Final Preparations

Late last week the final thing I had left to finish off for the Early War Tournament was to prepare some objective markers. For fun I decided to do some flat painted objectives rather than scenic ones. For the first marker I found a Japanese WW2 propaganda image, printed off a template to attach to an objective base and used a paint-by-numbers approach to replicate it.

For the second I decided to be a bit more adventurous and used a combination of freehand acrylic and oil painting to reproduce an image featuring almost every Japanese art trope imaginable, with an extra addition of Godzilla in the bottom right corner.

With these complete I was packed and ready for a weekend of gaming!

Flamescon 2014 Early War Tournament

One of my favourite things about Flamescon is that as well as a 2 day Late War tournament there are a number of 1 day events each day, which means that players can pick and choose which events and periods they want to play in each day.

Possibly due to the fact that the first Dust Battlefields tournament was on taking place on the Sunday Saturday's Early War event had a strong field of 16 players and a great selection of different armies being used.

Game 1: Counter Attack Vs Guards Rifle Company

For the opening game of the day I was facing off against Richard's British Guards Rifle Company, consisting of 2 platoons of infantry with mortar and heavy machine gun support, a platoon of Bofors AA guns, towed 2 pounder anti-tank guns and several platoons of universal carriers.

Richard deployed the first objective inside the village on my right flank and I deployed the second out to the left, in between 2 hills which blocked line of sight from the other side of the table. The British forces deployed in cover within the village, with the HMGs right at the edge of the buildings and due to Mobile Reserves the majority of the vehicle mounted units remained in reserve to arrive later on my left flank.

I deployed both my infantry platoons, my HMGs and artillery on the right flank, poised for an aggressive charge into the British lines on the first turn. My tanks, engineers and anti-tank guns were positioned to move off to the left and loop round onto the objective.

However once the game began things didn't go to plan. Thanks to some terrible rolls for night sight distance my machine guns and artillery were unable to pin down the British HMGs, meaning my infantry attack on the village bogged down and was almost entirely wiped out over several turns. We both forgot that units which fire at night can be seen automatically, doh!

Over on the left flank things went exactly to plan. Using the Japanese Envelopment rule to my advantage I rapidly moved my anti-tank guns into cover, positioned to have a clear field of fire on the British reserves when they arrived, while my engineers and tanks shot forward to capture the objective.

After several fire-fights and some assaults the Japanese destroyed or drove off the last remaining British contesting the objective and winning me the game.

Result: 5–2 Victory

Game 2: Pincer vs Japanese Armoured Regiment

The win in game one put me quite high up in the draw so I found myself facing off against a very experienced opponent in Issac, who with his Japanese tank force has been taking podium finishes in Early War events all year.

His army was always going to be a hard match-up, as my force is rather lacking in anti-tank firepower, with a total of 26 medium tanks, with cavalry and infantry support.

To make matters worse I was defending in the Pincer mission, which meant I started with only 3 platoons on the table up against Issac's entire army. I deployed large infantry platoon dug-in in cover to hold one of the objectives with my anti-tank guns and artillery covering the second.

However Issac steamrolled all his tanks at the lightly held objective, annihilating my artillery and then my engineers failed their tank terror test when they arrived from reserve giving him a very quick absolute victory.

Result: 1–6 Loss

Game 3: vs Polish Kawalerii Zmotoryzowanej

The third and final game of the day was against Greg's Polish infantry horde, with a swarm of infantry and anti-tank gun sections totalling 10 platoons! This game was tricky as we both had to make decisions and movements very quickly to avoid running out of time, simply because of the sheer number of infantry units on the table.

For this game I was planning to play relatively defensively and hope to do enough damage to the Poles as they advanced to thin out their numbers and then counter-attack. However I was put on the back-foot almost immediately as Greg had an outflanking platoon of veteran infantry which appeared behind my lines within striking distance of an objective.

In order to counter this threat I had to commit all my forces in the center of the table to drive them off and hold onto the objective, while on the right I had one Hohei platoon pushing forward into assault range. This platoon ending up running amok for 4 turns, killing an infantry platoon, anti-tank gun platoon and a mortar section all in assault before finally dying to massed machine-gun fire when dawn broke.

Back on the left flank several turns of furious firefights drove off the Poles with the depleted remnants of my infantry attempting to chase them down to force a company morale test.

Unfortunately for me I couldn't quite destroy the last platoon on that flank and Greg passed his platoon morale test with his commander's reroll and we timed out at the end of the 7th turn.

Result: 3–3 Draw

Final Result: 10th Place

Overall I was pretty happy with my results and how my list performed. I did have a little luck in that I only faced off against an armoured list once as that was always going to be my hardest match up. The Japanese special rules take some getting used to, but having the ability to move rapidly at night and through rough terrain is fantastic. Plus their morale and assault rules were a lot of fun as well, especially assaults with sword teams!

As I'm still pretty new to Flames of War I did make a lot of mistakes though, and forgetting key rules a number of times definitely hampered things in some games. Probably the biggest mistake I made was in positioning my objective in the second game, because if I had placed it right at the back of my deployment zone it would have been too far back for my opponent to get to. That would have allowed my forces to dig-in on the other objective and made the game a lot more interesting.

For the full results of the weekends Flames of War events check out the Flames of War website