All,
Here's something I wanted to do for a long time, finally gotten to: a set of modern, Special Operations fights based around a team clandestinely infiltrating a war-torn African nation to save one of its citizens, then having to fight its way out with not only its citizen, but a whole bunch of refuges, too. If you haven't seen the movie… Well, what was it like growing up in the Soviet Union, ya Communist!? Get off your butt and… Actually, sit on your butt, bust out your Netflix account, and sit back and enjoy some cheesy, good old-fashioned butt-kicking! Then get your laptop and peruse my silly batreps ;)
I'm playing these out in 15mm, good guys from Jimmi's Flashpoint Minis, bad guys and rescue from Rebel Minis, and other refugees from Peter Pig. I'm using Buck Surdu's "Combat Patrol" rules, which are pretty nifty and worked well for this size and style of fight, despite being written for WWII. Really the only changes I made was to treat the SOF as being armed with semi-auto rifles and the bad guys with bolt action rifles (also treated the SOF as elite and bad guys as green, but that's in the rules), and gave the SOF body armor, so any hits to the chest were downgraded (a wound was a stun, an incapacitation was a wound), though it only ever happened once in the four fights I played. So there it is, I played a total of four fights, staying as close to the movie as I could, though I started the operation off with a fight upon initial entry of the village when, in the movie, there was not one. So the fights are initial entry into the village to find "the package," the assault into the village massacre they came across while making their escape, the jungle ambush, and the final pull back to the river and all out hustle up the hill (when the airstrike finally came in).
In terms of my ever-growing list of projects, in order to keep my "Cuba Libre" alt-history gig going, I swapped out the US SEALs for my Free Cuban Special Forces, so please feel free to ignore all the Free Cuba/South Leon invasion talk and just pretend it's all US Navy SEALs if that makes it more palatable. I played all four games this past weekend, working on the batreps and will get them posted ASAP. In any case, here's number one.
Overview, north is up. The table is about four feet long by a little more than two feet wide, with the villagers needing rescuing hiding at far right, government forces spread across the table, and the Cubans entering at far left.
The Cuban SOF Team Leader, Captain Stelosavo, who uses the handle "Ryder." This is one of my favorite miniatures, and it still reminds me of Steven Segal in "Above the Law."
Commandos emerge from the lush foliage to end the unfolding massacre, close assaulting a government patrol (top left). To see how the fight went, please check the blog at:
linkThree more fights to come, I'll post as quick as I can, but they're all pretty long, so lots of work to do…
finally begins Vietnam.
