COW 2012

Fire and Movement: COW 2012

There didn’t seem quite as much 20th Century action at COW this year – and, inevitably (I seem to have had a bit of a retro year … 54mm, flats, sand tables …) , I missed some of what there was (I missed the Fletcher Pratt, I missed the PVO Strany, I missed John Curry’s British Army 1978 Desert Wargame … but a visit to Megablitz and More will help, and I missed Trebian’s SCW game – see Wargaming For Grownups – but that is all too regular, I guess) …

Spanish Civil War: a scene from the COW preparatory game

I did play in Martin Rapier’s session Fire and Movement, a game from Phil Sabin’s Simulating War.

attacking the German machine gun nests

This is an area based game in which each base represents a platoon, and in which ammunition supply has an attritional effect not unlike being hit by enemy fire.  In that sense it is very British (spraying bullets everywhere isn’t the solution …)… The mechanisms are very smooth, and although the way attrition works is unusual, the outcomes have a plausible feel to them.

Thanks for putting it on, Martin.  A good session.

All the teams clustering around their section of ‘the wire’.

The Plenary Game this year was a quick and dirty perimeter defence in which everyone at the Conference played (mostly as little fireteams in foxholes on the wire).   It was a 30 minute megagame … and we all won!  In truth, there were some ideas in it too (though they were well concealed by the fast card turning and general bonhommie) …

ADG: Display Team North’s ‘Rollbahn Ost’

I also played in John Bassett’s Cold War multi media game … a bit of Committee work, a bit of role play … then some Blue Peter improvisation … plus some big plastic figures and some die rolls to make it feel like a wargame.

In this Alistair MacLean adventure, we had to drop some agents on to an ice flow to investigate an abandoned Soviet monitoring station – though the first of many hurdles was our first drop going down the crevasse.  Our fist drop was human cargo, needless to say.   The weather turned suspiciously in tune with the session time elapsing, and (with me as air mission controller), we had to extract the team.

Cold War … cold feet … (so don’t try this at home)

We had one day to do it, and only six passes to sky hook them all up.  It took an extra day as away team leader Trebian kept ducking when the hook came in (or that’s what it seemed like from my perspective).  Fortuitously, the weather was deemed good enough to give us another day’s mission and we got the job done.

Apparently this was based on a real event, and by the sound of it we didn’t do too badly (the real guys had quite an ordeal on the ice) …  An interesting scenario.

More from COW on Ancients on the Move – click here: