least give preference to forces from the same book meeting up.

A couple of things are missing still. The rider for the war pig got put aside and forgotten until I had finished him, so I need to go back and finish that up and glue him off. I have the girl pig whisperer that fell under my painting table before I went to prime all of this, so I’ll get to her at a later date. Sorry for some of the blurry pictures. I was on a tripod with a cable release…. so who knows maybe I bumped the camera while shooting these. I didn’t notice until I had packed my studio back up.

The gun performance in game is great . It is nice to have something that really give the heavy tanks something to worry about. Pair it up with an AOP and its a very potent force. More pics after the break.

For those of you familiar with the Sabol Army Transport foam, these trays are significantly larger, but use the same type of foam with the same size cubes. Just be aware that it won’t fit in your bags even if you take the foam out of the boxes. Compared to Crystal Caste Battle Hive storage, it has cubes about twice the size. The foam texture seems to be the same.

They come in two sizes now. The 1.5″ deep cases that work really well for most everything in FOW without having a ton of wasted headroom. 1.25″ would be better for most tanks and infantry, but 1.5″ allows for some of the bigger transport, and artillery pieces I have. The also have a new “Fuzz Box” which is 2″ deep but instead of pluck foam, it has 1″x1.5″ precut holes. It’ll store 66 figs, and the holes come with the plugs still in them. I haven’t used the “Fuzz Box” but it appears to be of the same construction.

One disappointment with the cases is that the pluck foam isn’t glued down to the base sheet. This means you can’t just lift the foam out of the boxes if you like. I tried using some 3m spray adhesive to glue the foam down and that didn’t hold. If the slots are tight you risk pulling up the pluck foam every time you remove a figure, and that can cause everything in the case to shift. Its annoying to have to reshuffle the case frequently because of this. The top sheet wasn’t glued either, but at least is was easy to take care of.  The other thing to keep an eye on is that the boxes aren’t exactly the most durable material. You’ll need to transport these in another case of some kind to prevent the foam from getting beat up prematurely.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the EconoBox case, especially for FOW since they allow me to organize by platoon and only pull the units I want. I almost wish they offered half size boxes as well so I could fit smaller units into their own box as well. If I could just figure out a way to get the foam to stay down I think I’d be alot more happy with them.

The instructions say to coat your decals before mounting them. I of course had no such coating material and tried to go ahead without. After all one $2.50 page has enough room for about 24 sets of planes. The film is much much thinner than you are used to however and coating them would have aided in handling, and stoped scraping the ink off the decal. Application is more or less the same as a normal decal, but you have to be more careful not to wrinkle the decal as you slide it off the paper backing and onto your model. The up side is that the very thin backing conforms very well to the model and will wrap around edges without much issue.

Your printer most likely can’t print white so you’ll have to use a white decal sheet for this and be very careful about your trimming. The clear decals remain slightly transparent, so work best on light surfaces. I’m pretty happy overall with how the decals turned out. I think I’ll continue to use commercial decals where available, but its nice to know that this option exists.

If anyone would like a set for their planes until I run out, send a SASE and $1 and I’ll send you a couple sets.

CR.42 Decals