"Battle Group - Villers Bocage game" Topic

I converted the Kampfgruppe Normandy scenario for Battle Group and gave it a whirl.

This is the start of the first turn

The 4th City of London Yeomanry HQ squadron stretch their legs oblivious to Wittman's nearby presence.

The report is here:
thewargamingmegalomaniac.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/2013-10-26-battle-group-villers-bocage.html

Great report,great layout, thanks for sharing!

I thought Wittman was suppose to win!

Nice report.

Neat. Thanks for sharing. You just can't have too many Villers-Bocage battle reports; it's such an interesting battle. Better luck next time for the Germans.

Nice, but there were no grey Tigers in France.

where you there, rudi? nice report!

No offense Rudi, but I'm with John, this is just a game: it looks nice and looks like the guys had fun, that's enough for me.

Regarding gray Tigers, as much as we love our reference material, I don't believe it is outside the realm of possibility that there was one gray Tiger in France.

As a second point, a lot of wargamers, myself included, can't afford to have gray tigers for this battle, dunkelgelb tigers for that battle, green-stripey camoflage for another battle, etc…, so I end up doing a bit of proxying in order to get toys on the table as quickly as possible and actually get some games in.

I only bring it up because, as well all know, it takes a bit of doing to get troops and terrain on the table, come up with the rules and the scenario, then play it out. For folks that haven't done it, I'd like to point out how much work goes into posting a batrep: first you have capture all the relevant pre-battle data, then you play the fight, but much slower than usual because you have to constantly stop to take notes and pictures. Once you're finished you take a bunch of time to upload the pics, write the report, post it to your blog, then post to TMP.

That's a pretty time intensive effort, for which Grigork is to be applauded, and I worry that comments like "there were no gray Tigers," or "your cows should be black and white instead of reddish-brown and white," or "only Pz IIIEs were there, not Pz IIIFs," might be just enough to convince someone to not go through all that work.

Just my humble opinion, and again, no disrespect meant.

V/R,
Jack

My Tigers are many and varied verions in type and colour. In fact I own too many to play with as I still have the ones I had as a kid and have been tarted up for grown up play. Normandy camo is in short supply in my collection but that doesn't bother me, although I'd love everything to be spot on. For this game becasue the decals on my Tiger collection are unfortunately repetitive (my younger self didn't know the importance of the numbers)I chose a different colour for each tank to ease tracking ammo. If you've read the report you'll know the tanks didn't last long enough for this to be a problem.

Merry Christmas

The eagled eyed will also spot I used Comets as substitutes for some of the Cromwells. Again the Comet collection is due to the younger self (11 year old) not knowing these were only used late in the war. I've held off using them, wanting to get Cromwells but since Battle Group Overlord suplement appeared I've been eager to play a game and I've always wanted to do Villers Bocage so I went for it. It was great to see them in action at last, they'd been gathering dust for decades.

Comets, not Cupids? ;0)

Great AAR and makes me want to try out BGO again.
I like to keep things reasonably accurate but I purposefully bought a grey Tiger recently for my Normandy setting. I just liked the look of it :o
So hopefully there were more than one going around. :) As Jack pointed out I'm sure Rudi wasn't trying to be…well rude but it's impossible to keep things spot on…I used a farmer dressed in overalls in one of my Normandy photos and rightfully got chastised…in all fairness we have to draw a line somewhere

Thanks for posting Grigork

Was a grey Tiger I in Holland in 45 though…

Quibbling over the colour of a Tiger? What is this, the Napoleonics board?

Nice batrep. And there's a 'big cat' on the prowl on the tabletop, and by that I don't mean the Tigers.

It's amazing how agile cats are. Mine would jump on the table but never knock over figures.
Thought I saw a model of a green striped grey tiger that claimed it was from Normandy. Different colored tanks also make it much easier to tell who's damaged, suppressed and out of ammo. Since camo was partly up to the crew and setting up a nice game was all up to 'Grigork'- would have absolutely no problem with this. I'm still debating whether I would want to paint my Pz38t's grey to use for France/Russia or Yellow for Normandy. Like Grigork, don't believe in painting 20 different schemes to suite all theaters.