Continuing my Great War day with nephew, we moved on to this scenario. Tom took the Germans to start with, so my choice of Special for the French was to bolster my mortar unit.
Tom used "Infantry Assault" cards to attack in the centre initially, quickly getting a foothold in the French trenches. With the French units spread around, I couldn't counter-attack in any strength.
My machine-gun in the bunker took out a couple of German units, but couldn't stop Tom's next attack on my left, taking said bunker. I'd played a couple of 'Recon 1' cards that kept the scores level at 5:5, but Tom got the next medal to win 6:5.
Switching sides, Tom's choice of Special personnel was the extra figure for the machine-gun unit in the bunker.
My starting hand included a "Whistles & Bugle Calls" card. This says "...issue an order to a group of battlefield units in adjacent, linked and contiguous hexes". Hmm, how big is a group? All the German units are in adjacent, linked and contiguous hexes... Of course, the result of this was to leave most of the German forces standing in no man's land, which would have been catastrophic if the first French trench had been more fully defended.
My next trick was to use a "Short Supply" Combat card to remove the souped-up French machine gun from the bunker so that I could just walk in. Tom was not happy as German troops swarmed into the French trenches.
Fighting in the tranches went back and forth, but I was able to swap out damaged units for full strength ones. That kept Tom down to two medals as I reached six for the win.
It's an entertaining scenario, though I think the odds are with the Germans. They certainly won both times in our case and the aggregate score was 11:8 to me. (Full report - with photos - on BGG:
boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/109660
)
