"North Africa 1942" Topic

I ran my Cruisin' for a Bruisin' scenario at Sand Wars in Mesa, AZ on May 18th. My opponent, Mike P. came all the way from California to play in my game.

The scenario pitted a reduced German Panzer Company against a reduced British Crusader II squadron. We used 1/285th scale vehicles and the Mein Panzer rules. This was Mike's first time playing and I wanted to keep things simple. Overall, the 2 sides were fairly evenly matched as well. Mike chose the British side and I took the Germans.

The main objectives for both sides was the crossroads in the village, the hill tops on the opposing sides map area, and of course knocking out enemy tanks.

The game went for 6 turns and had a lot of good action in that amount of time. Mike won the initiative rolls 5 out of 6 times but had less luck getting hits on my tanks. I had a bit better luck hitting his tanks but seemed to roll a lot of misfires in this game.

At the end, neither side had uncontested control of the crossroads but I was able to get more kills. Ultimately, we both had a great time and Mike plans to come back next year for another game. That is definitely a win in my book.

Here are a few pictures of the action.

The calm before the storm.

This shows an overview of the action around Turn 6.

A view from the British side.

From the German side.

I had a platoon on the hill covering the advance of the rest of the Company.

Another German Platoon on the left flank of the village.

A view from the ground.

Solid game Pete, and of course with gorgeous terrain and minis!

Looks like you had some flank shot opportunities too, but with 50/L60s probably didn't need flanks that much vs. the Crusaders?

Thanks very much, FlyXwire!

In the Mein Panzer Data Book, the Crusaders and Panzer IIIs are pretty well matched with neither having any distinct advantage over the other.

The Germans do have a slight edge in troop quality which is as it should be.

We did get in a few flank shots in this game but most of the time it was frontal to frontal.

Nice!! Great terrain

Nice terrain and minis!

I sympathize with your disappointment (expressed in another thread) on the lack of responses one gets on TMP these days. However, given Facebook's many deficiencies (like their "stream of consciousness" format), I still think we should post in TMP as well. At least one can find things on TMP.

1940-41 North Africa has been my one of my major areas of interest since the 70s, and as a result, I may have become jaded and perfectionist as to what I bother to comment on. I will try to remedy that. (IMHO, fighting over a village is not typical of the period and locale; maybe that was it).

MH

Thank you very much hinds!

I do plan to continue to post here as I have more new stuff or maybe even some "old" stuff revisited. I hope others will continue to post here as well.

I know that typically villages were not main objectives in North Africa. My goal with some of these scenarios is to introduce new players to Mein Panzer and give them a fun game and a geographic objective or two that they can concentrate on. The game depicted here was definitely introductory,

I appreciate your comments.

Nice looking game. What size of battlefield does the table represent (to help me judge the scale)?

Thanks very much, Whirlwind!

The actual layout size is about 4 feet by almost 5 feet.

In Mein Panzer, 1 inch = 50 yards so each hex is about 200 scale yards from side to side. 12 hexes would equal about 2400 yards or 7200 feet. This is just under about a mile and a half.
The 14 hexes of length would be a bit under 2 miles.

Too bad you are so far away. I also have North Africa Terrain makers and a large
Army of British, German and Italian infantry, armor and other cool vehicles like Rolls Royce Armored cars. I also use Mein Panzer. Great pictures. Wish I could be there. I live in North Carolina

I have been playing Mein Panzer for over 20 years now and enjoy these rules as a good mid-complexity set for WWII tank and infantry combat at the individual vehicle and infantry squad level.

I have a decent set of painted British and German vehicles and infantry plus AT guns for North Africa but almost no Italians and nothing for the Americans in Tunisia so far.

Here are a couple pictures from a recent East Front game set in August 1943 that I hosted on December 7th.

That's a nice Eastern Front set-up. I think I may even prefer it to the (very nice) Desert set-up – perhaps the hex-lines are less obtrusive? Some really lovely water and wood hexes.

Thank you very much, Whirlwind. I will post more pictures of the Russian Front game very soon. I'm glad you liked it.