Sunday, March 30, 2014

Breakout Normandy another blast from the past

Played this Avalon Hill game with my Father after it languishing unloved since acquiring it back in 1993 i!
Do not really know why I never played it especially as it has such a good reputation.
And indeed it turned out to be an excellent and tense game.
We played the initial first week game/scenario and as Allies I just about managed to achieve the 10 VPs required (came down to my cutting off Cherbourg and retaining the Advantage. British landings were decent with only Juno stumbling a couple of turns to clear away defenders and I made good inroads from Gold beach to take a few VP areas.
But Omaha was a bit of a disaster, not in terms of losses but it took several days to get off the damn beach which meant the right flank of my British forces were vulnerable to German reserves arriving.
Utah was much better but tough to supply a large force through that beach head.
Two days were overly a tad prematurely due to Sunset roll (I considered using Advantage to re-roll but am glad I refrained in the end).
We both suffered several awful rolls when odds we in our favour which left attackers units Spent/Disrupted.
This is a great game with a lot of flavour of the Overlord situation.
Allies have power but need to get good landings and to link beaches, they are susceptible to poor weather as their Airpower is grounded.
Conversely the Germans love Overcast conditions as they are free from the nasty Air Attrition and move faster.
However Germans are initially thin on ground with several weak units (although I found several Coastal Gun Strongpoints a bitch to eradicate) with bulk of tougher stuff arriving opposite the British.
Their supply can be a problem in Clear conditions as often not enough to recover everything (doubles in Overcast).
Germans have to do a bit of hanging on grimly but do have chances to counter attack powerfully once the Panzer Divisions and Fallschirmjager appear.
Rules old school AH but we found them fine if a bit poorly laid out.
No real difficulties sorting questions but suspect our strategies were suspect.
Great stuff with bits of paper and cardboard once again and another gaming session with which we simply lost track of time as suddenly it was the next day in reality never mind on the beaches !










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