Bessarabia, April 1944

In this scenario of Combat Commander, the Russian forces (me) deploy first and randomly (using random hex drawing from the deck) around the map, and are defending against a small recon group of Germans (Jon) that deploy where ever, but AFTER the Russians and as a single contiguous group. The Russians had a few scenario-specific abilities like movement that is not hindered by the forest (SWEET!), and start with a unit reinforcement card in hand. The kicker? They can only play 1 order per turn vs 3 for the Germans (which proved to be a strategeery headache for me).

The predetermined starting open objectives state that kills are scored x2, and whoever controls all objectives by game end wins automatically. As an interesting twist, there is no map-exiting vp's, so it was to the death.... Secret objectives where drawn awarding VP's to spots on the left map edge (my objective), and one on the right map edge (Jon's).

So my units where scattered all over the map. Leaders were completely useless because they were scattered. It took me a few turns to get them within reach of other Russian units. My setup was the weakest close to the lower left corner of the map above, so the Germans popped up close to that group during setup (which btw, was very close to my aforementioned leftmost secret objective that I drew). The Germans quickly disposed off that small band which controlled my strongest weapon (a "stolen german light Mortar") while capturing this objective (unbeknownst to my opponent that it did provide vp's).

The rest of the game almost completely concentrated on that left half of the map specially around the lower clearings, as I tried fruitlessly to recapture that lost objective. Highlights of the battle:

1. Even with all that forest cover, we both suffered incredible number of casualties, which again, in this scenario, the vp award was multiplied by 2! During 2 different melee attacks which Jon lost, I earned 8 vp's each time! ....even when we both played ambush cards beforehand (which break your opponet's units, effectively lowering the attack value before rolling). We both start the scenario with 2 leaders, and quickly lost 1 each, which made moving units around the map even harder.



2. At one point in the game, I gained a radio to call in 82mm artillery. I considered getting another leader to go an rescue my other dispersed units, but the power of artillery tempted me. So you need a leader to spot a target to call it in.... I moved my only leader left close to that deadly clearing following the exposed train tacks.... only to be broken by Opportunity Fire from the Germans that where hiding in the forest. My leader lay there exposed and broken on the tracks (and thus unable to call in artillery) for 2 rounds as I tried to draw a Rally card (Recover Card). By the time I drew that card he was still alive, so he rallied. As a bonus I now had 2 Artillery Request cards in hand: I spotted 3 hexes away (oh the risk...! my troops thought my leader was nuts....any misfire and the shells could have landed on my units!). I fired my first artillery breaking a few German units. Unfortunately, I couldn't follow that up with a regular fire attack because I could only play 1 card per turn. The Germans of course then responded with a recover card. Second artillery request came around, and landed dead center between 3 German units. One of them was a broken squad....on which Jon played a Light Wounds card to mitigate the pain (switching a broken team for that broken squad giving me only 1 VP instead of 4!). At this point I realized that the Russians where really going to have a hard time winning this through killing units because of the 1 order per turn limit, so I switched to capturing objectives as my main goal (specially so when Jon decided to destroy my artillery radio).



3. Snipers where dead on making hits in this scenario! Probably about 60% of the time, they scored a hit (in my experience, it's been more like 40%).



4. An event made me reveal my secret objective which gave Jon VP's for controlling the lower left objective.... oh the smirk on his face....



5. When the last Time! marker hit, ending the game, the score was 3 VP's in Jon's favor. On our post game analysis, we realized something very peculiar about this scenario: Jon won partly (totally?) because he used 3 of the Light Wound cards mentioned above. Essentially in this scenario, you get 4 VP's for eliminating a squad and 2 for a team. If you play light wounds, your opponent automatically gets 1 vp as stated in the card for reducing the squad to a team. Then once the team is eliminated the opponent gets 2 VP's.... therefore only yielding 3 vp's from that original squad instead of 4. He did that 3 times (IIRC). If I had gotten 4 points for each of those 3 squads instead of 3 points per, the score would have been 0.......with me controlling the tie breaker.... the Initiative card.

What a sweet game.