More than a dash of Paprika.

Chris' Imagi-Nation inter war campaign carries on a-pace. He has rolled the table along from the last game, and the river line I was defending with Steve is now half way up the table instead of on the edge. Chris has soloed some of the intervening action, and the Paprikan cavalry is trying to envelope the Tibian right flank, whilst their engineering units are trying to force their way across the river at the broken bridge site. 

Tim couldn't make it this week, so Steve swapped sides and joined the Paprikan hordes alongside Phil. I needed to hold the river line as much as possible whilst my damaged units retired off the board. The right wing looked okay, with cavalry holding a strong position in the woods. The centre round the bridge was more of an issue. Phil had two pontoon sections to bridge the river, and I didn't have enough stuff to cover the length of it. I decided to set up the artillery, such as I had, to cover the hexes round the old bridge and put troops in the town as a strong point. I didn't really have a reserve and I wanted to disengage some of the cavalry to form one but this proved difficult to do. Instead I hoped to draw Phil into a lengthy engagement round the old river bridge whilst being able to respond if he tried to bridge elsewhere.

Phil anticipated me using airpower in lieu of artillery again and put up combat air patrols to stop me. In fact I'd decided to task them to blow up the other permanent bridge near the top of the table you can see in the first picture.

The artillery got a bit intense round the bridge. Phil had assault pioneers (ouch!) which surprised me and they were very good even across an unbridged river. Chris is trying out new bombardment markers, which work a bit like the ones I use in "For Whom The Dice Rolls". This is a definite improvement, but they were a surprise and we'll need to work out how to make use of the effects once Chris has ironed the bugs out. The markers look good. They're pipe cleaners sprayed with black car paint.

On the right Steve got bounced in his initial attack on the woods.

After the first air attack on the other bridge I deduced that Steve wasn't going to make use of it anyway, and switched my air wing to supporting the troops round the bridge. The plan seemed to be working as Phil failed to work out how to seize the initiative in this area and couldn't bring himself to disengage and switch his line of attack.

Steve had thrown my cavalry out of the woods, but I regrouped and counter attacked in force.

More bombardment round the bridges pinned both sides in place. This suited me more than Phil.

I saw off Phil's last air attack, and used mine to shoot him up a bit. This was an in game rules change which annoyed Phil slightly. It's been over 30 years, and he still isn't used to this happening.

I have now effectively stopped the river crossing attempt for the evening. Pleased with that.

I now had localised cavalry superiority on the right and so went all in.

This wasn't an unmitigated success, but I think I still have the upper hand here.

We closed up for a discussion of where we'd got too. Chris has made some important changes to the way the game is played which I like. He has some issues around how it all finally slots together, but  it'll be worth it. He also had issues with casualty recording as permanent casualty markers got separated from the relevant units or mixed up, but this didn't detract from a really interesting evening's entertainment.