Scenario: German Raid on a sap

This scenario is inspired by “Gentlemen at Loos” from Too Fat Lardies Stout Hearts and Iron Troopers Great War scenario book.  I cannot exactly recreate it given my terrain and troops, but I can get pretty close, consider this scenario “inspired by actual events.”

When playing scenarios involving trenches, the gamer will find one of their biggest limiting factor is how he represent trenches on their table.  I use rather large rubber trenches, really designed for 15mm FOW bases.  As a result the trenches don’t have what I consider enough bends and kinks as an actual trench would to prevent enfilading fire and protect from shell blasts, so some abstraction is in order.

Here is how I am tweaking the rules to handle my trenches and handle fighting along a trench (no changes from the main rules if one unit is outside a trench:

Special Rules for Fighting along a trench

·        Visibility along a trench is limited to 3”

·        All fire between two units fighting along a trench is limited to ASSAULT combat

o   With the exception of Bombers and Assault Troops, all fire is limited to 3”

o   Bombers and assault Troops may ASSAULT out to 6”

§  They may ASSAULT enemies they cannot see

§  They may ASSAULT enemies if there are intervening friendly troops

§  (It is assumed that bombers are trained to attack into adjacent traverses, etc. as was the practice, and will stop if intervening troops get into bayonet range.)

Your mileage may vary, these rules are for my peculiar circumstances.

Raid on a Gas Sap

German Briefing:

The perfidious British are digging a sap from their trench lines into no man’s land that intercepted phone traffic tells you will be used for gas cylinders to attack your regiment. The Colonel has ordered you to take a picked raiding party, infiltrate the British Trenches, and destroy the sap while it is under construction.  Your raiding party consists of:

·      

•   1 Officer Leader (yourself) and 1 other Leader (a senior NCO)
•      3 Bombing Squads
•      1 Assault (Regimental Stoss troop) Squad

Bags of grenades are distributed to your men and you carefully rehearse behind the lines for several days.  Your route across no man’s land will be covered by smoke and harassing artillery fire, and carefully camouflaged routes through the enemy wire have been cut over the last few nights.  Your will rush through these gaps during daylight hours, enter the enemy trench is a poor defended spot, and work your way down the trench using grenades.  Once in the enemy sap (S on the map), destroy it using concertation charges (each bombing squad carriers one, they must spend 1 turn and 2 activation points performing no other action, then must roll a 3+ to succeed.)

As soon as you have succeeded or are driven off, fire a green flare and more artillery fire will cover your withdrawal.  You troops enter at point A on the map.

British Briefing:

Your Platoon is being used as coolies to dig a sap for the Special Brigade to conduct one of their infernal gas attacks.  It will only encourage the Hun to plaster you with shells while the Special Brigade detachment heads back to the comfort of the rear, so you are not terribly happy with this.

You have your Rifle and Rifle Grenade section in the sap (S on the map) working under the supervision of their NCO’s, while your Lewis Section is preparing to relieve one of the other sections (B on the Map)

You and your Bombing Section are located off map at point C.  Reinforcements consisting of an assault section can be had from the neighboring company, and enter the table at point D.

·        Given the surprise the Germans achieve, the British roll for initiative as if they had poor training (2d6, select lowest)

·        Every turn you may choose to save activation points each turn instead of activating a unit.  They may be saved from one turn to the next.  At the beginning of each turn you may choose to spend the points, roll a d6 and if it is <= the number of points, you and your Bombing Section arrives at point C and may activate this turn.  The next turn the assault section will arrive at point D with 1 leader.

Don’t let the Hun ruin your labor!

The Map:

Player Aids:

I hate having my squads drag dice around with them to indicate hits, so I am using unit cards to track them.  There are only 4-8 units on the table in a typical game, so this should never be too much of an issue in Trench Hammer.

(As a side note, BUY YOURSELF A LAMINATING MACHINE if you make your own player aids. Mine was $10 at Wal-Mart and I buy the sleeves from Amazon so it costs me < $0.02 a page to laminate.  Do your self a favor and get one now!)

Here is the German force, it has a Leader card with the leader rules and a card for each unit that tracks hits with a red paperclip and includes any special rules for that unit.

Here is the British Force:

The QRS I use now can be found here, it can be pretty small as I have offloaded some of the rules to the unit cards.  After I get them painted, I intend to also use casualty markers, 1 for when a unit reaches 3 hits and a second one for 5 hits, so I remember to apply the negative damage modifiers.  This should leave a fairly uncluttered table.

Let me know what you think!

Next time I will actually play the game and we will see of Lt. Klink can deliver a blow to the British.

Note this is not the same Klink as Just Jack's, but his ditant cousin,  Just in case I get him killed off, we won't have any temporal paradoxes.