It's been a while, so I dug out Warfighter instead of working on the terrain I need for the next Rangers of Shadow Deep mission. I regret nothing! I picked the French as the friendlies and the African warlord hostiles. This is still my favourite pack because it has the "save the elephants" mission. I also quite enjoy the extra challenge of the hot environment, which can slow you down.
The commander had ordered Sergeant Capron to take his fire team and clear out the poachers from the area. Grabbing Corporal Durand, and Privates Swift and Bertrand, he proceeded to brief them. The enemy was massing in the area, so they would have a tought fight of it. Worse yet, they had a ways to go, so they would have to pack light. Loading up for close combat, the fire team headed out.
The mission is close combat, which means that all the hostiles will duck up in the same location as the foremost soldier. Many hostiles have other rules for placement, such as being placed in the objective location or behind the troops or some variant thereof, but this mission means getting up close and personal with the hostiles from the second you start the mission. The objective for this scenario is to clear the objective location of all hostiles. That means it is going to get messy.
The fire team was barely out of the gates of the base before hostiles showed up. Half a dozen gunmen leapt out of concealment but the team's superior training and firepower told. Despite being outnumbered, the hostile gunmen and RPG crews were soon suppressed and then killed by a combination of rifle fire and thrown grenades.
Although they would normally have been placed in the grassy fields location that was the first area to move through, because of the mission conditions, all the hostiles were placed in the mission card with the fire team the second I placed the first location. That was scary.
As the team advanced across the grassy fields and pastures of a nearby village, they were assaulted once more by hordes of gunmen. Once more they laid down as much fire as they could before moving into the village, where yet more gunmen and machine-gun teams waited to ambush them. The team were running short on grenades now, and the heat was taking its toll and slowing them down, but their objective was in sight. They only had to cross the village's farmland, ford a river and they would be there. The water of the river looked enticing at this distance as the drained their canteens and prepared to advance.
Once more, the hostiles threw themselves out of cover and tried to slaughter the team. Capron took a bullet in the shoulder, but shook it off.
"It's just a flesh wound," he announced. The others could see that it was slowing him down though.
The team pushed on to the river. It looks quiet but appearances can be desceptive. More hostiles emerged and rained firepower down on the team. Suddenly, an unseen ambusher leapt out and fired a burst at Bertrand. The plucky private died in the middle of the river. The others cut the ambusher down in a hail of lead and emerged on the objective.
An IED went off startling them all. Fortunately no one was hurt and Capron was able to lead the team round some very hungry-looking hippos into the objective where a group of villagers were gathered, drinking sweet tea, singing and arranging flowers. Apart from the singing and the disgruntled murmuring of the locals, there was no other sound, and there were no hostiles either.
Capron reported the objective clear and led his team back to base.
Well, that was a first. It was a hard fight all the way to the objective and then the objective points requirement was met by drawing three event cards and no hostiles. The IED suppressed my troops, I spent experience points to avoid the hungry hippos, and the local meeting did not require me to do anything because I was in the final location I needed to move into and had plenty of time. That meant I just advanced the timer and the mission was over. I have no idea why the local meeting was so heavily guarded or even if the two things were connected, but it made an interesting finish to the game.
In subsequent missions, Capron and his team took out a poacher stronghold, used a dust storm to sneak up on some poachers and drive them off from the elephants they were hunting, and defended a local village against hostiles. As the team was retreating from the village they had defended, the poachers massed in strength and pursued them. It was a hard fought battle even with the armoured support that had turned up. Unfortunately, Capron died within sight of the base gates, the bodies of his team strung out along the route back from the huts.
I played half a dozen more missions with the same two player soldiers and mostly the same squad soldiers after the mission written up here. All went well until the escape mission where the team had the misfortune of suddenly discovering that the hostiles had set up two heavy machine-gun nests outside their objective. Between that and the huge number of reinforcements that appeared, they were overwhelmed and Capron was cut down one card away from his objective. It was a TPK. A sad end to a good series of games and my worst result yet in this game. On the other hand, if I won every time the game would get boring. I guess I can always run a rescue mission to free Capron, who, it unexpectedly turns out, was only wounded and was captured by the poachers.
I really do like how Warfighter generates interesting narratives through the play of the cards. Of course, I try to help it along by playing thematically appropriate locations too, rather than just looking at which locations offer the best advantage for me, but the random draws add an extra dimension to the stories that my soldiers will tell afterwards. Cracking good stuff that makes me feel like I am a movie action hero for a wee while!
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