First Contact!

Last night I cleaned off my messy table and Patrick and Mikey came over to put my Afghanistan toys through their first game. Since Fighting Season isn't out yet we used the free to download FUBAR rules and their modern Afghanistan notes.

I set up a table, utilising all my finished terrain except the ANP strongpoints.

The lengths of wood demarcate the table edges. I think I need a few more buildings, lots more walls and pot fields. But once the grape huts and fields are done that will fill things in nicely as well. 

Coalition forces, platoon of PPCLI with a section of ANA

Patrick was the ISAF commander with Mikey assisting. I decided to run the Taliban since I was making up the scenario on the spur of the moment and to make it easier to keep some Fog of War. I let Patrick come in from any table edge and his mission was to search the village for a bomb factory. Patrick rolled in mounted from the road entering by the ditch on the lower edge of the picture.

I should have made my dispositions and planted some IEDs before Patrick declared his entry point.  I totally forgot about IEDs until after they were on table, so I left them out. Maybe they failed to go off. But the IED threat did influence Patrick's manoeuvring.

7 platoon rolls up beside the irrigation ditch to avoid possible IED planted roads

Suicide bomber opens the ambush by attacking call sign 31

Taliban team gets lit up by two 25mm chainguns with expected results!

Note recoilless rifle in the orchard. It annoyed call sign 31 a lot and caused some minor damage

Gunfight in the village

ANA finally arrive to outflank the orchard

Mikey dismounts to search the village

LAVs put a lot of fire into orchard 

ANA sweep orchard and take out recoilless rifle team

Taliban try to outflank Canadians

31B and 31C engage a heavy machine gun firing from the far roof top.

Last Taliban teams getting flanked by ANA and chewed up by LAVs

 

31A finally finds the bomb factory they've been on top of all game!

I had one trick left up my sleeve, a second suicide bomber in the bomb factory. But after he failed to activate three times and missed his chance to get in the middle of a fireteam covered in suppression markers, I decided that he had chosen surrender over martyrdom.

Halfway through the game I realised I'd also forgotten about my Taliban sniper, who would've been perfect in the HMG position and the HMG would've been good over the bomb factory building to tighten the kill zone the Canadians rolled into.

Coalition casualties were extremely light. Those 5+ saves for the body armour kept saving Patrick's troops. The ANA lost one man crossing the ditch, but fire from the LAVs got them on to the Taliban positions without taking more hits.

So the takeaway from last night was that the FUBAR rules are pretty fun, I need more terrain and more Taliban (or I could recycle casualties), LAVs put down a lot of fire and the ANA are pretty useful once you can get them activated. So more ANA too. I should introduce some less useful ANP allies in another game!