With the ever-so-rare time to myself and no where to go over the holiday, I spent the new year breaking in my copy of Warfighter WWII (the Pacific edition), and wow did it not go over well. I played two games and lost them both. The first was a flat-out loss, but I could have won the second. I was too exhausted to slug-out the last eight turns or so of my second game though, so I through in the towel when I was looking over the field before me.
Game 1: A Swamp too Far
For the first game, I ended up drawing the still waters mission card, depicting what looks like jungle waters or someplace rather wet. Fittingly, I drew a swamp location as my first location card, and I never really made it out of the swamp. Mired from the start, my squad desperately fought to avoid being overrun while battling the feverous elements surrounding them. If memory serves, I (meaning me and my boys, aka the five poorly equipped dudes I chose to send into battle under-armed) spent the first five to eight turns trying to get out of the swamp. With an 8+ fever rate, almost every soldier I fielded was suffering from environmental effects every turn, severely undercutting their fighting ability AND their ability to move out of the location.
One of the high points of the first game was securing naval fire support against the jungle location that bordered the swamp my squad was in. This was just after placing the jungle location (so it was stacked with a full set of fresh hostiles). An officer, and NCO, and another unit (which I have since forgotten) outright perished under the naval fire, and the remainder were pinned.
Just as I was about to leave the swamp, and enter the adjacent jungle, I lost my first soldier to a kamikaze attack. Most of my men were out of actions, having expended most of their effort in the elimination of the last hostile in the swamp. Only so they thought, a kamikaze soldier appeared in the hostile reinforcement phase and charged one of my most vulnerable squad members. Charging unchallenged, he detonated the device, killing both himself and my fifth squad member.
Then, to make things worse, a legendary sniper appeared in the jungle location, almost doubling the entry cost. It cost my men a fortune (in effort) to enter the jungle location, and only two were able to do so at that. In the following turn, the sniper killed what second squad member in the swamp location. I successfully downed the sniper in the subsequent turn, but my discovery of a village in the next location stacked with machine gun units and a harassing force outright destroyed not only my men's morale but my own, so I through in the towel.
There were simply too many locations and too few turns left for me to meet my objective.
Game Two: Stuck on the Beach
The second game fared much better, but I ultimately spent too much time on the initial beachhead trying to clear it. I remember less about this game (since I didn't have anyone absolutely decimated by a kamikaze soldier in the middle of a swamp ... which was honestly heart breaking) but I do recall that it was just too much of a grind. I made it off the beach and rather quickly down a muddy slope, but I got stuck again in a jungle location, all the while under the eye of an enemy mortar team away on the far ridge -- my designated objective. I could have made it if I were ambitious, and were confident of making better environment rolls, but I counted the locations remaining in my path, all of which were susceptible to fire from the ridge. If I'd brought more long-range weapons I would have been more optimistic, but I was kitted for a fight on the beach, not a cross-map range contest, so I threw in the towel on this one too.
Neither game was disappointing though, and I look forward to playing again soon.
Til then:
Dan Verssen - 2
Me - 0