Tigers at Minsk - First Game

I have been looking forward to playing this game for the better part of a year now - which is how long it has taken me to get the scenery and figures together! Whilst there is still much more to do I now have enough stuff to start putting on games.

Fair Warning: Lovers of photography may wish to turn away now. Due to ill health my hands shake hence why things look a bit blurry at times. 

I've already shown off the scenery, so here are the counters I made from printouts stuck to beer mats. The advantage chit is double sided with a Soviet hammer and sickle on the other side (we flipped this like a coin to determine sides - I got the Germans). The orange pin/stun markers are from Litko.

The Scenario: Road to Moscow (Eastern Front 1941, November). The Germans have 60 minutes to capture as many built up areas (BUA) as they can. Each BUA is worth 1pt and, as there are three of them, it can be seen that this battle cannot end in a draw. We were also using the limited command rule for the Russians (two hexes instead of three).

Here is the battlefield from the German perspective.

BUAs should be obvious as should the woods and the stream/river on the right flank (special rule "Frozen Water" = vehicles must check for bogging due to potentially going through the ice). Destroyed woodland (with craters) was treated as Rough. Marsh can be seen adjacent to the stream and two single hex hills are also present.

 Here is the battlefield from the Russian perspective. 

And finally from a neutral perspective.

 The Forces: Never having constructed a scenario for TaM before but having read most (if not all) of Norm Smith's AARs I decided that the Russians would get 10 units and the Germans 16, picked freely from what I had painted in the box. It was also agreed that both sides would get one off-table artillery strike and one observer.

The Russian player chose: 3 x T34, 5 x Inf, 1 x HMG, 1 x ATG (with tow).

I chose: 3 x PzIII (37mm), 2 x PzIII (50mm), 1 x StuG III, 8 x Inf, 2 x HMG. 

The Russian player wrote down his troop positions, then I deployed, then he deployed. 

Here's how I deployed: Inf on the right to take the BUA, more inf to advance across the center and fight for the two BUAs on Row A. The PzIIIs (50mm) and a HMG would act as a fire base in the center and the other PzIIIs would tackle any threats on the left flank.

 Here's how the Russians deployed, as can be seen they held back one T34 as a reserve and the ATG is also off table (hidden) waiting to spring an ambush. The two BUAs on Row A were strongly garrisoned and two T34 were strung out as a forlorn hope. Notice that my opponent did not to defend the BUA on the flank. A clever decision which meant that I had committed too strong a force to take that objective.

And we're off!

(Unfortunately due to the aforementioned shaky hands I have had to junk a lot of the photos I took).

Almost immediately my left flank ran into trouble with a T34 in a wood shooting up the PzIIIs (37mm), their return fire was shockingly abysmal with shell after shell just bouncing right off the enemy's armour. Over the next three or four turns the PzIIIs struggled with this beast, it even shrugged off direct hits from the 50 mils firing in support!

Eventually my tanks, with some infantry support, tried to close the range on this troublesome T34. Thereby triggering some savage opportunity fire from the BUA and an ATG ambush. Disaster! I lost the entire force bar one tank, this shocked German morale. But then just as all seemed lost we got our chance, Out of Command and Stunned the beast was wounded and this gave my last surviving PzIII (37mm) one shot to deal with it, finally I got lucky! But my left flank was wrecked...

Meanwhile on the right (unopposed) flank things were going just peachy. However, in the center a cautious advance by StuG supported inf was being held up by another T34 and infantry combo.

Turn 5 and the very unwelcome sight of yet another T34 arriving!

Having captured the BUA on the flank with what was now the bulk of my inf, we see below the beginning of the end. The StuG was taken out without ever firing a shot but we did manage to drive off the T34 with infantry assaults. Unfortunately my attempt to go forward under cover of smoke was thwarted leaving my inf dangerously exposed. Far too late did the PzIIIs (50mm) start moving forward, I badly mishandled those.

And here we are at the crunch, the high tide if you will - the point at which German morale reached 0. I would like to point out that the Russians were only holding on by the skin of their teeth with a morale rating of 1. For the record we were 52 minutes into the battle, could I hold that BUA on the flank for just 8 more minutes?

Alas no! On the final turn (Turn 9) as the clock counted down my infantry gave up the ghost and retreated from the BUA a 2:1 minor defeat was now a 3:nil kicking. Although not pictured my opponent made good use of smokescreens when maneuvering and also for cutting off my LOS.

And in case you're wondering what happen to the artillery, we both missed and the fire fell in empty hexes both times!

Thoughts: What a great game! I am so glad that my faith in this rule set was justified. I like the way that every turn you are required to make command decisions. I like that you have to roll for assets such as smoke and Molotov cocktails. And I particularly like that sometimes you need to roll high for a success and sometimes you need to roll low - you won't win this game by having a good run of 6s (unlike DBA for example). I would recommend this game and I will be playing it again (and again).

Hiccups: We forgot that HMGs and ATGs can roll to avoid OP fire. However, by consensus it was agreed that this influenced the outcome negligibly.

1941: We both thought that infantry in close combat with armour in the open were a little too powerful for 1941. This is not surprising (nor is it a fault) given that the game is supposed to played in the mid war period.

Signing Off: I sincerely hope that Norm expands the Forces List, I've got some Soviet cavalry and a SiG33 begging for "official" stats, and I hope TaM does well.

More Terrain - a Building!

Recently Norm Smith has released two Stalingrad scenarios and some "how to" articles on scenery building for Tigers at Minsk. As a result of this I realised that the buildings I showed in the previous post simply weren't going to cut the mustard, so I decided to do something about that.

Buying resin or laser cut mdf terrain is beyond my meager budget. Building it myself (as Norm did) would have been stretching my modeling abilities and somewhat time consuming. So I looked around for a quick, cheap alternative.

Enter Dave Graffam Models and his excellent range of papercraft buildings and terrain. For the almost unbelievable price of 91p I bought his "Snipers Wall" set.

What you get from DGM is a pdf with "layers" allowing you to customize the look of the building templates before you print them out. The standard size is tailored for 28 to 30mm scale but a handy shrink to scale chart is proved. To get "N" scale (or 10mm) required that I print with a 66% reduction I.E. the templates were reduced down to 34% of their original size.

Having printed, cut out, then glued together the model I stuck it down (using doubled sided tape) to a double sized hex template and textured the base. All this took about four hours spread over two days to allow for glue drying.

Here is the finished result:

Terrain and Board Finished!

Here are the finished hex tiles and swap-outs.

Firstly, the board.

I picked up a pin board from Amazon, it cost around £12 including delivery charges and it is 2ft by 3ft in size. It is not robustly constructed (though I see no reason why that would be an issue) but it is doubled sided. The other side being very thin cork.

Next up are the swap-outs.

Firstly the hills, I have made one large and two small hills I'll have to add a couple of two hex medium sized hills in the future.

Marsh/Rough Ground.

Destroyed Woodland.

These feature shell holes from M.Y. Miniatures and the "Deadfall" set from Woodland Scenics. I mixed PVA and brown paint to line the bottom of the craters and then gloss vanished the hole to give it a wet/slick look. The brown staining around the crater edges was done with watered down Basetex.

Stream/River.

I made this using the same techniques I have already documented for the marshes. The bank is made from chippings from the Warhammer 40K basing kit.

Buildings.

I had these buildings lying around in my collection. I've overdone the roofs a bit but I will correct that at a later date.

Winterised Trees.

I nicked my partner's hair spray for this, gave the trees a good going over with it then shook on some fine snow powder from Woodland Scenics, immediately after shaking the snow on each tree was hair sprayed again to fix the snow in place.

Despite using the ridiculously expensive though recommended Hob-e-tac glue (£7 for 2oz!) my trees are still molting weeks after I first created them. Here is a picture of what has fallen off since applying the snow.

All this will get stuck back on with cheap superglue which does a far better job that Hob-e-tac.

Having got together what I hope will be enough terrain to get a good start I am now turning my attention to acquiring and painting some figures. 

Work In Progress

This project was started in response to the series of articles and the free rules entitled "Tigers at Minsk" by Norm Smith. Norm's blog "Battlefields and Warriors" can be found here:

http://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Free%20rules

The look of the board I am going for is early Winter on the Eastern Front, October/November time, so cold/frosty with light snow and ice. I am looking do battles connected to the Defense of Moscow 1941.

Here is a view of my hex board (sorry in advance for my poor camera work).

As should be evident I did the filla paste in batches and have created, more by accident than design, a patchwork quilt effect of hexes which I very much like the look of.

The colour isn't quite right on my camera, those half hexes are not as light as they appear.

The brown speckling came through during the drying process and has given a mud/green effect that was quite unintentional but welcome never-the-less.

Moving on, here is the large hill. A different (cheaper) filla paste was used for textural effect.

As you can see I am planning on putting a curving valley through the hills.

Next up are some marsh/rough ground swap outs.

The different (cheaper) filla paste was again used for textural effect. The brown stones are from the garden, the grey from a Warhammer 40K basing kit.

The water effect was created by first cutting to shape and then painting very thin plasticard a porcelain blue colour. When dry dark blue ink was applied to the middle of the cut out and dark green ink to the outer edges, these were swirled together a bit for good measure. When dry a coat of gloss varnish was put over the top (sourced from GW). Finally, a piece of blister packaging was cut to match each bit of plasticard, a couple of blobs of superglue were applied and left to dry to give air pocket effects and then it was superglued over the varnished cut out.

To give you an idea of what I am aiming for as an eventual look to my games, here is a patrol of T34 tanks and a BT7 from Katakov's 4th Tank Brigade somewhere near Mtensk, October 1941.

There is a lot of work left to do, for instance I want to draw together the different greens a little by giving all the tiles a light dusting of "snow". I'd also like to add some clump foliage to many of the plain tiles and to Winterise (is that even a word?) the trees and also get some Pine trees so I can bulk out the woods a bit.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed having a look.