Table top screwups

[voltigeur]

Thought it might be time for another fun thread! Tell us about a time when your best laid plans went horribly wrong during a wargame.

This is for laughs so please be self deprecating and have fun.

I'll go first in the next post:

[voltigeur]

About 15 years ago I was in a medieval campaign with a beer and pretzel set of rules that could finish a game in an hour to 2 hours depending on size. This allowed 3 or 4 games in an afternoon so the campaign could be finished in 4 to 6 weeks.
My friends Ron and Rich got into it immediately with Ron getting the worst of it. Rich had the biggest army at the outset and was the “dukeâ€￾. I noticed in 2 weekends of these 2 fighting that Ron was wearing Rich down but would be totally defeated before Rich would be forced to back off.
Between games Ron came to me and asked me to ally with him and he would concede winning the campaign. He agreed to pay me in gold the cost of the march to help him and the deal was struck. Rich called me the me the next day and asked for my help as well offering to pay me the gold the game system required for me to go on the march plus 12 pieces to replace my losses.
My evil genius plan was to march to a position behind Rich appearing to support him. In reality Rich would be pinned against Ron and MY cavalry could run down 3 or 4 infantry units before he could respond and my infantry could capture his base camp capturing his Heirs and gold making me the most powerful player with a larger army than Rich and Ron combined.
Enter 20th century technology. In the early 90’s Xerox machines were not all that great. (Especially after a 6th or 7th generation copy.) To make my plan work I needed to march up the road on hex row 21 of the campaign map. The map was blobbed very badly and I wrote orders to the campaign controller that I was marching up row 20 next to the road paying cross country movement. I ended up 2 campaign hexes short of my intended point for the miniatures game. Everyone knew what I had planned and I was only able to deploy 2 stands of infantry on the table!
I emerged the most powerful and wealthiest player but now had to fight a siege battle with Rich to get him out of his castle and my only ally didn’t trust me.

Actually this may be why I had problems in every campaign after that.

[HKurban]

I was playing a 15mm game called AK-47 one time (a whimsical, fast paced African conflict game), and was playing the part of a well equipped "colonial" army versus the local religious fanatics. I had a cobra gunship at my disposal that the previous player used to wipe out almost every single enemy vehicle in the game. I sent the cobra after a pair of T-72s, seemingly easy prey. The T-72s throw it in reverse and my cobra gives chase, firing rockets as it went. In the game, hits while moving are possible but unlikely. Lethality is achieved by standing still to take aim.

Stupidly, I fell for the obvious bait, thinking that the attack helicopter could chew up the tanks before any anti-air weapon could get in range. As the tanks fell back as fast as their treads could go, a BRDM SA-9 Gaskin anti air vehicle, the only effective weapon against my cobra on the entire board, sped up perpendicular to our little persuit. He fired, scored a hit. Since he was moving, it wasn't a likely kill, but I still had to score above a 5 with 2d6 to save against the attack. I roll the dice....

... and get snake eyes. Thats right. Double 1s. My Cobra goes boom and crashes down as a take and hold objective. The other guy parks one of his T-72s on the wreck until a mob of militiamen take over the security of the wreck. Fortunately, the wreck wasn't worth many points in the long run, but the morale crushing loss of a deadly support asset was more than enough to throw off our offensive. Believe it or not though, I went on to win that game thanks to a particularly luckly special forces team that sucessfully called in artillery strikes on the two T-72s, finishing the job the Cobra could not.

[Panzerleader71]

I am sure I can think of something better, but this will do for a start. Not from a mini game, but from a game of GDWs Sands of War. A buddy and I were fighting a battle near Bir Gifgafa '67. It is one of those games that goes really well at first, then goes all pear shape because of mistake. To start in the 2nd turn I was able to call up support from a coy of Cents (I rolled a 1 on a D10 on turn 2) the earliest they could show. I postioned them perfectly on a ridge were they blow the crap out of an Egyptian light armour column (at 3000m as really happend) trying to swim in deep sand. I was so engaged in this little turkey shoot, I did not notice he had flanked me with his T-55's until they smashed thru my infantry on my left. So, what do I do as the brillant, young Israeli TC? I decide to move my Cents to plug the gap ...bringing them into the "kill range" of the t-55s. The only saving grace was the game ended just after he finished the last of my tanks off, but I still held the objective. I was safe in the knowledge of 2 things: 1) I had won the battle, 2) HQ was probably not going to give me command over something any more dangerous then a No. 2 pencil in the future.

[thetourist]

Good Topic!

I was playing a Civil War board game by Victory Games with my college roommate. I was the Union. Traditionally when we played this game the Union bided it's time waiting for decent leaders to enter the board before doing anything to ambitious. They built their blockade, and kept the south at bay until their strength could be paired with good leadership and used to great effect. But in this game, due to some lucky dice, and brilliant tactical prowess on my part, I had the Union cleaning up in the early stages of the game. I had already subdued Arkansas, invaded Tennessee taking Memphis and Nashville and had captured most of the strong points along the Mississippi including New Orleans. In the East I was holding Lee at bay, around Mannasas. I was feeling pretty good about myself and expected to win the game by late 1862. But on the next turn, Lee attacked the Army of the Potomac and forced a retreat into Washington. That's OK I thought, I'll reinforce next impulse and it'll be no problem. But before I could do that, and before I could rally my demoralized army, my roommate won a critical initiative roll and was able to attack with Lee again right away. His luck continued when he beat the army of the Potomac again badly and they had to retreat out of the city. Lee captured Washington and ended the game. It was a catastrophic sequence of events.

[dougeagle]

I like this idea.

Well, back when I played Flames of War, I remember playing against Darren at his place on a saturday with my DAK against his 8th Army British. Darren is a very good gamer, having military background so he knows about combined arms...anyways, back to the topic. We were playing one of the missions from the rulebook and the game was going fine, no serious losses to either one then I assaulted his infantry on a hill with my Panzer III's and that turned into an all out battle there and I was slowly winning while on my left flank, my infantry had taken out his artillery...he was getting closer to making a company morale check... and would have been the first time for a win for me against him. Except for that on the bloody hill battle, he assaulted my tanks with his infantry, I got pushed back, then attacked and pushed him back. Then he made his company morale...he passed Then he attacked my tanks again and I lost a couple this time...now it was time for me to make a company morale check...rolling 1's... which is not what I wanted...game over...4-3 win for Darren.
That was probably the BEST game that we had and still talk about from time to time.

[ed*b]

This is a little different tale of a game gone horribly wrong.

Many years ago when we were regularly doing microarmour in my friend Bob's basement, he and I got the brilliant idea of constructing an actual sand table to improve realism in sighting, hull down, etc. Before long, we had built a 6' x8' table with six inches of sand to contour terrain, shelves underneath to hold his ECW army and a plywood cover we could put on top of the sand so we could play large boardgames.

It was quite successful for a while. We used little dental mirrors to check visibility and had lots of great arguments over how much of the hull had to be hidden before you could claim hull down.

Then we decided to do Next War, one of those horrendously large SPI monster games with three map sheets and thousands of counters. There were seven of us playing, and we had just finished the first move (two Sundays effort) when there was this large "craaack" and the entire table collapsed sideways till it hit a stool against the wall, then straight down. Fortunate that the stool was there, otherwise one of our buddies who was standing next to it would have taken the full force of the collapse.

Just call us Bozo Brothers construction - you can't expect an accountant and an IT manager to know about cross-bracing.

Sadly, his wonderfully detailed ECW army did not survive the collapse.

[redleg]

I was playing a game of Mein Panzer several years ago – I can’t remember all of the details, but I recall that it was a Western Europe scenario. I was controlling some German armor units, and I happened to have a section of SS Heavy armor that was hiding in a village. My opponent (British) was moving a battery of SP artillery forward behind a smokescreen, but I had an observer forward that could see this.

I decided to have my Tigers burst through the smoke screen Hollywood style and blast his artillery. I had double the normal rate of fire since they were elite troops, and I would play my commander’s bonus action to take another shot. He would pee on himself when he saw my tanks come out of nowhere and wipe out his artillery.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a single decent die roll. Every single shot I took missed! Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, he halted and performed direct fire with his arty. That’s right – superb rolls resulted in my Tigers being brewed up. No wonder they lost the war.

[Ritter]

I dont get to do many face to face games so planning for one is always half the fun.

This year, I had planned on attending Salute 2009 in March. I started planning the game LAST March!

I built all new Terrain Maker based Eastern Front terrain with fields of sunflowers, village terrain, muddy roads, Forests and new rolling hills. I painted up all new armored formations, Infantry and support weapons; Man I was ready!!

Packed up everything for the game in the family car (after the wife noticed my hex terrain left in the garage) and traveled to Vancouver, BC (drove 2 days!) as part of a family vacation. 18 or so hours driving...

On the morning of the game, to my surprise, I grabbed the wrong box of terrain!

I had actually brought my old Normandy terrain and was forced to do a quick re-adjustment (Russian Bocage anyone?!).

Thanks to a great bunch of players and some loaned terrain - Thanks Ken! , we had a good game anyway but was I bummed!!

Troy

[WargameHub]

A friend and I were playing flames of war........

It was 2007........

The dice rolls were a perfect average....... except


For the whole year he got almost all of the 4, 5, 6 and I got almost all of the 1, 2, 3 rolls.

I was really happy for early 2008 when my luck came back to average.

[BattlerBritain]

Years ago I was introducing a friend to the hobby of wargaming and we were using the old Yacquinto 'Panzer/Armor/88' rules.

I had a MkIV on a hill overlooking a valley up which my friend was advancing with a bunch of Shermans.

I got off a total of 34 shots at his tanks and they all missed. He eventually decided to stop and fire back, at less odds than I had had.

Yep - you guessed it - a Hit first time and destroyed my MkIV.

My friend liked these 'easy' games....

Sometimes the dice Gods are just not with you.

[Mk 1]

I remember an interesting twist on "best laid plans going wrong". It happened many, many (many many...) years ago, in my early days of wargaming with GHQ micros (when T-34/76b's came in a plastic hinge-top box with red foam), in a game I played a game against my Jr. High School gaming buddy -- well not really a buddy, just a gaming rival.

I had just gotten my first Soviet 76.2mm guns by mail-order from a UK vendor (GHQ didn't make any yet), and I was anxious to get them into action. So I invited him over for a 1943 battle on the Eastern Front. The scenario would be him attacking my interpretation of a pakfront. Per WRG rules, I set up a points total, and gave him 3x my points number to work with.

In those days we played in the dirt. We played in actual 1/300 scale (1 yard on the ground = 300 yards in the game). I had a sandy plot in my parent's yard, about 10 x 16 ft, that we used for smaller battles. His whole yard was undeveloped dirt, which we used for larger battles.

My pakfront was very simple. I put up an anti-tank ditch (actually dug out of the ground), with a gap in it which was marked as a minefield. Some 500yds behind it was a low rise, with my guns dug-in (actually dug in to the ground) camoflaged by some shrubbery (lichen).

I sent him a drawing of the battlefield, along with his points total, to use in preparing for the battle. It had been my initial intention to put down dragon's teeth rather than the AT ditch, and so that's what the drawing showed.

He kit-bashed some SdKfz251 "mine roller" halftracks to carry engineers. His actual intent was to use the engineers blow his way through the dragon's teeth with demo charges. The mine rollers were just a back-up. When he saw it was a ditch rather than dragon's teeth, he shifted to his back-up plan. He drove his mine-rollers across the marked minefield to clear several lanes. I made him roll for mines even though he was using mine rollers (he resisted this roll, but I insisted). When his dice showed a "hit" from the mines, I told him that, in spite of the roll, no mines had detonated beneath his rollers. He looked puzzled for a moment, and then said: "So it's a DUMMY minefield?". I nodded.

He then charged his whole panzerkiel across the dummy minefield, and on into my defensive zone. He led with his tigers on the point and his Pz IVs on the wings. His Pz IIIs and halftracks were behind the leading wedge. Beautiful formation. I then told him he had rolled into an unmarked minefield that was behind the marked dummy minefield. We resolved the mine attacks. All but one of his tigers, and several of his Pz IVs were killed.

He picked up his tanks and went home in a huff.

After a week of preparation, we played for about 3 turns. Not a very fun game at all. I never even got to fire a shot with my new 76.2mm guns.

[Thomaso827]

Just have to throw in a Twilight 2000 roll play game I ran with family and neighbors during my last tour in Germany - long ago enough that the game was new back then.

My wife and the couple from next door were playing the team of survivors, and after 2 sessions, were not cooperating with my GM plans. They were supposed to go through two game modules taking place in Poland and then work their way northwest to Bremerhaven. To help guide them a bit, I gave them a helper in the form of a Soviet armor officer, having survived the destruction of his battalion in an earlier battle and wandering the field with PTSD. He would do just about anything to get away from the carnage.

Well, I introduce the scene at the beginning of our next session. The players think for a few minutes, but before anyone makes up a plan or starts conversing with the Soviet officer, the neighbor's wife says she runs up to him and slits his throat.

She was probably the quietist Army wife I ever knew, but boy, I'd hate to ever have been on her wrong side.

The session ended, and we never did pick up another.

Tom Oxley

[dnichols]

Situation: Large, Eastern Front 1944 Microarmor game at a convention. The table was 6' deep and 8' across. The game was scheduled to run over 2 periods. 4 people on each team, 3 players and one senior commander. The game was well organized and we all looked forward to a massive German delaying action scenario, reminiscent of those great delaying action scenarios in Panzerblitz. Hordes of T-34s against the best equipment the Whermacht had. Oh yea, it promised to be a great game.

Well I was a Mech Infantry Officer at the time with the US Army and had just finished a class on battlefield calculations the week before. Basically it was a technique by which you figured out how much firepower you had to concentrate in a kill zone to destroy your enemy.

I did some calculations being very familiar with the rules and figured that if we concentrated all our forces in a one foot wide corridor and just moved, never stopping to fire that the Germans could not destroy enough of us to prevent us from exiting enough forces off the table to win since they only had limited weapon systems that could engage us on the corridor we choose.

That is exactly what we did and the 2 session game (8 hours) was over in less than 1 hour with us having won a decisive victory never having fired a shot.

At first the German team was quite upset and I explained why we did what we did and where I got the idea, and then we all had a good hearty laugh.

We reset the scenario and played again, this time with the Russians attacking on a much broader front with different results.

--Daryl

[BaronvonFrank]

The Tale of The Ladder
In my very early wargaming days, each friend supplied an army of their choosing. I selected German, another Russian, etc., and the battles were big. I had created a number of buildings from cardstock and one had a ladder I made from toothpicks to allow soldiers to climb to the next level. I created it especially for a Russian/German game that weekend, along with a set of homemade rules.
The day of the game, I set out my army (overwhelmingly powerful against the Russian infantry on the other side with only one artillery piece) and started across the open, tanks rolling with infantry behind. My plan was to bust through the center of town with my Tigers and rip the Russians apart all the way to the hotel at the end of town.
As I approached, infantry kept passing around the board, passing that ladder between them. The Russians were in every tree, on top every building, and sitting on fences. The opposing player had indeed read my rules, and saw that height advantages of over an inch gave the soldier a bonus when shooting, and by using the ladder he was doing it.
So the German infantry are being mowed down by about twenty Russians who were then snipers, basically, thanks to that ladder, but I was determined to press on as my Tigers leveled every tree and small shanty that had an enemy on top. (That's still a funny image to me, watching the Tigers blasting away at those trees...) Working with D6 dice, a +1 advantage is pretty outstanding.
Finally, I got into town. Each side was issued a limited number of grenades. As my tank passed a building with a Russian on top, the player announced he wants to throw a grenade down the hatch of my tank which was painted open. I had no rule, but said that if he rolled a six twice on a D6, it would land. He rolled two 5s, but with the height modifier from the ladder he actually rolled two 6s. The tank explodes, killing the troops' CO and the infantry quivering behind the tank, hiding from the "snipers." Chaos ensues. I try to press on to the hotel.
Once in sight, the hotel belches death as that single artillery piece was positioned in the lobby (I had cut out windows on the buildings). Given my rules, cover makes it tough to dislodge or destroy anything, and the hotel, after much debate, was classified as a heavy fortification by the neat and hefty bricks I had drawn on the sides. One Tiger after another goes until none remained, all of them shelling that hotel for all they were worth.
The game ended as the Russians closed on the last hut held by the riff-raff remaining of what was a glorious assault army.
I have never put another ladder in my wargames again, not for show, not even drawn on. I also leave the hatches closed.
Hope you enjoyed- I didn't! We all get a good laugh, now...
~FM