Stargrunt AAR (Or: Do Not Feed The Claymores)

Played my first game of SG2 in ages at the club on Saturday, against my friend Daniel. We decided to try to try the Convoy scenario from the SG rulebook, with me being the Blue side, using my ESU (I'll get round to posting some pictures eventually), and he playing the Red side, borrowing my NAC. Between us we had 3 APCs, which was just enough to transport my short platoon of ESU, but no trucks, so we changed the scenario slightly and removed the 'claim the cargo' aspect.



Daniel started by rolling abysmally for his counters, only getting two mines and one dummy counter. He did manage to get two veteran squads, though they both had abysmal leadership. For my part, I managed to get two green squads, and a regular platoon command squad with Ld 3. From the start things were not looking good for me.



Terrain was a fairly open stretch down the middle ('the road')' with fairly dense trees and rocks on either side. Whilst I went to get a drink, my opponent set up his counters. The obligatory AV mine was placed roughly halfway down the board, with one counter on top of a hill, another between that hill and a clump of trees, and several dotted about the trees, including one in a crater in the ground. For some reason, he had put all his stuff on one side of the road.



The troops in the lead APC faired well, considering they ran over a mine, with only one figure dying. The squad's first action was to reorganise and check the wounded man, and he turned out to be fine. Obviously a dud mine. The troops in the other APCs dismounted shortly before their rides got toasted by IAVRs.

Before the troops firing the IAVRs could open up on my infantry, I moved them behind the smoking wrecks of the APCS, which were large enough to block LOS. Problem was, because of the part of the road I 'd stopped on, there was no way I could get round the APCs to fire at them without leaving my troops out in the open. So I tasked one of the green squads to trek off down-table to try and set enfilade fire on the ambushers, whilst the other two held the fort. Big mistake.

Two ambushing squads came round the trashed convoy, one from each end, whilst a third went off to deal with my flanking unit. The fourth still hadn't activated and was hidden.

My platoon command unit tried to call in artillery fire on the squad going after the flanking squad, but his abysmal leadership meant I kept failing my comms rolls. Shortly after, the rather depleted command squad was close assaulted by a full-strength NAC squad and ran off, its morale dropped to Broken. This was not good.

The flanking squad had managed to advance most of the way up the table and had taken the NAC squad tasked to deal with them under fire, pinning them in a patch of wood. They tried to combat moved across the road, and managed to almost make it. They had been advancing towards a counter I assumed to be a dummy, or his concealed command squad. After dicing for the combat move, the squad ended up 4" away from the counter.

Suddenly remembering the second mine counter, I measured the distance from the counter, and was relieved to find none of the squad were within 3" of it. Then Daniel smirked and flipped the counter, revealing a CDM. As my entire squad was within 6", the effect was horrific. Of the 8 man squad, only two survived, and rifle fire from the nearby squad soon finished those two off.

With my only squad still functional pinned by fire, and my only hope of rescuing them a nasty red smear on the ground, I conceded.

Overall, a fun game. With hindsight it was fairly obvious the counter was a mine, but I thought my opponent was trying to double-bluff me and ran headlong into it. Very Russian, but not really a smart move. If my squad had managed to get stuck in and deal with the NAC squad, I still don't know if I could have salvaged the game, with only two squad to his four, with one of mine pinned down by fire. Still, it was a laugh.