Thanks to Ray for doing yeoman's work in solo running the event this year. It takes a lot of energy and he's still going strong.
Jim Bishop, Guy Chaney and I shared a ride in Guy's suv and had some fun conversations on the trip down and back.
At the event there were the usual suspects in attendance, with a few new faces, and Curt had the WBC ASL Champ trophy in prominent display. Rounding out the notables, Cirillo and Deller had a playtest extravaganza going in full swing as well.
I wanted to get some final playtesting done on my France '40 AP, but I packed the wrong bag of maps and scenarios so I decided to enter the main event.
My first round opponent was Ed Fritz, jr., Ed is always a fun guy to play and we had an enjoyable, at least for me, game of 'Death to Fascism' with me taking the Rumanian Fascists. After a dubious and bloody Human Wave on turn one, Ed settled down into forcing his way into the village, cutting my Rumanians pillage plans a bit short. The grind and lack of troops as a result of the turn one rush in a couple of mg42's proved to be too much for his commies to overcome.
1-0
Round 2 was vs a relative newcomer to ASL, but a long time SL player, Michael Gravinese. We had a fun conversation about rotisserie league baseball and a fun game of the scenario "Field of Black Gold" as well. Michael was a bit rusty on the rules and I helped out as much as I could, but his lack of experience with the game made it hard to handle his troops in a difficult situation. I hope my input of the rules and play choices was helped.
2-0
Round 3 brought out a Bitter Ender veteran and all around good ASL player in Dave Reenstra. From the scenario list we decided to play "No TIme to Bleed" with the ROAR balance leaning towards the Soviets we were a bit dubious but as I had not packed my Deluxe board and I was sharing my kit with two other players who had chosen one of the other scenarios, our choices were limited. We diced for sides and I ended up with Germans...Axis again. The scenario wasn't as unbalanced as ROAR shows and my Germans withstood a Turn 4 ferocious furball of Soviet armor as the Soviet armor to my left flank was reinforced by T34/M41's entering from the nearby board edge into the left flank of my armored advance. After the shooting was done, 4 of the Soviet tanks were burning with the loss of no German armor. Some of that was due to the freshly delivered panzerfausts. While their range was abysmally short they proved very effective, with the infantry crouching under my tanks to shoot at vehicles daring to close to pointblank ranges with my tanks.
3-0
Round 4 was another Bitter ender stalwart, Ken Daughtey. He and I had tangled a few times in the past and it's always a good game. The choices for this round were a bit anemic in both our opinions and we decided to have, yet another go and a scenario we had both played in the past...'Cold Crocodiles'. The dice gave me the Germans...yet again.
Ken's artillery was fairly ineffective, only having one mission before pulling back to back red cards. His Crocs did flambee a few Germans before going down to an 88 and a Panzerfaust. I was able to hang on against Ken's seldom seen British 'Banzai' assault on the last turn, to eke out a narrow win with the VP total: 73 to 66.
4-0
Guy Chaney had also compiled to only other 4-0 record, and with Ray's permission we decided to head home and play the final game sometime this coming week.
