Yesterday I played J178 Old Friends versus Ross Zarzecki at the Austin game day. He chose the Germans and set up a pretty good defense. In this scenario, the Americans must gain control of 7 out of 12 (?) multi-hex stone buildings, without losing 37 CVP. They can also win by gaining 38 CVP if they can't get the buildings. The nature of the terrain really cramps the Americans in. They start out in a corner, with some of the buildings (3 of the VC buildings) right in front of them, but the rest are behind a stream with only 1 bridge across it for most of the board. The other part of the board has a lot of woods and one obvious chokepoint. The Germans have 2 Panthers, one Mk IV, a StuG, and a halftrack with a 20L (12), plus an assortment of infantry. The Americans get 3 Chaffees, 2 M4A3 76(W)s, a couple Wolverines, and an M4 105, plus some elite and first-line squads. They get to put gyros in 2 tanks. Each side gets a 9-1 armor leader. With constricted terrain, and facing an immediate loss via the 37 CVP, I had to attack very cautiously as the Americans. I can easily imagine careless American armor use putting them in a CVP hole early that would be hard to climb out of. The idea was to try never to give the Germans first shot at a tank, and let the infantry leverage their way forward, and in general to use lots of smoke. This plan worked reasonably well, but what worked much better was that Ross' dice rolling was terrible all game. At one point, one of his Panthers was under a +1 stun, and its gun, BMG, and CMG were all disabled. His troops failed most morale checks. Meanwhile, the American 9-2-led stack of 3 squads with MMGs rolled pretty well on the few occasions that they got a shot, scoring outright KIAs a couple of times on squads. His tankers couldn't hit anything all game, while one Chaffee knocked out a Panther and a StuG with bounding fire. The Mark IV was a victim of the armor leader's M4A3 76(W) with gyro, also in bounding fire. It was just that kind of game. Had the dice been even, this would probably have been a tough slog for the Americans. It's very even on ROAR, but I think the American players had best be prepared to use all the tricks of the trade.