Pocket Panzers

For our first game of 2024, Jesse and I returned to Chain of Command, which is probably our most-played ruleset. However, I wanted to introduce a bit of a twist by pitting him as the Germans against the Soviet fortified region machinegun platoon list. It pits a small but well-armed and dug-in Soviet force against a well-trained and well-supported German one. We set our game sometime in July 1942 on the southern Russian front during Case Blue. Jesse took command of a rifle platoon from Fremery's 29th Motorized Division, while I had the Soviet defenders. In reality, the Soviets defending the approaches to the Caucasus oilfields crumbled reliably under the German advance, but we'll see how our match-up goes.

Although most of my wargaming career has been dominated by WWII wargaming, particularly Chain of Command, I'm a little ashamed to say that I've played just two games of Chain of Command this year. It's been a while since the blog has had any WWII content, so here's a few photos from a game we had Monday in which we finally returned to the brutal battlefields of the Eastern Front.

Gebirgsjäger — German mountain troops — are a project I've wanted to tackle for some time, although I couldn't say exactly where the idea first came from. At this scale, the mountain infantry are not that different in appearance from regular German soldiers, aside from the inclusion of some specialized winter clothing. And at least in the game systems I've played, their special rules are nothing to write home about. Still, there's something about the depictions of them in historical photographs, art and reenacting circles that has always appealed to me. Maybe it's the status they carried as elite troops, or the way they seem to appear scruffier and hardier than the average German soldier, or even the Third Reich's tendency to throw away the lives of their specialized troops as leg infantry to stave off an inevitable defeat. What I'm getting at is that I've made some Gebirgsjäger. I started with a squad at first, but I've got every intention to expand...

After taking a bit of a self-enforced break from wargaming at the end of August, I was fortunate enough to snag two games at Virtual Lard 7, hosted by the Too Fat Lardies (makers of Chain of Command, Sharp Practice, etc) community. This is the first of those, a Chain of Command game set on the eastern front during the late summer of 1941. As I've discussed previously on this blog, these games, hosted virtually through various video-conferencing apps, were the community's answer to the pandemic. For me, though, they've given me a great chance to play games with members of the Lardy community in the UK and elsewhere that I never would have gotten otherwise. In this scenario, the Germans are tasked with advancing quickly across the steppe (shown above on right) and reducing a pocket of Soviet stragglers held up in the factory complex. To accomplish this, they'll have a three-squad infantry platoon with its light mortar team, plus a tripod-mounted MG-34 medium machine gun, ...

  It's been a busy week here (and productive, I swear!) but I'm left with a pile of half-finished products and longer battle reports to write up. And here I am, out of time to get in a post this week. So I hope you'll accept some photos of a game from back in December, pitting Germans against Soviets (on this blog? are you shocked??). It was a bit embarrassing for me, fending off the German attacks and losing the game when I attempted a counter-charge that went totally awry. Full disclosure, this is an excuse to show off my friend's bizarre little tank - a French R35 hull mated with a Soviet T-26 turret seen in Axis service in one photo . It's a 3D-printed model here, and actually the paint has since been touched up a bit, so that the different colors covered over with German grey is more apparent. But, on with the photos: Soviets dug in near the T-junction Germans are bringing firepower to dig them out Germans deploy in force on one side, but a Soviet reaction make...