We’re looking at running three weekends for the WWII period initially. We currently have a variety of nations, British (early and late), French (early only), German (early and late) and Russian (early and late). In the past, the Wargames Holiday Centre has run a lot of WWII weekends, some of the favourites being, The Battle for Crete, The Battle of Kharkov, The Battle of Caen and D-Day to name a few. These are in addition posted for this year, which are The Battle for Arras, The Battle of Arnhem and The Battle of Prokhorovka within The Battle of Kursk.
A couple of Stugs take a well earned breather
Now you might wonder why we have chosen these as our starting battles, well to be perfectly honest, it’s purely selfish. I love these games, there is something about the earlier war which really appeals to me. The tactics vary quite a bit to the later war, I feel that most of the action is “closer”, if you know what I mean. The ranges of the weaponry is shorter, the tanks are not quite so dominating and the infantry are quite key. The protagonists in this battle are quite well matched, with none having a massive superiority over the other due to the battlefield scenario.
A nice close up of one of our Panthers
The Arnhem scenario is really…well I want to use the word nostalgic or romantic, but that is probably due to me bwing brought up on films such as “A Bridge too Far” and “The Longest Day”. I have always had in my mind that the desperation of the situation and the bravery of the Allied airborne evokes something in the gamer, one just wants to replicate these achievments on the tabletop, which is no mean feat!
Prokhorovka is great if you love Tanks, there is a railhead which the Leibstandarte and Das Reich are trying to capture. There is a long rail viaduct which dissects the battlefield causing communication problems for the Germans and loads and loads of tanks, hundreds! (Did I mention the Tanks?)
Close assault into the town…leave it to the infantry!
We have used a set of rules which while accurate, have been rather paper oriented, loads of book keeping. These were recently shelved for a less administrative set of rules. These have worked extremely well as when you’re fighting across fifteen feet of table and your front is 28 feet long, you really need a set that allows you to experience the command and control while lending accuracy and above all playability.
Over the last few months we have decided on converting all our infantry and artillery to a more sensible base size. I am all about the aesthetics when it comes to wargaming and I felt that our truly huge collection of WWII figures looked fantastic based up on our new larger bases. (More of these in my next post). This allowed more “diorama” based squads and a more “realistic” look about them when they’re laid out on our tabletops. (After all you never know when there will be a photo opportunity, do you?)
Good ol’ Shermans force their way over the bridge
Now we have the conversions of the infantry and Artillery truly under way, we will be adding more to the lists. All the work and additions will be presented in further posts.
Talking of additions, the more astute of you will have noticed that there was a major omission from the beginning of this post…The American forces. We don’t have any! Not one single G.I. Well that will change very soon too…..so watch this space, question is do we go Pacific or Europe?
