One Hour Skirmish Wargame: The Patrol

Saturday night, after the plastic eggs were hidden for the Sunday morning hunt, I cut up a coconut fiber doormat for use as fields in my games. Combined with an itch to field my British paratroopers was all of the motivation I needed to set up a game.

The rules were One Hour Skirmish Wargames, the scenario was "Scenario J" (the patrol) from Platoon Forward.

Paratroopers enter the table in heavy woods.

The lighting is much better in this shot.

I stole the idea for using farm animals as blind markers from someone online - I can't remember who, but they are a genius. Much less obtrusive and kind of comical even. In this case, the cow was not the real force.

The firefight does not go well for the paratroopers who had split up to enter the fields. I was playing that the fields were fully grown and limited visibility (this is not part of the OHSW rules). I'm not sure I liked it. One high point for the Brits - the Deetail PIAT trooper made his debut by taking out two Germans with a single HE round.

Germans fall back to a defensive position at the farm. The paras, their numbers slightly reduced, opted to try to further engage the Germans - to their detriment.

Black and white because the new light bulb in the kitchen really washed out the ground cloth in this one.

The Brits were beaten soundly. In large part, the Germans benefited from having three leader figures on the table (generated by the tables in Platoon Forward) - a squad NCO, jr. NCO, and the Platoon Leader. Lot's of extra cards for attacks.

Maybe it was the scenario, but something just didn't work for me for this one. It was fun, to a point, but I ended up feeling like there were too many grey areas and question marks. I suspect, ultimately, the OHSW rules work best when there is a clear objective or turn limit. A patrol with a sort of vague objective (scout this terrain but give the enemy a bloodier nose than they give you) isn't really ideal. 

Also, as this is the second time I've played scenario J this year, I've decided that the way the blinds appear doesn't work for me. I think maybe Nuts! (at least the older versions, I can't speak for the newest) provides a better system for randomly generating the location and composition of the enemy in a patrol scenario.I probably won't go back to using the Nuts! rules mind you (too much dice rolling), but their Possible-Enemy-Force (PEF) system is pretty great in my opinion.