Wargaming | Crossfire | Scenarios
2 Foot City

John Mclennan and I often play DBA on a 2' by 2' cloth. One evening we were discussing how many Crossfire building sectors would fit on such a table, so we tried it. As it happens the particular layout we used had 35 building sectors (of various heights). That seems enough for a company a side, hence after a brief discussion about a scenario, we set to. As usual I was the Russians and John the Germans.

You'll have to forgive us for the green streets - we didn't have a suitable city style base cloth.

Set Up & Plans

As per the scenario, we rolled randomly for set up. By chance my Russians were clustered in the lower left hand corner, with John's German up in the top right. I, however, had an outpost near John's troops occupying two building sectors.

My plan was to rush forward to trap John in his deployment zone. My outpost would facilitate this.

John's plan was to consolidate his position by wiping out my outpost, then push on from there.

The Game

John started with initiative, but perplexed by having my outpost so close he soon passed the initiative to me.

I had a bit more scope for operations and moved both rear platoons up to support my outpost. One moved into the city block behind the outpost, and the second platoon up the other flank towards the German base/HQ. The end result was the flanks of my outpost were covered by machine gun fire. It wouldn't stop a frontal assault, but my Lines of Fire (LOF) would stop John sneaking about.

Unfortunately one of my stands was suppressed as it approached the front lines and the initiative swapped.

With all that Russian fire power about John didn't bother with sneaking - he went straight in. 2 x Rifles + PC versus Rifle + HMG, i.e. he was only +1 on the close combat roll, but he made it, and reduced my outpost by half. Ouch.
Thinking to distract John, and even up the losses, I pushed forward a couple of rifle stands and a PC and took out the German company commander (CC), hence capturing John's base. This left me with even better Lines of Fire.

I also brought up my CC to rally the suppressed rifle squad, but unfortunately my gallant soviet leader died in a hail of machine gun fire - oops. (Double oops actually as we'd forgotten the rule that you can't reactive fire at troops moving within a building complex.)

A minor fire fight followed across the main street resulting in several pins but no serious damage.

Undeterred by the threat to his flank John close assaulted and destroyed the remainder of my outpost in the contested city block.

Buoyed by the mounting Soviet casualties, John smoked off one of my lines of fire to facilitate a close assault on my suppressed stand and its colleague in the adjacent city block.

Massing a full platoon against my two weakened stands, John made short work of them.

Things were starting to look a bit dodgy on the Russian side.

John then swung around behind the survivors of my platoon.

He smoked off the nearby Russian stronghold and close assaulted my isolated stands.

Posing no contest I conceded the building, the city block and, having only one platoon left, the game.

Conclusions

We were quite pleased. The game was visually appealing with 35 terrain pieces crammed into a 2' x 2' square. This provided more than enough terrain for two companies to get lost in, and considerable room for manoeuvre. The urban nature of the terrain, and the building complex rules, did impose constraints - the streets became dangerous - and were avoided except for the occasional quick dash across. The conditions also encouraged close assaults, as was typical historically. All, in all, it seemed a successful experiment, and got us thinking about more scenarios for a 2' x 2' table.

We did think of a couple of tweaks to the scenario as devised.

  • Snipers would have been good.
  • There should have been a chance to deploy troops in the home bases.
  • There should have been a chance that the random artillery would fall on the home bases.
  • Support multiple levels for buildings.