Chris wanted to revisit his 1930s Imagi-nation campaign this week. He’d taken Gazala to a WD mini-conference and I think he wanted to consolidate some learning. 

The Paprikans continue their unwarranted aggression towards the peace loving Tibians. Chris split up me and Phil for this one, with Phil defecting to the invaders, partnering Tim. Steve joined me as defenders. We’re at the end nearest the camera. They have to storm down the highway as quicky as possible and capture the town and the bridges across the river. We had to stop them. My oh my they had a lot of kit.

I gave Steve an infantry brigade and told him to defend the woods forward. I gave him the field hospital and the log unit as I reckoned he could deploy with most if not all of his units in contact with them, enabling him to recycle casualties and not run out of ammunition. 

We were lucky that one of our recce units – the armoured car with the green die in the back – was really effective and slowed the flanking advance. I also threw in a fair amount of air support in lieu of artillery. We were able to order a total of 10 missions in the game, with a maximum number of 6 aircraft at anyone time. I did not intend to finish the game with the enemy at the gates and resources still to be used. As you can see, they did have a lot of armour.

They also had a load of cavalry that they were using for deep penetration and encirclement. We tried to shoot them up from the air.

Sometimes this went quite well for us.

Steve was getting surrounded but he kept holding on. It was taking the Paprikans an age to winkle him out of the woods.

The centre of the board was dominated by a hill top fort (which I kept calling a monastery) where I’d put all our artillery and our command centre. We were able to hit some of the Paprikan forces as they tried for full encirclement of the woods. However this was not enough and Steve was finally forced to withdraw.

The action then shifted to our next strong point, which was based around a convent and a winery.

This action was similarly hard fought, and kept most of the Parikans tied down. This gave us time to blow one of the bridges, but I’d been tardy in getting a demolition team up to the other one, so Tim got his cavalry across to our side of the river.

We’d done or best to blunt the attack and had done quite a lot of damage and inflicted major delays on their advance but we didn’t have much left in the tank for the next phase of the campaign.

Other thoughts? Well I took to the Kallistra more than usual. I like the neutral colour and the hexes work well with the system. Chris is shuttling back and forwards between a couple of design ideas and I think he is nearly ready to plump for one or the other approaches. Whether he gets it exactly how he wants it in order to publish fully I can’t yet say.