Carentan 1944 anniversary game - playtest

My friend Jean-Louis at the Guerriers du Marais wargames club in Normandy would like to do a game next year to mark the 75th anniversary of the battle for Carentan. We have therefore created a scenario covering a week of battle, 7-13 June 1944, and this week saw its first playtest.

We are fortunate to have in our group a master craftsman, Colin, whose blog shows you some of his modelling techniques. Colin's work has taken him to remote places such as Mongolia and Tibet where opportunities for entertainment are limited. Consequently he has whiled away many long hours painting gorgeous 6mm armies and scratchbuilding historically accurate buildings for Normandy - in fact, as luck would have it, actually from Carentan.

Believe it or not these Shermans are not 15mm, not 10mm, but 6mm scale!

Combat Command A, 2nd Armored Division, about to roll through 

the scratchbuilt (and scratch-demolished) houses of Isigny.

Fantastic craftsmanship by Colin, marred by my unpainted unit base ...

So we laid on a game to give his handiwork an outing and test the scenario. This was a popular night at the club, there were eight of us clustered around our Normandy table. Jim, another of our more skilful modellers, contributed some convincingly damp-looking marshes for the extensive inundations around Carentan.

The battle starts out very much an infantry fight, in fact para versus para, as the Screaming Eagles of 101st Airborne sort themselves out and take on Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6 in the marshes. It's a subtle contrast, though: the FJ have high intrinsic firepower from all their MG42s and mortars etc, good for defending with; the US paras are more lightly armed, but full of gung-ho aggression, and with artillery, airstrikes, and naval gunfire on call to support their attacks. The Yanks being rated veteran also have a better chance of recovering losses during the mid-battle "night interval".

Then in the second half both sides get some armour. For the US, CCA of 2nd Armored Div rumbles on from the more open east end of the table, along with a task force from 29th Inf Div. These bump into some newly arrived infantry Kampfgruppen and Osttruppen, while behind Carentan itself, the might of 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division "Götz von Berlichingen" pedals on ... yes, it's Romanian Volksdeutsche on bicycles, backed up by a few StuGs and Marders ...

The ruleset was my own experimental WWII variant of BBB. We've used this a couple of times for early war but this was its first taste of 1944. It was also the first scenario I'd written for it from scratch rather than adapting, and it was a few months since we last tried them (and for some players they were totally new), so I was a bit apprehensive about the play balance and we were a bit rusty and slow in play at first. Despite all that, we got through 8 of the scheduled 10 turns in two and a half hours - enough for everyone to be happy to call it a draw - and the boys all seemed to enthuse about the game. I had some qualms that I might have underrated the Yanks, who were struggling a bit at halftime, but they bounced back and evened things up in the second half.

Overall a big success, then: the rules were fun to play, a realistic and balanced scenario, some really beautifully crafted troops and terrain on the table, and players clamouring to do it again. :-)

I have posted a few more photos in Flickr and will put the scenario in the BBB Yahoo group files after some polishing.