Ambush! Mission 3: A Cold Morning in Belgium

Just David and James this week, so a return to the classic Avalon Hill map-and-counters solitaire game Ambush!  After October's disastrous Mission 4, we agreed to treat that as an "exercise" particularly as we should have been playing Mission 3 anyway.

Your squad, on garrison duty in a quiet sector of the front, is bivouacked in a small village just east of a running river.  On this misty, snowy morning, your men have been ordered to patrol nearby bombed out buildings to check for German scouts.

 We deployed in three buildings on the eastern edge of the town (I think the mission designers expected us to deploy someone in the church building in the west - it was the highest point but with the mist limiting visibility to six hexes, we thought it was better to cluster together).

This mission doesn't have activation checks and the mission proceeds by random events and paragraph checks.  After a single artillery strike near us, we then heard some rumbling as we explored the bombed out buildings, and a Panzer IV arrived in the north-east of the map, along with a group of three Panzergrenadiers, three Volksgrenadiers in the east, and three veteran infantry in the south-west.

David's half of the squad had limited cover crouching in the bush and Private E was killed by the full force of the Panzer's bow machine gun.  The rest of the men ran to the same hex as the Volksgrenadiers to engage them at close quarters with the significant side benefit of preventing the Panzer on firing on them, as the Germans will not fire into a hex containing their own men.

The Panzer trundled on, blew up our parked Jeep and eventually trundled off the map.  The game was slow to play with so many Germans activated at the same time but we steadily reduced their numbers.  Eventually a US runner appeared to tell us the obvious - Germans were still in the area and we should get out.  But this at least then gave us a way to attain all the Victory Points needed for a victory - successfully leave the map by the northern edge, and blow the road and rail bridges as you go.

Having taken out all the Germans, another group were activated on the eastern edge of the map, so we decided (also looking at the clock approaching midnight!) to ignore them and the bridges, and just exfil.

We acquired 7 VPs for searching the bombed out buildings, 12 for activated Germans (acquired regardless of whether you incapacitate or merely evade them), 1 for capturing a veteran NCO, 16 for exiting our 7 surviving squad members and the runner, and -2 for the loss of Private E.  A grand total of 34 points, comfortably exceeding the 25 needed despite our ignoring the bridge objectives.

With 32 combat points received for successfully completing the mission, we can hopefully improve some of the squad's stats and improve their chances of completing Mission 4 for real next time.

 

Hit Z Road - 5 February 2020

One of James' new games... and it's a corker.  The artwork is next level - the conceit of the game is that it has been devised by a child who survived the zombie apocalypse and they've had to adapt what is to hand to make the game.  So the box is amended and tatty, the resource counters are bottle tops, player markers are things found in wallets (e.g. credit card, loyalty card) and the cards are mostl playing cards.  And best of all, some of the cards and counters are adapted from real world games, most of which we own, like 7 Wonders, Splendour, Ticket To Ride and Dixit.

And fortunately, the gameplay lives up to the production values (so finally, a zombie game that even Kieron might play...?).  There's a bidding mechanism so players interact to choose the best routes as they travel from coast to coast with the zombies in hot pursuit.  And there's dice rolling as your survivors battle it out with the groups of zombies who they regularly encounter.  Which brings the double joy of managing to survive for another round by some lucky rolls, and sniggering whilst your competitors group of survivors are unexpectedly decimated.

There was a bit of an issue with the resource runaway leader - if you've got most resources, it's easier to win the bidding, and then take the route that gives you the most resources back.  It would be interesting to see how much that is the case next play, now we have a feel for the distribution of resources and zombies throughout the game rounds.  But we also found a good variant on BGG where the second of the two cards in each route is hidden - which rather fits the theme well: you might be able to see down the road but not round the corner.

James was first to run light on resources and despite a fiery death for a horde from his molotov cocktail, his last survivor succumbed in the sixth (of eight) rounds.  Andy and David were both taken out in the seventh round - giving the Stuart the automatic win without needing to count the victory points we had attained.  Stuart did a lot of fleeing rather than fighting so actually had a lower number of victory points.  But he survived, which is more to the point.  Looking forward to playing this again.