Somewhere in Jæren, Norway 1940 (Solitaire Advanced Squad Leader)

 I've been out and about a lot lately since I got the summer tyres back on my bike and the weather has become better. Looking around for destinations to visit, I picked out a few coastal fortifications in the area as being accessible navigation points. These were built after the Germans had invaded in April 1940, although many were then taken over by the Norwegian military after the Second World War. Of course, it also helps that there is a lot of Migration Period and Viking Age archaeology visible here and that I can combine my visits to the bunkers with visits to runestones and grave mounds.

Exploring the bunkers and the fact that it is Liberation Day as I start to write this blog post inspired me to dig out Advanced Squad Leader to play again. I knew it would involve a lot of reading of rules, but I have all weekend, and shall hopefully finish the game and post this blog before the end of the weekend. If I do not, well, never mind. I tried!

The Bunkers

Bø coastal fort is easy to access down a path and across a field. You can go inside and the area is also a nature reserve. There's a lot more to it than the pictures below.

The main part of the bunker complex

Fairly sure this says "Last one out switch the lights off."
(It actually says "In case of danger of gas, shut the doors and loopholes")

The view from the inside

Løndshaug is 22.5m in diameter and 4m high

There were several more gravemounds like the one above at Børaunen, but the Germans built a bunker complex on them! This is actually something we see a lot of here, where they used the gravemounds as the basis for artillery and anti-aircraft positions but just digging into the top of them.

Vigdel fort is another complex that is easily visited, although beware of the wind. Even on a nice day, it will be blowing a howling gale. Here are a few pics of parts of it. Most of the underground tunnels are locked up and not accessible unfortunately.

And if you tire of the coastal fort, N 244 Helland II is just a couple of kilometres down the road. The runes apparently read 'Skarði erected this stone in memory of Bjalfi(?), his son, a very good man' (× skarþi : risti : stin : þana : iftir :: biafa : sun : sin : harþa : kuþan : man :). I could only read a few of the runes, so I must trust the runologists here. What is interesting is that the stone fell over at one point and was re-erected the wrong way up. It now stands the right way up and has been supported so that it will not fall over easily again.

N 244 Helland II

The Scenario

Near a village in Jæren, Norway, Norwegian soldiers are on patrol.

It has to be Jæren because I rolled for the conditions and got no snow and lots of wind. It is always windy in Jæren. When it is not windy there, it is very windy indeed instead.

Looking at SASL, I decided it would be fun to play a patrol scenario. Both sides enter on roads and march towards each other until the front elements make contact. Then the scenario proper begins. The Norwegian troops marched through the village. Forward elements spotted Germans advancing towards them, just as the Norwegians were about to exit the village.

The situation after the initial march on

Both sides scattered off the road as fast as they could. In the initial exchange of fire, two German units broke and ran for cover. The Norwegian half-squad panicked in the middle of the road instead of leaping into cover like the rest of their company.

The situation at the end of Turn 1

As the two forces closed on each other, the Norwegians gave good, disciplined fire and the Germans, taken by surprise, broke and sought cover.

It looked like things were going to go the Norwegians' way, but a new company of German infantry arrived from the south. However, this was countered by a mixed company of infantry and armour arriving from the north. Who knew that the French had armour this far south in Norway?

With the French armour arriving, the German commander called in the artillery. Two stonks were sighted in on the Norwegians, but one was immediately cancelled when the commander realised that it was going to his prisoners the Norwegians had taken. Over on the left flank, a lone German squad tried to sneak through, but Colonel Eliassen led his own squad into the fray and a desperate melee ensued. However, fully half the first Norwegian company was paralysed by panic, a situation that would continue as they became flustered by the increasing German assaults.

The second artillery stonk was sighted in and eventually landed in the right spot, leaving Norwegian troops fleeing as fast as they could for cover.

As the Germans sought to extricate themselves from the fighting in the forest, their reinforcements were advancing on the hill, unaware that the lone squad they had seen off was now being reinforced by a full company. In the confusion of battle, the Norwegians were able to take several officers prisoner, and the French armour began a drive into the German rear. Although Norwegian casualties were mounting, there was still a chance that they could hold the village and beat back the German forces.

With artillery raining down around them, about half the Norwegians took cover and refused to stick their heads out. Meanwhile, the rest were advancing on and attacking the German reinforcements on their left flank, driving them back. In the forest, the German leader bravely worked to rally his troops, while a lone half-squad faced off against the French tanks and immobilised one of them with an anti-tank rifle. The tank crew heroically manned the gun and co-ax machine gun in the face of a close assault by a German squad. The squad threw grenades and did their best to close properly, but the French hled them off.

Norewgian infantry rushed to aid the tank crew and a fierce melee developed in which neither side could quite get the upper hand. On the left flank, the Norwegian counterattack was bearing fruit as increasing numbers of Germans surrendered to them. At this point, the German guns fell silent. There was too high a chance of dropping 150mm artillery on their own troops.

Surrounding the last of the Germans on the left flank, the Norwegians marched as fast as they could herd their prisoners towards the fighting in the forest. In the meantime, the melee around the tank had ended with the arrival of fresh Norwegian troops, who aided their beleaguered allies and cut down the attacking Germans.

The fighting died down and the Norwegian infantry rounded up the last of the German soldiers. Their village had been blasted by artillery, but they had given the invaders a bloody nose. They would be able to drink their beer and eat their komle with their heads held high tonight.

After thoughts

So, it took me three days to work through 11 turns. I did not play constantly, but it did progress slowly for the first half of the game, because I had to keep looking up the rules. I do not play Advanced Squad Leader often enough, and it shows in how much I need to check up as I play. Still, it was a good game and the good guys won.

I sometimes think too hard about the real people that lay behind our cardboard counters. It's hard not to when I pass the graves from Operation Freshman most days on my way to work, or when I see the grave of Solveig Bergslien near them, or any of the other war graves in the cemetery by my house. It makes me wonder about the ethics of playing wargames when the events may be fictional but there is a reality and real people's lives behind that fictional element. The fact that this country was occupied territory for five years and that there are memorials and reminders everywhere makes it all too real. I am not sure how to square that with playing games based around those events. Of course, it should be said that I overthink everything.

All that said, I still feel I should play more often. I enjoy the game, and there is definitely a cinematic element to it that belies the reality of the Second World War. If only the threshold for digging the game out were lower! The set-up is reasonably easy once all the counters are organised properly and you have a system for accessing them, but they still take up a fair bit of table space, and for SASL in particular, you have a whole bunch of charts. Then there is the rulebook that is a large folder. It really needs a lectern beside your seat for ease of access! Having to shuffle things around constantly slows game play down and makes it all harder. Clearly I need a dedicated ASL room with masses of ASL paraphernalia to ease set-up and game play. I wonder what my wife would say if I bought a 65" TV (or bigger) to use as a screen for digital versions of the charts...

RAF: The Battle of Britain 1940 (Decision Games)

 September 6 1940

A hectic day with half a dozen raids, mostly focused on John's gaming shed near Canterbury. The Luftwaffe has been gunning for that shed since the start of their attempt to grind the RAF into the ground and pave the way for Operation Sealion. It was a good day for the RAF. Losses were low and enemy losses were high. And the shed was still standing despite a month of attempts to bomb it.

September 7 1940

My campaign was over. It had been hard fought, especially in the beginning, but the might of the Luftwaffe had been thrown back by the heroic pilots of Fighter Command just a few days after the Luftwaffe terror campaign had begun. In this version of reality, there was no Blitz. London was never even attacked. Kent was the real focus of the Luftwaffe's ire. I've no idea why I drew so many target cards for Kent, unless it really all was about the gaming shed after all.

I used to own the original version of this game many years ago, about the time it first came out. I played it a bit but never finished the whole campaign, and can only assume that I sold it somewhere along the way, although it is possible my mother's dog ate it, like it did to my copy of Hornet Leader. With the new version of the game in hand, and more time for gaming, I sat down a week ago to first learn the rules and then to play the campaign from the perspective of Fighter Command.

The rules were easy to follow, and it was simple to set the game up and learn by following the sequence of play. I then set up again to try the shorter campaign covering the first four raid days of the campaign (days on which raids happened). Things were looking bad after just those few raids but not hopeless, so I decided to continue the full campaign. As I gained experience with the game, things started getting better. I stopped trying to stop every raid, and started focusing on those where I thought I might do most damage. The Luftwaffe started getting worn down and my new approach paid dividends in fewer of my own planes getting shot down. Suddenly, the two factors led to a snowballing of victory points and on September 6th 1940, I reached the critical victory point score. I had won the game. This took me about a week and ten raid days.

The game is quite repetitive in that you draw a target card and roll to see whether this is a real raid, a minor raid or a major raid. Then you dice to see what warning you get of the raid and how accurate that warning is. The point at which you deploy your fighters and find out what the raid consists of depends upon what level of warning you get. Which of your fighters you can deploy depends upon how early the warning is. It is possible to get no warning, where only fighters actually on patrol on the raid's flight path can deploy against it, to very early warning so you can call in the fighters from all the surrounding airfields.

With both fighters deployed and the raiding aircraft identified, you have to fight your way through the fighter screen before you can attack the bombers. There are random raid events along the way and much of the narrative is driven by card draws for events on the approach, at the target and at the end of each day. With the raid outcome determined for good or ill, you start all over again with the same process, only this time some or all of your pilots could be refuelling and rearming their planes and unable to respond. It is also possible to have multiple raids happening at the same time, either as follow-up raids or in different areas. I think my record in this campaign was four follow-up raids on John's gaming shed, or RAF Hornchurch as the cards called it. By the end of all this action in the one place, I had no fighters left able to respond from any of the surrounding areas and the bombs were falling thick and fast around the shed.

I've seen some complain about the sheer repetitiveness of the game but I found that it was not an issue. I played a raid day or two every night and was soon looking forward to returning to the table and seeing what would happen next. The relentness repetitiveness of the raids was what built the tension in the game as I tried to work out where the next attack would be and which fighters I needed to send up on patrol. If I sent the wrong ones up now, they would not be available in an hour's time if there were a raid over their sector then instead. Likewise, do I send supporting fighters from a neighbouring sector, or will I need them for the next raid? It's very much a resource and risk management game, and I enjoyed it a lot.

I also like that the new edition allows you to play as the Luftwaffe and to play it as a two-player game. I don't particularly have any desire to play the Luftwaffe in this, having grown up thrilling to the sound of Spitfires and Hurricanes at air shows and on a diet of movies like The Battle of Britain and Angels One Five, but I do like having the option. The two-player option offers an interesting challenge too, because a human player is unlikely to manage resources in the same way as the game's AI.

Heroes of Telemark (Decision Games)

I remember watching The Heroes of Telemark on the TV many years ago. It wasn't a movie that really stayed with me, just another in a long line of WW2 movies that formed a large part of my diet as a child. Still, I remembered it enough that I was reminded of it in 2020 when I moved to Stavanger. It turned out that my flat would be next to the graveyard where the dead from Operation Freshman were buried. This made me reflect on the movie and on the reality of this period, although I don't have any great insights to offer. It's just a purely personal reflection on the morality of wargaming generally, my relationship to the past, and my reasons for not usually gaming anything more recent than WW2 these days. If you want more depth and discussion of these topics, I recommend the Polemarch blog instead. The discussions about the morality and philosophy of wargaming there are very interesting.

Eiganes cemetery in Stavanger is home to more than just the members of Operation Freshman. Solveig Bergslien, a member of the Norwegian resistance who died in a Gestapo cell, has her grave here, and there are the graves of Soviet soldiers who died in Rogaland, as well as the Norwegian war dead. Visiting the cemetery really does make you think, but that's not the point of this post.

I picked up Decision Games' Heroes of Telemark, Commando Raids in Norway, 1942-43 recently as part of my quest for more solitaire wargames. I felt a bit weird about it because of my proximity to the dead from one of the raids depicted in the game, but pushed past that and tried it out. It's an interesting game with only four pages of core rules and two of game-specific rules. Knowing the core rules makes other games in this series more accessible because you only need to take on board the game specific rules then.

The game itself has a small footprint (about A3 but actually one of those funny American paper sizes). This makes it ideal for the space-challenged. The map depicts Telemark (if I have done it right, this link should show you the map area on Google Maps), where the heavy water plant was.

The game offers four scenarios that can be played in turn: Operations Grouse, Freshman, Gunnerside and Tinnsjo. Played in order, these set up the narrative of the WW2 operations, but they can also be played in a random order if you just want a slightly different campaign. Success in one operation will increase your chance of encountering Germans in later operations, so the difficulty of each game ramps up through the campaign. You can replay operations if you lose them, but if you lose two operations, the campaign is over and you have failed.

Game length is determined by the number of event cards in a deck. This number is set by the scenario but can go up or down as you encounter and defeat or lose to German patrols. You draw one card each turn and the game is over when the last card is drawn.

Each scenario also gives you recruit points to buy troops and gear. These start in Britain and arrive on the map either by glider landing or parachute according to what type of troops they are. Then you have to move to the various objectives and reveal them. Once revealed, you can capture some of them, destroy others, or find that you have been ambushed and must fight. Operation Grouse requires you to scout the objectives. The other operations are about capturing plutonium or destroying heavy water plants and resources.

In my first game, my entire force was wiped out by an encounter with a massive German patrol. I then moved on to the campaign, having worked out the rules. I succeeded easily in Operation Grouse, encountering little resistance and dodging an ambush by scouting an objective from an adjacent space with my Commandos. Unfortunately, I lost most of my troops to an enemy encounter in Operation Freshman but still managed to win the operation. My engineers all died when my gliders crashed in Operation Gunnerside; they did not even make it onto the map, in a repeat of the historical Operation Freshman. My second try at this operation was a success and I moved on to Operation Tinnsjo, which I lost because of massive hostile activity, and thus I lost the campaign.

Despite my being a bit weirded out by being too close to elements of this game's subject matter, this is an interesting game. It is very random in that your encounters with the Germans can be overwhelming if you roll high for the number of Germans present or they can be a walkover if you roll low. The random distribution of your base and the objectives will also affect how easy or difficult your game is.  However, this just means that you need to manage your risks as best you can and the meaningful choices in the game are made around that risk management, while the pressure to push your luck is provided by drawing the event cards and counting down to the end of the game. The combination of these elements and the short playing time for each operation make the game highly replayable, although I would not want to play it exclusively.

For me, it is a good filler game for when I don't want to, or don't have the time to, sit down for a couple of hours with something meatier. The main down side of this game is that I found the rules a little messy. Despite being short, or perhaps because of that, it took me a little while to piece together how to play.

I have two more of Decision Games' solitaire games: Vikings: Scourge of the North and Border War: Angola Raiders. I expect more of the same from each of these, and look forward to trying them out in the future.

March Objective Achieved!

My plan for March was to get a small WW2 skirmish force painted. I have painted a platoon of late-war British infantry with a little extra support. I already had a Sherman and a Stuart painted from before so the lads can have a bit of armoured support. After taking the photos it occurred to me that I had not painted any badges onto the troops. I need to do a bit of research so that they can have proper unit identification and greater esprit de corps, but they are perfectly usable as is. Click the pics as usual for larger images.

The whole platoon

Command section including additional support from battalion (Vickers HMG, Sniper and a PIAT)

1 Section (9 men plus Bren)

2 section (organised as 1 section)

3 section (organised as 1 section)

 So, that's the late war troops ready for action. We did manage to get a couple of small USEME games played this month. I took no photos in the first one, which is probably just as well because it was an ignominious defeat for me, but I managed some photos of the second game and will post a report later.

Figures:
QRF
Peter Pig
Of the two, I prefer the sculpts of the Peter Pig figures, but the QRF figures add extra poses for variety.