Friday Night Game - Heroes of Normandie

On Friday evening I popped over to Andrew's place for a game of "Heroes of Normandie", which we have played a couple of time previously - but not for several years!

"A miniatures game without miniatures, Heroes of Normandie is a fast-paced WW2 strategy wargame inspired by Hollywood war movies. A tactical scale board-game opposing two players and two armies, with the Germans on one side and the Americans on the other. Players use order tokens to determine initiative and to bluff. While a single six-sided die determines combat, action cards are played to spice things up. Secretly plan your attacks and outwit your opponent. Block the opposing strategy and surprise the enemies. Deploy your units and don't turn back!"

Although the game comes complete with some very nice full colour printed tiles, Andrew and I have generally played the game using our 15mm FoW collections. As I don't have any US forces, I was happily allowed to substitute my 1944 Brits. 

The game took A LONG TIME to set up - Andrew did comment that he always forgets between playings, just how much pregame admin there is, and we had only managed to get through one and a half turns (of six total) by about 8pm, when we broke for Chinese takeaway dinner. However, after eating, we did manage to speed things up a bit, and got to turn four or five I think, by the time we called it a night around 1030.

I don't think my tactics were the best, but this was compounded by some atrocious dice rolling - generally a 3 or 4 on a D6 will be sufficient to get a hit on most things, but I hardly managed to get anything, despite having a larger force than Andrew, including four mortars to none! In an activation system somewhat reminiscent of Great Escape Games 1914 and Iron Cross, the more units you have, the more tokens you get - but you never have enough to give an order to every unit. I had 9 order tokens and Andrew only had 6, so, combined with the fire power of all those mortars, which can shoot at anything on the table, no range and no LoS rules here, I should have been able to do some decent damage to his infantry. However, until the last couple of turns, when it was too late, I singularly failed to do so.

Andrew on the other hand rolled some pretty good dice so that by the time we stopped, he had caused damage to three of my five tanks, whereas I had done nothing to any of his. He was also in possession of both the victory points, which we had agreed beforehand would be worth 5 points each to the side controlling them.

So, an overwhelming defeat for the 11th Armoured Division in the first round of fighting in Normandy - which seems about right from all the reading I have done on this campaign - in fact, if this goes exactly to plan (as Monty claimed!) I can look forward to a string of costly defeats against the Germans, while I "write down" their forces, until eventually, weight of numbers will tell, and we will manage to batter our way through the multiple Panzer Divisions and wipe them out in the Falaise Pocket - just as well I have a few 1/144 rocket firing Typhoons in my collection!

As always with Andrew's games, a beautiful table to look at. I took along three boxes of vehicles and all my infantry - I knew I only need a few models but did not know which ones it would be, hence the selection, In the end, all I needed was one Sherman Firefly, two standard Shermans and two Cromwells, plus some infantry and supports as shown in the images below.

When I was putting this collection together about twenty years ago, I looked around for a formation involved in NW Europe to which I had some passing connection - I settled on the 11th Armoured Division based solely on the fact that their armoured component included the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, and Forfar is a town about fifteen miles inland from Montrose, where I grew up. Indeed, the county, now called Angus, used to be Forfarshire, and Forfar is still the "county town" Thats it - I had no relations serving in the division or anything like that - just this rather tenuous link based on the name of one of the constituent units!

Armored Reconnaissance regiment equipped with Cromwell tanks, plus a few specialist armoured engineering vehicles and cute little armoured cars and Honeys (Stuarts)

The make-up of the infantry component, with the unit designations alongside

Infantry transport

The PBI

Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - with the three tanks required for the game already removed.

Overview of the table

Some nice buildings above and below - Mark will recognise the two below, as did I!

Some of the very attractive and detailed playing tiles that come with the game. Even using models, the tiles are required for all the stats - and there are quite a few!

Ready for the off, with models sitting on their appropriate tiles

An overview of the table

German vehicles and Fallschirmjaegers from Andrews collection

"Driver, ADVANCE!"

Sneaky Nazis skulking in the Bocage!

A small libation seemed in order!

Cromwell in position to ambush an advancing PzKfw IV

This is when I should have been blazing away with my mortars, at infantry bunched up advancing in the open.... a missed opportunity!

Position around move three or four

This looks ok (above) but this is how it looked after a round of German firing...

This is the last pic I took - a heroic PIAT team got onto the flank of a PzKfw IV - German infantry (behind the grey order token) were set up to assault them, I had an interruption card and managed to use the MG on one of the nearby Cromwells to take out the Krauts, the Piat fired - miraculously I rolled a 6 - a Hit! - then had to roll again for effect and got a bloody 1 which, not surprisingly, did nothing - kind of summed up my dice rolling all evening!

It was a good learning game to reacquaint us both with the rules - we made a few mistakes eg we only realised very near the end that the tanks can fire both weapons each turn ie the main gun AND MG's - that certainly could have made a bit of a difference - and I also forgot that in my hand of four action cards, I had two where I could force a reroll - so, could potentially have prevented two of the three tanks being damaged by Andrew - ah well, you live and learn!

Nice to get a few of my extensive 15mm WWII collection out of their boxes - I have a significant number and I would guess 90% of them have never been in action....! Thats not likely to change even if we play a bit more of this game, as this was a "large" scenario by the "Heroes of Normandie" standards,  five tanks on the table when I have 22 Shermans alone in my collection, not counting Cromwell's and Comets!

Its ANOTHER long weekend here in New Zealand as we mark 6 Feb, the day the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between the representatives of the British Crown and the United Tribes of Aotearoa, back in 1840, so hopefully a bit of time will be spent at the painting desk or perhaps even the solo gaming table!

Thanks for dropping by and extra special thanks to anyone who contributes a comment!