It was hot summer's night...

It takes more than a heatwave and the UK's traditional lack of air-conditioning to stop the Monday Night Group from their weekly game. Alas Tim & Steve were unavailable for non-heat related reasons, but Chris, Phil & I gathered in Chris' games area for some NQM.

Now, there's a long running "joke" in our group going back 30 years or more about me complaining that I'm not being given enough Russian armour in our Eastern Front games. In particular the total lack, near enough, of the legendary T-34. Mostly they don't appear at all ("too early in the war") or I'm not able to attend ("we did Kursk last week when you were on holiday. There were LOADS of them"). After a exchange of messages on a discussion group Chris set up a Tibia/Paprika game in which he promised me loads of T-34s.

There had to be a catch.

There was. The Tibians and Paprikans have moved on from the late 1930s and are still scrapping into the 1960s. The Paprikans - who I was commanding -  had introduced a (as in ONE) heavy tank, in the shape of the T-55, but most of their armour consisted of T-34s. The Tibians, on the other hand, had managed to obtain significant numbers of Centurions. Oh dear. That did not sound good. The ratings for the tanks were that the T-34s were medium and the T-55 & Centurions Heavy. I've played a lot of games of NQM where my kit is one classification below the enemy. It's often Light v Medium, but the step difference is the same. It is hard work and you can normally only get ahead of the game by rolling sixes. These cause a lot of damage but also give you an out of ammo marker which makes you vulnerable to counter attack, even when you're winning.

Still, Chris had given me quite a few T-34s, and I had Katyushas to back them up, so he'd delivered on the promise. And for a change we were on the offensive, having made a landing in a Tibian port, with orders to drive in land an capture the airport.

The broad open inland plain looked like superb tank country. Chris said we outnumbered the defenders, and a quick count showed that to be true. However, there was a lot of dug in infantry. The dreaded Centurions weren't on the table yet. And then it turns out the the Tibians have ground attack aircraft and I only have interceptors. Still, there's probably only one way to go. Head straight for the airport as quickly as possible and try to overwhelm it before the Tibian reserves arrive.

As the highways only take vehicles in single file I decided to send the smaller half of the army off left flanking in an effort to draw off some of the defenders.

I have to say at this point my recce were useless and lost or drew every encounter. This meant that Phil, commanding the Tibians, was able to locate the head of my main attack column and then hit it with his heavy artillery. This outranged everything I had, and inflicted a load of damage on my solitary T-55. Chris changed his mind part way through and claimed they'd always been Mediums, although Phil agreed with me that they'd been firing as Heavy up to that point.

Whilst the head of the column was reorganising and trying (and failing) to push back the recce I swung a couple of tanks round the side of the village and tried to overrun the artillery defending the airport.

Meanwhile on the left I'd hit the defensive screen blocking the road and driven it in, drawing out a couple of the Tibian Centurions.

My T-34s smashed their way onto the airfield, overrunning one of the guns. I'd re-org'd my other tanks and was bringing them up in support. I didn't have any mobile infantry. In fact I had no infantry at all. This meant my supply units were vulnerable to disruption by Phil's recce, which was playing a blinder, so I had to be careful where I placed my units to ensure the attacks went smoothly.

Despite my inability to roll higher than a 4, with a 5 being a luxury, I think Chris was concerned at this point that I was going to knock the Tibians over in under 45 minutes.

The left flank was looking a bit dodgy. Phil's ground attack sortie inflicted a load of hits on one of my units. His counter attack piled into my lead units. I realise that one of those tanks of his isn't a Centurion but it counted as heavy anyway. Behind the tanks he has mobile infantry, which can be used in support of assaults (***NEW RULE WARNING*** Chris was pioneering some changes to the close assault rules which incorporate armour quality and support units). I was putting a lot of faith in my Katyusha breaking up the attack, but I couldn't hit anything for toffee.

Sure enough over at the airport a couple of big burly Centurions turned up. My supporting armour was distracted by an APC with an RCL "attacking from ambush" (??).

Over on the left I was being driven back. As I feared, outnumbering 2:1 v heavy armour isn't enough. Especially if your artillery can't hit owt.

The outcomes by the airport were universally disastrous, and I lost all along the front. At this point I had two choices. I could continue to head bang at a disadvantage against heavier opponents, or drop back to the port, dig in and try and make Phil attack me on a more even level. So I started to scoot. Phil was not amused. Especially as I finally drove off his recce. This meant he no longer had units in contact or observing my forces so he couldn't shell them.

I managed to extricate myself on the left, too, before everything got trashed.

I squeezed most of my stuff into the port, along with the defending units. Some had to stay outside, so I got the engineers to dig them in. I had mistimed this on the left, so the defences weren't ready when Phil arrived.

Phil stormed down the road and put his foot straight into the bear trap. Pummeled by Katyushas, out numbered and attacking dug in defenders death awaited him. Once I'd drawn the sting from the heavy armour I could then counter attack up the road and overrun the lightly defended airfield. Genius plan.

Except despite all of this, the Katyushas could hit anything (there were THREE of them now, for goodness sake) and I lost an opposed close combat die roll when I was on +3. The Centurions stormed into the port, and the Paprikans were fleeing for the landing craft.

Well. That was fast and frantic. In the post game washup Chris said he was astonished at how badly it had gone for me. He reckoned the armies were evenly balanced and he'd trialled the combats beforehand, with the medium armour usually coming out on top. I said at the start of the game (when Phil complained he was badly outnumbered) and I said it at this point too that based on my experience playing the game I would have swapped armour at the start of the game and still attacked. Heavy Armour in defence - and hence normally next to its resupply and reorg bases - is really tough to crack, and it's a devil to defend against too. I know. I've done it a lot. Admittedly in this game Phil did roll exceedingly well most of the evening, which skewed the results a bit - like in the last attack on the port - but if you are an armour class down you take more hits and inflict fewer and so are pretty much always at a disadvantage in the post shooting combat.

Nice to see the Centurions on the table. Even if I was on the receiving end of their fury. What a great tank that was.