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Monty’s Gamble: Market Garden on Vassal. Mike Rinella has a long design career full of ups and downs; most of his games haven’t had much depth or staying power, but this one - his first design! - is one I still enjoy almost 20 years later. Pretty dynamic, fast-playing; too complicated, but not terrible. I picked up the 2nd edition of this not long ago, and had consequently forgotten how much I dislike the graphics from 1st edition. The Vassal module isn’t great, but the game is pretty amenable to the format, so I didn’t hate it (although a Tabletop Simulator module would be great). Anyway, the combination of reasonable length and the existence of Breakout: Normandy may have promoted this to classic status after all these years. #bgg #boardgamegeek #boardgames #multimanpublishing #vassalgameengine #virtualgameday https://www.instagram.com/p/CD2akLRh1Q-/?igshid=1la2klkpw6ksa

ASL Day! RP141, Volunteers Became Scarce, from the recent Rally Point Special Study. ROK vs KPA very early in the war. The ROK has to pull off a fighting withdrawal over difficult terrain against an enemy with overwhelming armor superiority without much AT weaponry. Fortunately the KPA has a lot of ground to cover in not a lot of time. The T-34/85s gave me fits, as they shrugged off everything I threw at them; but the infantry was stalwart and the KPA assault ended up going right Into the teeth of my defenses, so I held off collapse just long enough to keep the them out of the town. Interesting scenario and a nice mix of forces. Good to see the Rally Point folks giving us a few Korean War scenarios, including a handful of scenarios focusing on the actual Koreans. I generally find Schwerepunkt and Rally Point to be a little bit of a mixed bag, but is a shortage of Korean War scenarios out there and a number of these look pretty promising. #bgg #boardgamegeek #advancedsquadleader #aslkorea #multimanpublishing https://www.instagram.com/p/B7Ey1xCB7vV/?igshid=76pjb2svu3re

Finishing off Bullets for Breakfast. The NKPA attack pressed home with the arrival of reinforcements, after being blunted in the first three turns. I don’t usually play these larger scenarios, so lessons were learned. Slogging through rice paddies isn’t great, but it’s better than running across open ground. SMOKE is your friend. Heavy mortars are great but they are unpredictable. And the big games really are games of mental endurance. Anyway, fun to play, but I’ll probably mostly stick to the weeknighters 😄 #advancedsquadleader #asl #boardgames #multimanpublishing https://www.instagram.com/p/B5O4sFSBH1C/?igshid=fogeoat8q60h

The new edition of Monty’s Gamble: Market Garden. The Allies had really good luck, securing all the bridges south of Nijmegan without issue, securing the railroad bridge near Osterbeek, and enjoying clear weather all 4 days. Plus the 82nd secured the city of Nijmegen first thing on the 19th. But the 1st Airborne at Arnhem got quickly overrun, very early on the 19th, which allowed German reinforcements to flow south. XXX Corps then got hung up getting north of Nijmegan. Despite this, the Nijmegan bridge was taken on the 20th and XXX Corps tanks poured across towards Osterbeek where the 1st Airborne was still holding the bridge and ferry pretty securely. If I had one more turn, XXX Corps could have crossed the Rhine in force after having crushed several German attempts to cut Hell’s Highway on the 18th and 19th inflicting heavy losses. But I didn’t have another turn, and so I came up short by 1VP. Entertaining game with a lot going on. We didn’t really explore the infiltration tactics available to the Germans, which would have made things hard; but there are several VPs available on the flanks of the advance which I ignored but I think the Allies should make some efforts to secure - you can’t usefully employ everyone down the main highway. Fun to break this out again, and the new edition is definitely a lot nicer than the 2003 edition. Mike Rinella has gone on to make a career of designing area-impulse games, but I still think this is probably his best design. But the complexity is a bit high, especially if you’re not a Breakout: Normandy veteran. But that game is great, so just play them both! #bgg #boardgamegeek #boardgames #mmp #multimanpublishing #montysgamble #marketgarden https://www.instagram.com/p/B3dTcU8BL4t/?igshid=16stfjfbsvm7y

British tanks punch through the German front lines in Breakthrough: Cambrai, a classic Mike Rinella game from 2011. I have really fond memories of playing this back in 2011-2012, but I don’t think I’ve played since. Revisiting it didn’t quite live up to expectations; the British position is tough, but against a canny British player German units are *very* thin on the ground the first two days and if they push hard and take advantage of their double turn between days 1 and 2 they can fairly easily achieve the auto-victory if the Germans don’t play very carefully. We played twice in a couple hours and both games were UK auto-victories before they had to worry about the Haig dieroll. Now I’m curious to try it one more time to see if we just need German strategy to adapt, or if the game is just too unforgiving for my current tastes. #bgg #boardgames #boardgamegeek #multimanpublishing https://www.instagram.com/p/BoNYsT-DhMw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=ed60i2y26mzj

ASL scenario 213, It’s So Easy!, from The Forgotten War. US Rangers raid the Chinese at night for intel and prisoners. I always think the Night rules are fun to play, and with the Chinese unable to use starshells that cuts out a lot of rules. The pressure is on the US here, they can’t take many casualties in fulfilling their objectives, but they do have good troops and all the usual advantages of an attacker at night. Can’t say I’m a huge fan of the new US Ranger squads with a wide range of super-powers, but I guess now that you’ve got US Marine and Army units fighting side-by-side the disparity in morale ratings between elite Army and regular Marine units finally got weirdly jarring, but I don’t know that the way to paper that over was yet another squad type with more rules. I would have been fine with “well, it’s weird, but it’s the system we have, what are you going to do?”. Anyway, the communist Chinese units are pretty interesting, I’ll be curious how they play in a slightly larger daytime scenario, especially once they get up-armed by the Soviets. They have an interesting combination of the persistence of the Japanese with worse command and control but better armament. Seems like an interesting set of design choices that mostly reuses existing mechanics, which is nice given we’ve already got a million rules. Anyway, really enjoying this module so far, I think they’ve done a nice job in interpreting the history. #bgg #boardgamegeek #boardgames #advancedsquadleader #mmp #multimanpublishing

The French attempt to take a hill in the extreme winter of Korea, 1951 in scenario 212, First Bayonet Charge, from the new Korean War module for ASL. As my 82mm mortar rained fire on the French kickoff lines, I was worrying that the scenario wasn’t going to be that interesting. But several twists and turns later the French overran the first summit but couldn’t quite manage to reach the second and it turned into a fun scenario (my health has been a bit dicey recently so dragging myself out for more involved games like this can take some force of will, but glad I did it today 😄). Also fun to revisit the old favorite board 2. It looks like they’ve done a really nice job with this set, really looking forward to exploring it. MMP has gotten really unreliable in their non-ASL and non-GCACW lines, so it’s good to know their core competence is still there; Hakkee Palle also could have been dicey but turned out to be really excellent. #bgg #boardgamegeek #boardgames #advancedsquadleader #multimanpublishing

XXX Corps hammers on Nijmegan in Monty’s Gamble: Market Garden. Fun to revisit this one after about a decade. It’s a little short given the complexity, but given that a lot of us played Breakout: Normandy back in the day it’s not that hard to learn. I’ve always enjoyed this one and it’s one the few Market Garden games I’ve liked; it plays quickly but still gets a lot of details right and has good tension throughout. This is up for pre-order and is definitely worthy of a reprint. #bgg #boardgames #boardgamegeek #multimanpublishing