Outskirts of Kharkiv

 I participated today in a game depicting part of the 4th Battle of Kharkov in August 1943. This was a Soviet offensive, but the scenario was a German counterattack. It was run by Mark, one of the "satellite" members of South Florida Miniature Gamers who came from a county and a half away to show off his own 1:1 skirmish rules. They are 15mm, roughly company scale, and work down to light-and-serious wounds and damage to guns or engines on vehicles. The rules are named Tactical Combat, fit on a single page and have been worked on and played at conventions for decades. They seem suitable for just about anything in the 20th century, though trench warfare would be more complex at 1:1.

Scenario

We had four players, though as we played it became clear that it could accommodate six. Luckily we also had the writer to GM; if you've read much of this blog you know rules make my eyes glaze over, so it helps to have someone tell me what to roll! That said, it was not that difficult; like The Sword and the Flame, shooting is roll-under on a D20. I was getting the hang of it by the end.

Basically, the Soviets (on which side I played) held a factory complex and, behind it, a pretty village of Flames of War buildings. The largest residence and the six rooms of the factory were the objectives - whoever held four of these after ten turns would win.

The Russians started with a couple platoons of infantry and two guns (a 57mm AT gun and a short-barreled 76mm howitzer). The Germans had plenty of infantry to start. Both sides had some anti-tank materiel, mostly AT rifles on my side and a demolition platoon for the Germans. My partner took the infantry up front, while I held the back line and handled guns and armor.

6x6 table from the Soviet side, with village in front,
and factory in center. Vehicles arrived on the roads.

Typical tokens and unit cards. Movement is simultaneous,
so we would place green markers for movement and purple for
reaction (overwatch, basically, though this also denoted firing
at the start of turn before anything else happened). Movement is
in cm, while the armor facings cross-reference with firepower.

Some of the Red Army before deployment.

Side view of the field.

We placed nearly all our starting infantry in the first row of factories, excepting a couple AT Rifle teams in useful spots for when the German vehicles turned up. I placed the AT gun in the "v" of the fence to the village right, pointing down the road, with the 76mm on the opposite side in a railway building. (We could hide units until they fired, at which point we either tilted the roofs or removed them entirely).

Infantry in the factory.

Left side of table (from Russian perspective).

German machine-gun team facing the factory.

The Germans brought in a few StuGs on their right - the wrong side for my 57 to shoot at them, though the 76mm exchanged fire for a few turns until it was knocked out. Russian AT teams firing from doorways did hurt them a bit, though - unable to destroy them, but able to disable their guns. These turned out to be the earliest mak of StuG, with no machine-gun mounts, which meant without their hull armament they were out of the game. But then the rest of the German armor turned up.

All we had at this stage to challenge them was a few SU-76s:

And a few tiny T-70 light tanks with ingeniously-cut tank-rider bases:

As an example of the exhaustive pluses-and-minuses
to shooting rolls, these had negatives for one-man turrets.

This lovely Henschel HS129 ...

...had an equally lovely target in my road-bound guns.
Luckily he had to roll scatter for his line of flight
and it only covered one vehicle, though it also blew up
that wooden building to the left.

My partner, more intelligently,
went off-road with the T-70s.
You can also see where I positioned the
57mm, which will be relevant shortly.

Three T-34s with tank riders also turned up.
Nice shot of the objective mansion and its courtyard.

Then two Tigers turned up in the sights of the 76mm and started taking apart the T70s. My 57mm crew earned Heroes of the Soviet Union by killing both Tigers in three turns and, a couple turns later, disabled a Panzer III on the other side of the building they'd been sheltering by.

I also had a machine-gun crew in the top-story of the mansion, and shot up one of the German infantry units in their only visible target - a second-story ruin on the far side of the factory. They shot back, but I had better cover.

Meanwhile, the six tank-borne infantry teams were racing to reinforce the factory while my SU-76s got their butts kicked trying to challenge full-fledged Panzers. One of which turned out to be a Flammpanzer which methodically destroyed the factory while German pioneers assaulted it with demolition charges.

Vicious combat in the factory. Red pom-poms denote
structural damage to the buildings. Like vehicles, they could
take progressive damage or (on a low-enough damage
roll) fail entirely.

After nine turns, the Red Army still held the mansion and (barely) two of the factory sections, while the Fascists held the other four. Their infantry was more numerous than ours (who had been shot up on their way in), and my partner and I felt there was no point in trying to take another room against twice our number of better-equipped defenders. Even manhandling the 57mm gun to a position where it could fire on the Panzers didn't help, as my firing dice failed me. So the game ended a German victory.

But it remained a good test of the rules, because it was touch-and-go much of the way. Our tactics weren't that bad (except where I'd stuck my machine gun in what turned out to be a blind spot). My dice-rolling on the left was particularly bad, and with average rolls I might have taken out half the opposing panzers and evened the odds for the T-34s. Strangely, we rolled at least four 1s for hits, (good) but consistently rolled high for penetration (bad) - once I had four out of five dice with 17s and 18s!

So it still could have gone either way, and we weren't disappointed with the game at all. It was quite enjoyable, and clearly a well-tested work of love for its writer. I'd be happy to play it again - though given current events, perhaps a different period!