Well, that went well, didn't it?

It has been a fairly rubbish last few days, topping off a fairly rubbish last few months and a fairly rubbish year, all round. What we needed was an everything all in massive RCW game, with tanks, aircraft, artillery, armoured trains, trenches, barbed wire, a big river. Everything. Except cavalry, perhaps.

I had need to look at how the really heavy armour adaptations worked, and also needed to see if the rules would handle a Great War style full on assault on a fortified position, because there were a few.

I decided to make it a one-sided game; that is, all the players running the Whites, whilst I "plumpired" the Reds with some auto-control mechanisms.

Jon was the White leader, supported by Chris in SHQ, and Ian and Richard on line. Jon had been given force lists and a set up photo beforehand, and had devised a plan and given me dispositions.

The Whites are in the two woods towards the top of the right of the picture. They have two Regiments, each of four battalions, three light batteries each of two field gun sections and one howitzer section, and a light, medium and heavy tank section. Plus some ground attack aircraft.

The Red forces are unknown to them, but consists of two infantry battalions, two batteries each of two field gun sections, two field gun sections deployed in anti tank mode, and three independent MG companies. There was also the chance that an armoured train would arrive. All the White troops were of better quality.

The Red position had a lot of chits, marking potential troop locations. I had a crib sheet, which had the actual deployments marked, so the Whites could bombard without knowing what they were hitting.

This is the White right wing. There's some Renault FT-17s, re-purposed from my SCW collection, and the Mark Vs, together with a couple of field gun batteries. Some howitzers, borrowed from my Great War Brits, are skulking behind the woods.

The central wood had the Medium tanks, again borrowed from my Great War collection, and the other artillery battery.

This is what it looked like from behind my lines.

Jon opened up with a massed artillery barrage. He shared the fire about a bit, rather than concentrating each battery. That increased the area he potentially pinned prior to the assault, but also reduced the chances of an actual pin. He also nearly used up all my barrage markers.

The artillery strike panicked some of the defenders, who revealed their positions by opening up and blazing away pointlessly.

There was a degree of debate amongst the White commanders. The rule system gives infantry some benefits when moving over open ground if they are co-ordinating with armour. This is made difficult in that the "Nyet/Da!" test card suits are different for armour and infantry. So you can either be guaranteed your armour will move, or guaranteed you can move the infantry. This created some tension between the infantry and armour commanders. Eventually they went with the armour moving automatically, and the infantry testing. As it turned out, the infantry refused to move, and had to be coerced into action. Here we see them emerge from the woods, led by some plucky FT-17s.

Next to them the Mark V's rumbled to the edge of the woods. This is the business end of the armour formations, able to crush more wire and cross bigger trenches. And blast strong points with their 6pdrs.

The Renaults press forwards, smashing a hole in the first line of barbed wire, as the infantry cluster behind.

The machine gun platoon in the forward line opens up on the armour ineffectually, only to be destroyed by the incoming artillery fire.

Next the Whippets were ordered forwards. In deference to the infantry commander, they chose the "Nyet/Da!" suit for the armour. This requires a random event test for each vehicle. The first Whippet rolls 86, and so suffers an engine fault that requires it to retire to the rear. Then, coincidentally, its colleague rolls the same number, and so has to withdraw as well. Oh.

The Mark Vs rumble forwards. In one of them the commander is overcome by fumes and passes out, but it still presses on. We don't know exactly what happens in the other, as it starts to belch smoke, and then an explosion kills all the crew. Bolshevik sabotage perhaps? There is further confusion, not helped by my internet signal starting to become unstable, so it is difficult to receive orders from the on-line players.

But what's this? A lonely Sopwith Camel appears over the battlefield, and machine guns the town. Typical capitalist anti-revolutionaries, murdering innocent civilians.

Almost in response, it seems, a Red armoured train pulls on to the table. Its massive 6" guns start to bear on the target, as the station master runs up with a field telephone from the Forward Observer.

The guns thunder out, sending a crushing bombardment down onto the central White artillery battery.

And then the internet signal gave out completely, my phone showing 0.1mb on the wi-fi speed check. So, not like last week, which was PC performance, but the actual signal. I have no idea what happened. Mrs T in the house was happily watching TV on catch up, so the main router was working fine. I even had a green light on the mesh box in Shedquarters. Very, very, annoying.

I think the Whites were more than happy to call off the attack, with their armour down to half strength and the armoured train on the table. In practice I think the objective was still achievable. There was enough artillery to pin the front line whilst the infantry negotiated the wire where the tanks couldn't help. It would have been tricky as the attackers would have needed to adopt a lift and fire approach with the artillery, with their infantry hugging the bombardment. 

Anyway, a massive disappointment for me, as I'd spent quite some time setting the game up, and drip feeding Jon information as White C-in-C. Due to time lost over the weekend - for obvious reasons - I hadn't got everything perfect, but it was good enough to go, so that's a lot of effort gone up in smoke. I could reset it, and start again, but I'll need to sort my IT problems out first.

Not all bad, of course, as I learnt a few things I might want to look at, and I got the Mark Vs out for an actual game.

And Chris and I ate a packet of Jammy Dodgers between us.