Tournament Report for 23rd Feb @ Gamescape North

How my boys felt going into this tournament.

My first tourney was on Saturday. A long day, started out with me getting up at 6:30am to be at my mate's at 8. Then from there four of us car-pooled down to Gamescape North in San Rafael. After some awards ceremonies for last year's circuit, the first game got underway.

(First though, let me say - I had played exactly 3 full games of Flames of War up until this point. 3..... *facepalm* )

The tournament was a Late War 3-round escalation format, 1st round starting at 1280 points, then 1530 and the last round 1780. My lists for this were thusly:

2nd Canadian Infantry Company

1280
Infantry HQ - 30

Full Rifle Platoon - 190
Full Rifle Platoon- 190
Universal Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher - 105
6x 6pdr Anti-Tank Gun Platoon - 215
4x 4.2" Heavy Mortar Platoon - 165
3x Sherman 1x Firefly Armoured Platoon - 385

1530
Infantry HQ - 30

Full Rifle Platoon- 190
Full Rifle Platoon- 190
Universal Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher, 1x .50cal Machine Gun - 115
4x 4.2" Heavy Mortar Platoon w/PIAT launcher team & Lloyd Carriers - 190
2x Sherman 2x Firefly Armoured Platoon - 435
4x M10C Achilles Self Propelled Anti-Tank Guns - 380

1780
Infantry HQ - 30

Full Rifle Platoon - 190
Full Rifle Platoon - 190
Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher - 105
Additional Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher - 100
4x 6pdr Anti-Tank Gun Platoon w/Lloyd Carriers - 155
2x 3" Mk II Light Mortar Platoon - 75
4x 4.2" Heavy Mortar Platoon w/Lloyd Carriers - 170
3x Sherman 1x Firefly Armoured Platoon - 385
4x M10C Achilles Self Propelled Anti-Tank Platoon - 380

(Hope the lists make some sense to those not familiar with Flames of War and WWII Commonwealth army load outs in general?)

Game 1 - American Engineer Company - Fair Fight

My opponent was a nice bloke called Sam from Los Angeles who had recently moved up to the Bay Area. As soon as he started plonking down minefields during his deployment all over the fucking board, I knew this was going to be a dirty game. Funnily enough though, I should have wiped him clean off the board. I had WAY more stuff on the board than him and he had very little long range kit that could damage my own troops.
Some clever maneuvering and piff paff poof(!) one straight forward win for me! Right?

Not if my dice had anything to do with it....  I've never rolled so many 1's in my life. Sam even pitied me and offered jokingly to "take it easy on me". I smiled, declared I would roll one more "1" before games end, picked up a dice and did just that.

A poor performance perforated with poo rolling left me losing most horribly and scoring a measly 1-6. Not a good start.

Game 2 - Panzer Lehr Company (I think) - Surrounded

Second opponent was a thoroughly fun and cool chap called Stewart. Him running a Mech' list and me an Infantry one meant I had to defend in this game, which is hard as hell in this mission as my boys were stuck around two objectives in the middle of the table and he was able to deploy from either table-end to come take them from me. Stewart ran 2 platoons of 1/2-tracks filled with a load troops, a small Puma Recce patrol, some NebelWerfers stuck back in the corner of the table and a scary 3-tank unit of Panthers that ended up being more scared of me in the end.
(I had my platoon of M10's in ambush)
I tried to spread my boys well enough between the two objectives but laid out a shite deployment anyway, leaving one poor Infantry platoon to have to hold back two full platoons of Nazi infantry AND their attendant machine-gun toting 1/2-tracks until everything I could run over to them finally arrived to back them up. In the end, they did hold off Stewart's crazy mad rush of assaulting troops long enough for my 2 regular Shermans to roll over along with my Universal Carriers and M10's and machine gun the heck out of the enemy to try to force them off the objective (My 1st brave platoon of infantry ended up dying almost to a man in the process.) and win me the game.
The best part of this game was the complete uselessness of his Panthers, who (2 of them at least) spent the whole game hiding behind a church, terrified of the two fireflies who had killed their 3rd team member in the first turn for being so cheeky as to poke it's nose out from the church and think it could even begin to win a long range fire fight against them.  

I ended up scoring a 5-2 on this game.

Game 3 - British 11th Armour - Breakthrough

Last game was my closest and another example of just how much effect "luck" has on tabletop games.
My final opponent was Forest, a gentleman of a Kiwi and we fought Brits on Canadians in a weird mission with lots of running frantically for objectives and delayed reserves and so forth. I don't particularly like the Breakthrough mission, but that's beside the point.
I started this game really strong, taking out a full platoon of 2x Shermans and 2x Firelys in my 1st turn. I then went on to roll full reserves every turn until the 3rd turn and looking like I might kill off the game before Forest's own reserves could arrive. Sadly, once again, my dice decided otherwise. Not only that, so did Forest's dice. In the corner of his deployment zone, he had placed a typically weak 2 fun Sexton battery. (Only 2 guns means he had to re-roll any hits he made on against my troops.) Only, the bugger kept rolling hits EVERY SHOT, and then RE-ROLLING them! Then 6's for firepower tests every time and two supposedly crappy guns started to make mincemeat of my force. (The artillery had a plane spotting for them and I had nothing to shoot it down with.) Couple this with my two infantry platoons failing all game to roll to un-pin and you might get the idea of how well this all went.
He also had a Typhoon buzzing about strafing and my boys were mangled. They held up in time for his reserves to come on - 3 full infantry platoons eventually - that I just couldn't hold back from the objectives for long enough, or kill enough stuff to at least get a strong loss on this one.

I ended up losing 2-5 this last game.

So in the end, I finished with 8 tournament points and was about 1/2-way in the standings of 24 players - not bad really considering how inexperienced I was at the start. I had a smashing time and an enlightening experience of it all compared to the pants Warmahordes tournament experience I had suffered prior to this and which scared me off tournament play for the past 6 years or so. I didn't have a camera to take pics, though wouldn't have had time to snap any shots even had I brought one, so apologies for that. I do know that the TO's took pics throughout the day and I'll shove some pics up here once they post them on their forums.

If you've read this far down, then thanks for keeping with it. I'm now feeling a bit more confident about the rules to this game and have even managed to get a mate at work interested (He's chosen to play King Tigers..... of course.) so I can get some more practice in before I go out to any further tournaments. For now, there are still LOTS of painting to be completed for my Brits, though I have some commission work to get on with beforehand.

Cheers.



About as competant as my boys ended up being.