Battle at the North Pole

Today about eight members of the South Florida Miniatures Gamers played in another game DMed by "Oriskany Jim" Johnson of Sitrep Podcast. I'd gotten up early for a Sunday, was browsing Youtube, and spotted this "prep" video for the game:

("Whoops, forgot about this one...")

I hastily decamped to Das Krieg Haus and made it in time for deployment.

As usual, Jim provided a fantastic table of scratchbuilt terrain to play on:

    

If it's not obvious yet, this is Santa's workshop. Among the defenders:

I got the Toys For Tots squad led by a USMC bear, and Santa himself - the only flying model on the board. Other units included reindeer, elves, snowmen, polar bears, and a displaced yeti named Colonel Bumble.

Our opponents?

I've never played HALO, but that's a lotta guys.

Gun emplacements ...

... and Warthog vehicles were particularly intimidating.

Some of the good guys' deployment:

And those on the side of the Grinch:

Eep!

Justin the Mammoth leads (nonflying) reindeer.

Most important, AI holographic objectives. Take these out
and the defenders get bonuses to their rolls.

Table as a whole. HALO's objective is the lit-up Christmas tree.
If they have anyone touching it for an entire turn, they win.

The rules are very basic, and would work well for a snowball fight (that's presumably what the otherwise unarmed defenders were throwing anyway). I need to try this before I leave my branch (moving to a different one after Christmas); one of my coworkers has plenty of Christmas critters and decorations.

Left out is cover - +1 to the roll - and open and difficult terrain
movements are reversed. There are no morale rules.

HALO won initiative, and dropped a hurricane of fire on us. The reindeer mostly became venison, but the polar bears won so many of the rolloffs that we started calling them the Iron Bear Brigade. Justin the Wooly Mammoth, one of our commanders, was gone too. I was nervous about losing Santa, our fastest and most powerful piece, and kept him out of view.

"How do deer throw snowballs?"
"Chernobyl."

In Turn Two, we managed to knock out one of the powerful Warthogs, and I took the risk of flying high, where Santa could see everyone, but everyone could see Santa. Luckily, he took out one of the holograms, while a sweeping movement by the elves got the other. Next turn, Santa took a wound and hastily dropped back down.

Snowmen and bears hold the line.

The Yeti fearlessly leads on the right.

I selected thematic ice-blue dice for my units.

Brisk firefight ice fight on the right.

High move distance relative to the table meant double envelopment could be a thing. Unfortunately, ours left the primary objective unguarded, and ten HALO troopers descended upon it in triumph.

A bitter fight in bitter cold.

Santa's boys raced back and knocked out all the blue HALO unit, narrowly avoiding a knockout loss of the game. But a sniper took out Santa.

He's a magical elf. He'll recover
in time for next year, right?

At this point, the tree was defended; HALO's center thrust was gone, but they had defeated everything on our left; and HALO's right was going down to defeat under the overall leadership of the Yeti. My Marine bear picked off the sniper ("Zero Dark Thirty," was my inappropriate quip) and the game ended with an unbroken, if decimated, line of snowmen and bears between what remained of HALO green team and the tree.

If HALO meant High Altitude Low Opening, these guys
have just reenacted Arnhem.

A missile launcher team hides out of view...

... as very cute bears look on from a lovely scratchbuilt bridge.

So the North Pole is safe in the end, but HALO has a moral victory having taken out Santa. Who will deliver the toys now?

It belatedly occurs to me that there should have been severe range penalties on all sides for fighting in the dark. Since it's December above the Arctic Circle.

A fun and diverting game, in which I actually managed to learn the rules! Though, true to form, I kept asking the GM questions anyway. "Can we go faster sliding on the ice?" "Can we cause a snow avalanche?"

Next week, the annual Regatta!