After the extremely short and brutal game we’d just had, which was basically over before Brett had even finished his first turn, we reset the board and began again. This time would be different!

It was too – Brett took advantage of the cover given by the tree line to move down and get closer to his goal. But could he get his units off the board? The victory conditions required him to get about five squad-equivalents off the board, and I had some very good American defenders to stop him – armed with flamethrowers and machine-guns. My set-up was identical to the first game we’d played, but he moved a lot more men on under cover of the woods, while a small number of units entered the map in the central positions to draw fire and keep all my forces from converging on his.

So, after his first turn, the map looked like this:

Brett made one particular mistake with his initial movements: he entered the left-most units through the woods in LOS of my machine-gun nest rather than the woods just to the left; thus exposing them to heavy fire, meaning he immediately lost the use of the MMG he’d placed there. This was unfortunate, and the loss of fire-power would hurt him later. Personally, I’d also have moved a couple of units up into the tree-line to the right immediately to distract my units in the town, but instead he was intending to move his units there through the woods out of line-of-sight for as long as he could. This allowed me to redeploy my units there to cover the tree-line better. Unfortunately for Brett, his units which were in line-of-sight of mine took very heavy fire and mostly broke, allowing me to move up spare troops to ensure they were eliminated for failure to rout (or routed off the board).

The rule that was giving Brett the most problems related to defensive fire. In ASL, a defending unit’s first attack can be at ANY unit within LOS, the second attack can only be at the CLOSEST unit within LOS, and after that final protective attacks can be made only against ADJACENT units. Brett was thinking that all attacks could only be against the closest units, and this led to a couple of mistaken moves during the game which led to his units breaking; we did allow the retraction of those moves, though Brett often let them stand.

I’d rolled pretty well on my attacks against Brett’s units approaching over the frozen fields (even with snow falling), so now all the action was concentrated on the woods to the right of the town. I had two flame-thrower units there making things quite hot for Brett, but even with the flame-throwers beginning to run out of fuel, Brett found that the defensive ability of the woods wasn’t as good as it could be, especially against quite good rolling on my part.

This also demonstrated the effectiveness of good leadership in the back ranks: broken units could rout back to the leaders, rally, then return to the front. Both of us were soon doing this.

However, even with a steady stream of rallied units, Brett wasn’t able to keep enough units active to really dislodge my defenders; in theory he’d be able to overwhelm them, but in practice this wasn’t the case, and with none of his units remaining on the left-hand side of the map, I began to move my other units closer. It would take them some time to get there, but my few defenders were holding him in check. I was also making some unlikely rallying rolls, which didn’t help the situation! About the only good news for Brett was that both of my machine-guns in the MG post had broken (and one was later eliminated trying to get it repaired), but that really was immaterial now to the progress of his troops.

Brett managed to force me back from H3, but my one remaining flame-thrower made it a risky proposition to enter. Brett tried – the flamethrower ran out of fuel, but still managed to break the units that had entered. Smoke would have been quite nice in this instance, but Brett had none (I did, but it really wasn’t necessary). My reinforcements got closer and closer, more Brett’s units fell back, and weren’t immediately rallied. He tried to run a small taskforce down south, but my double-timing reinforcements scurried along the road to take up position in I1 and K2 to prevent his troops from leaving the map.

Too many American units were now blocking the way, and Brett wasn’t able to do anything: any units that moved into the tree-line to attack those in the buildings were attacked and broken, and the remaining fire-power wasn’t enough to dislodge my units. Once again, it had been a determined defence from the Americans, and Brett’s Germans were just unable to make headway. He really would have liked his MMG to be with his troops here, but it remained unmanned on the other side of the board.

These had been a couple of brutal and bruising learning experiences for Brett; I seem to remember having a lot more trouble defending as the Americans in the past, but it’s now a few years since I last played the scenario, and I can’t remember the best strategy the Germans have of winning this one. At some point I’ll need to play the Germans again and see if I could do better with them, but not right now, as Brett needed to leave.

There are better first experiences of Advanced Squad Leader out there; I was disappointed that this hadn’t gone better for him. The second attempt was more successful, but the Germans still didn’t look like winning.