Saturday, November 08, 2014

Monty's Gamble: Market Garden played

Had first game with this recently acquired game by MMP based on the Storm Over Arnhem/Breakout Normandy area style game.
Took a while to get some of the situation specific rules sorted but once we got going it turned out o be an exciting and fun game.
Allies have a lot of powerful units compared to Germans but their Victory Conditions are not easy with time, distance, and weather against them.
Arnhem seems very far from 30th Corps start zone at other end of map and one can easily see how it was 'A Bridge Too Far'.
I was Allies and failed to get into Arnhem before bulk of 9th SS and found 1st Airbourne surrounded on approach areas pretty quickly.
Eindhoven and 82nd Airbourne area of operations fell quickly though allowing Allies to put pressure on Nijmegen with 101st and advancing 30th Corps.
But failure to take Arnhem meant Germans had free rein to reinforce area between Rhine and the Waal.
I narrowly failed to evict defenders of Nijmegen twice.
Having two turns of Overcast Weather did not aid Allied cause as it ground air support and halves the supply for paratroopers.
German have a sort of thwarting mission (historical enough) as seldom have the strength to kill an Allied unit outright but they can certainly hold up Allied advance by contesting key areas and threatening the long supply lines.
Allied Tank units are most powerful in game but all Tank type units can only traverse areas via the road network so not always possible to get where needed most without a slog through defenders.
At end of basic game (4th turn) the Allies had only managed to accumulate 6 VPs so 4 shy of the required 10 for Allied win.
Enjoyable game leading to lots of quoting from film "Bridges its all a question of bridges..."
"And what of the Gerrrmens ?", "Slippery stiff fog...." , "I expect you intend to let us land somewhere !?"........................................



1 comment:

  1. looks interesting. I like the area instead of hexes. Good review, thanks!

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