Faithful readers will recall the excitement of earlier posts, as Filip’s US forces swept aside poor Bart’s meagre German forces. In the last episode the Germans, trying to breakout of a pocket, were swept out of the charming little French village, Bordelle de Roi. Led by their bold Commander, Oberst Horst von Knackwurst, the remaining Jerries assembled in the nearby twin village of Boudin-de-Reine. There, they received orders to… run.

Blitzkrieg Commander includes a number of scenarios to play, rather than just equal points games. This time we played the pursuit scenario (for obvious reasons, given the campaign situation). Bart had 750 points, consisting of a tiny battlegroup of two companies, a Tiger, an 88 and a Nebelwerfer. Against him was 1500 points: “look Alan”, said Filip before the game, “I’ve made a very unusual army list, light tanks and dive bombers”. Hmm, interesting and indeed this in itself was to lead to one of the highlights of the evening.

But before moving on to the game, I have to report my successful, if unconscious, destruction of part of Bart’s beautiful new house. I got to Bart’s place late, having been stuck on the Brussels ring in traffic. Somehow, between the car and Bart’s front door I managed to cover my right shoe in unbelievably stinking dog s*$t, but alas didn’t notice this until I had climbed the stairs and walked all around the wargames room. Belatedy, I noticed the smell. I first thought it must be one of Bart’s projects (he is quite into glues and other strange potions) but then noticed strange marks on the (new) parquet on the floor. Oops. Yes it was me. “err, Bart”, I started to say, but Bart had disappeared. So I went into the hallway (now carrying the offending footwear) and there found him busily scraping away at the (new) wooden stairs, which until this very evening had been protected with cardboard while awaiting a coat of varnish. And there I saw a trail of offending marks, stubbornly resisting all Bart’s scrubbing.

Oh dear. A bit like the time after a DBM evening when a half full (empty?) bottle of red wine leapt out of my hands and spilt all over Graham’s carpet and wall. Just days before he had to give the house back to his landlord. Nasty memory.

Anyway, quickly back to the game. The table had a village in the middle/left hand side and woods on the the right hand side. A railway ran down the middle. Bart could deploy in the centre third and then had to escape off his end of the table. Reasonably enough he put all his troops in the village, ready to run down the road. The next odd event of the evening was that Filip declined to use his option of flank deployment, ie to be able to cut off the escaping troops.

Turns one and two saw Filip dash down towards the village. Alas, his lovely new aircraft failed to turn up. Much entertaining moaning was heard from Bart who saw his cunningly concealed 88 shot up by enemy armour “and I didn’t even get a shot, these rules are so lousy, etc etc”. And then a quite amusing tank battle as Bart’s tiger, at point blank range, with two shots (12 dice in total) failed to scratch an enemy Stuart. Never mind, Filip’s depolyment meant that Bart got some units quickly off table, including the brave Oberst himself who abandoned his men pretty early on.

Meanwhile, Filip’s main force attacking down the centre against the village suffered against the Nebelwerfer (an entire company lost in one turn). But he wasn’t worried, he was doing damage and had tanks infiltrating through the German lines. At this point, Filip played his trump card and attacked with his lovely new dive-bombers, armed with the latest lethal rockets. In BKC, you choose an aiming point for the rockets, roll 3 dice for deviation and we turned a spinner to see the direction of the deviation.

No prizes for deducing that the spinner sent the rockets back towards the US forces and the dice rolled about 18, meaning the centre of the rocket attack was the attacking Yanks. Result, nearly every US unit suffered nine attacks. And Filip proceeded to roll 6..6..6..etc and nearly his entire force was wiped out. And that was effectively the end of that game. An unglorious but very funny victory for the Germans.

How we laughed. And to be fair, so did Filip. I was still chuckling at about 1 in the morning, finally getting into bed.

Sorry, I forgot my camera, but Bart will hopefully publish some photos. A good fun campaign, with the Americans winning two to one, but I think Filip will be burning his new army list.

And Bart will be sanding his stairs.