"Invasion of Belgium -- How you've gamed it" Topic

Have you ever gamed the opening moves of the Fall of France -- the invasion of Belgium? Ah yes, Operation Yellow and the drive of XVth Panzer Korps. As a Belgian player trying to hold off the Bosch Blitz in a Panzer Korps division level battle, me and my amis decided to have fun while fighting valiantly. We came well equipped to the battle with Belgian candies, chocolates, Ales and Hard Ciders. Some nice baguettes and chevre rounded off the repast while we endured a pasting by the Luftwaffe. However, we managed to outwit and stymie the German assault with a spoiling attack by the 1st Chausseurs Ardennais that caught the over confident Bosch in their soft Left Flank, almost over running the German Command Stand, resulting in a frenzied change of orders! That plus some well aimed artillery that slammed some Panzer columns saw the Belgians acquit themselves well.

I highly recommend being prepared with tasty treats when facing German panzers!

Gp read the book the Bblitzkreig Myth

Those belgian ales could be classified as Weapons of Mass Intoxication, they are pretty potent & don't usually taste like it.

Your Beglian battlecry should be "DUVAL!!!"

"Gp read the book the Bblitzkreig Myth"

Yeah, the myth that conquered Europe!!!

Was the bulk of the German army leg infantry? Yep. That's why most try to dismiss the Blitzkrieg. But ya know, one of the things about the Blitzkrieg is the tempo of operations and use of combined arms to mass on a critical point, blast through and break out. The speed of the German attack simply outpaced the decision cycle of the French and Belgian high commands -- by the time they got good information, decided to act and started issuing orders the entire situation had changed.

So the Blitzkrieg certainly wasn't a myth. You should try gaming early war, quite interesting. The French tanks were actually quite good, and the bicycle troops pretty darn mobile, and the Germans don't have any of that cool late war megatank stuff yet -- but Panzer I's the size a VW bug aren't bad when the other guy has bicycles.

"Have you ever gamed the opening moves of the Fall of France -- the invasion of Belgium?"

Mainly in boardgames, I managed to miss the big Megablitz outing to Belgium.

We did the FJ attack on Rotterdam though (The Dropzone scenario), that was quite interesting.

Done the Gembloux Gap a couple of times, but most of my 1940 gaming has been the fighting in France itself.

about 8 years ago I think, with 40+ players, on 5 tables, totalling about 900 square feet of playing area, in 6mm (1 stand to the platoon) for a week… with 2 umpires (and I just handled the air side)

the belgies refused to declare brussels an open city (the luftwaffe bombed it),

the belgie light armour had a whale of a time biffing the bosch,

french colonial troops formed a keyhole defence of Charleroi,

french tried to pug a 20k wide gap with a motorcycle recce battalion and almost did it – bosch were convinced for at least half a day that there had to be more to the defence than that…

one panzer general got nixed by the RAF,

another panzer general almost got nixed by his own stukas

overall a crushing bosch victory, thanks to to the combined arms at lower unit levels

Wow, Phil Gray, that sounds like an incredible game!! What system did you use? Any photos of the game itself? Impressive effort.

Hi

We do these once a year (for now), booking a hotel for a week to host the thing.

The first game we did (Kursk, Southern Front) was done using vanilla Spearhead.

After that crushing experience (I played a Russian) we rapidly developed our own set to handle multi-divisional actions at the troop scale of 1 stand to 1 platoon.

Pictures wise, not many online, but there's a contemporary diary available here (look for 2002 France '40):

megagame-holidays.blogspot.com

It's also got details of past and future games…