AAR - Disposable Heroes

Another game of Disposable Heroes on Saturday night taught me a lot about playing the German.  First thing is that regardless of how good their stats look on paper you do not want to split up your squads.  The fact that each team has it's own MG-34/MG-43 does not make it strong enough once you start taking casualties.  The Russians on the other hand have ruddy huge squads and casualties just don't seem to make any difference, at least initially. 

Now I know there's probably a lot of your thinking "well duh what did you expect" but remember I've come from a predominantly skirmish background where my "army" would consist of maybe 12-15 models.

Anyway on the report, sorry for the blurry photos but they I used my phone and they looked ok on the screen.

Roughly 850pts of my Mid War German Panzergrenadiers came up against Bill and his Russians.  Simple seek and destroy scenario this time.

Germans advance north.

 

HMG's facing off at 100 paces, well actually it was really something like 38".

The Russians were here...

There...

Everywhere.

Yay finally some Germans, sadly these guys didn't last very long.

Hmmm if that building looks so very enticing.

 
Sadly it was haunted by a Russian "ghost squad".  That's only half of them too, it took two turns of combined fire from two squads and a HMG MG-42 to reduce them to that amount.  With reinforcements coming over the hedge there was no way I was getting the Russian out of that building.

 

A german squad takes the small building and garners the attention of a Maximum MG and a couple assault squads.

Three turns later a lone MG-42 gunner holds the best he can by passing every Guts check before the Reds finally passed their Guts check and storm the building, I'll never forget Unknown German Solder #22.

Disposable Heroes & Coffin for Seven Brothers

Came home tonight to find my order from Iron Ivan Games had arrived.  The packaging was a little worse for wear but none of the books seemed damaged, well not by the postal service at least.  Since there were six books in my order the envelope wasn't able to completley close.  This meant that a small sliver of the sticky glue on the lip of the envelop stuck on the front cover of the main rulebook.  Luckily it stuck to the white part of the front cover so no real damage was done to the artwork, still annoying though.

The books themselves have a fairly thin cover, even the coloured ones, however the books are anything but cheap.  The content is well laid out well and these books have more tables than I've seen in any game, well except maybe for Phoenix Command but that game was just awesomley ridiculous.

I'll have to put these away on the shelf, for now, so I can focus on the terrain building.  I mean it's so unlike me to get distracted and leave something half finished...

Disposable Heroes

I had a look at Disposable Heroes & Coffin For Seven Brothers (DH&C7B) waaay back when I started getting into WW2 gaming but I overlooked it in favour of publishers who provided pdf versions of their rules (cheaper you know). The other thing that I didn't like was that you activated squads and teams, I really wanted something smaller, individual men.

Well after playing Nuts! for a few years now I'd really like to be able to field more of my collection on the table. Nuts! is a great system but really doesn't scale well without resorting to house rules (group activation and so on). It still can bog down with the reaction rolls but simply anything above a platoon a side can get result in a lot of dice rolls.

What I'd really like though is to be able to play a game with 3-4 platoons on the table, lots of artillery and few tanks. Something like that would really show up the *cough*hammer guys.

After a fair bit of research and a small dash of procrastination I decided to pick up DH&C7B, a couple of the army books (British, US and German) and one of the scenario books (Without Fortune). All paper ones too, my bank account would have preferred PDF versions, cheaper and no postage, but I'm sure I'll appreciate these when they arrive.