Cross-posting two quick AARs from
Boardgamegeek:
Smith and Weston, March 1944.
Another Burma scenario against Merrill's Marauders, this time the Japanese have to push through a defending American force and exit more VP off the far end of the map than the Americans do. The Japanese have two possible routes: an eastern one that goes through jungle the whole way (with a single path), or a western one that goes through jungle for about half a board before opening into a big stretch of open ground. By SSR, the Japanese must roughly split their force between the two approaches, and the Americans must defend pretty far forward.
I wasn't a huge fan of this scenario. It seemed like a PTO classic were most of the conflict is between the attacker and the terrain, and the defender is just trying to stay out of sight. The defender needs to do very little indeed to make it mathematically impossible for the Japanese to exit via the eastern path before the game ends. So the east is largely a sideshow in which the Japanese try to keep as many Americans from reinforcing the western side as possible.
Meanwhile, on the west, the Americans need to avoid fighting the Japanese so that they can retire intact to the open ground area where they stand a chance of actually hurting the Japanese. My brother didn't manage this well enough, and so lost.
I generally like the old-school style scenarios where there is a couple of turns of maneuvering before combat is actually joined, but this was too extreme a version of that, and besides, the terrain and VC meant that meaningful maneuver wasn't actually possible. So the first few turns and just "Japanese and Americans move down various paths", with only the occasional speedbump, which wasn't super thrilling.
Roadside Assistance, May 1944.
Roadside Assistance is a major triumph in scenario design from the
Dispatches from the Bunker: to my knowledge, it is the only partisan scenario ever made that is fun!
A German halftrack has run out of gas in the sticks of Greece, and partisans are grouping in the nearby village to take them out. The Germans have put together a relief column consisting of a halftrack-mounted SS platoon and a handful of other, chromier halftracks, including the mortar one and the dual-side-flamethrowers one (possibly the coolest AFV in ASL). The relief column must fight their way into the village, gas up the stranded halftrack (by ending a turn stopped in its hex), and then hack their way out as increasingly dangerous Greek partisans move into the village from all sides.
I'm not sure that I would recommend this as tournament scenario, exactly, but it was one of the most flavorful ASL games I've ever played, and it's worth your time. The relief column took heavy casualties getting into the village, but managed to save their stranded comrades and get a move on, heading for the northwestern exit hex--the partisans gathered there to stop them, but at the last minute my column pulled a u-turn, shot back through the village, and escaped in a hail of fire via the southwestern exit hex by the skin of their teeth.
An ASL memory that will stick with me: I messed up the halftrack PP, so that one of the "rescued" halfsquads wasn't actually able to mount up--by the time I realized this, the halftrack that should have been his ride was already on its way out of the village. I didn't need that halfsquad for the VC, as it turned out, but I did feel a bit bad for those five poor bastards who now had to hoof it out of the village with a horde of angry Greeks on their heels, as all their comrades disappeared in a cloud of dust on the horizon. Considering they were part of an occupying SS police force, I am sure I shouldn't have felt bad for them, but such are the moral hazards of ASL.
