02h00 (Oh Two Hundred Hours) AAR

 After participating in my Black Ops game back in December, Gord has been on me to try out 02 Hundred Hours, a game designed to simulate WWII partisan warfare, commando raids and similar special operations and wet work.  Last night, we finally managed to fit in a trial run!

Arthur set up the board, a small Italian village, centered around the town square.  Naturally we decided to fill the square up with all the activity to be expected on a busy market day.

The jolly grocer tries to convince the grumpy signora that the tomatoes are genuinely fresca, but she does not appear convinced.

Musicians and dancers put on an impromptu performance.

Then Gord arrived, and pointed out that the reason the game is called 02h00 is that the action takes place in the middle of the night, and during wartime so we can assume that a curfew would be in place.  So all the townsfolk went home, and we adjusted the layout a bit to allow more streets for unauthorised mischief.  The mission for the Italian partisans is to capture a German officer, and extract him for interrogation.  There are three possible places that he could be - in this case, one of the two churches, or the garage (the white building with the two big doors).

The cat, however, ignored the curfew ;^)

I selected a group of partisans, including a hero of the resistance (the lady with the MP40), a radio operator (Noor Inayat Khan),a partisan sergeant (with the red scarf), and five regular partisans.  This selection allowed me to choose several special mission cards, that gave me bonuses for when the action kicked off.  In particular, one of the cards allowed me to examine one of the three possible locations in advance, so my search for the German officer would be made a little easier.

I used my free search to check the church, and found that the officer wasn't there.  This was great for me, as that would have been the most difficult place to search, and so Gord's sentry there didn't slow my search.

Germans on roving patrol.

German sergeant checks in on his sentry at the cardboard church.

The partisan hero sneaks into the square to check the garage.

She opens the door of the garage, but is too noisy and generates an alert token allowing the German sentries to search for her.  On the positive side, though, she confirms that the officer is not in the garage.

Meanwhile, over by the resin church, the partisan sergeant and his compagno prepare to take out a German sentry.

The sergeant sneaks up on him and silently takes him out.

He then enters the church and apprehends the German officer.

And the hustles him into captivity, with his fellow partisans providing cover.

The team that captured the officer managed to make some noise, and the German sentries started toward them.  The partisan hero, having previously shed the alert token that she'd earned earlier, now took action to distract the guards.  She played her distraction card, and opened up on the guards.  This naturally attracted a lot of attention to her, but had the advantage of removing the token from the partisan sergeant and his prisoner.  She was also pretty effective with her Schmeisser, taking out one of the three German sentries.

But the alarm was definitely raised, and the German hauptmann dashed onto the board.  He mercilessly gunned down the heroic partisan!  But her distraction was enough, and the other partisans escaped with their prisoner.

All in all, it was a good, fun, suspenseful game.  It gave a very cinematic result as the partisans snuck around trying to avoid the sentries.  Meanwhile, Gord was frustrated as my dice rolling worked out to my advantage.  Even though I had many partisans running around the town, I was lucky and barely rolled any noise results, and was able to cancel out the few that did come up.  I can see that it would be great for solo gaming, as the guards/sentries are mostly on auto-pilot until the alarm is raised, and even then they still need to locate the partisans.

The game does require lots of markers on the board, which is an aesthetic thing that I'd prefer to avoid, but that is offset by the relatively small number of figures on the board.  I'll be ready to try the game again.

I am getting into Italian partisan music - will be looking at building a soundtrack for my next game!

Brigate Garibaldi Partisans and another ersatz Nazgul

 After reading Ben MacIntyre's SAS: Rogue Heroes, I have an idea for a WWII partisan scenario.  This has motivated me to finish up a few more Italian partisans.  These ones are supposed to be members of the Communist Garibaldi Brigades, or Brigate Garibaldi.  One of the key identifiers for the Garibaldi partisans was their red scarf.

Here are the new models,

And here are all the partisans to date.

I also added another ersatz Nazgul.  This one is based on Perry plastics with a GW Rohan horse, so actually looks a bit more like the GW LotR figures than my other conversions.

Here is the base figure - a WotR man at arms on a Rohan horse.

Added greenstuff cloak.

And here is the painted rider, along with a barrow wight.  I now have three riders - which leaves me a bit of a dilemma.  For the Flight to the Ford of Bruinen, there should be nine riders, but that is the ONLY scenario that needs nine riders.  Not sure it's worth building a full nine riders for just one game...

Partisans from Wargames Atlantic

 Wargames Atlantic plastic kits are turning out to be great fun.  This is a set I've been wanting to pick up for quite a while, Partisans (1) French Resistance.  The title of the box creates hope that there will be more variations on the theme coming!  The box includes 8 frames with 4 torsos each, but with loads of head and arm options, the variants possible are extensive.  Here are the first 16 figures.

I had an idea that I could use this kit to make unarmed civilians for either my 1943 Sicily or 1940 France campaigns, as bystanders or refugees.  The 1940 campaign in particular has great opportunity for civilians as refugees clogging the roads or as fifth columnists.  I experimented a bit with the arms and heads in the box, and feel they have potential but I'll need to work on them a bit to come up with a bit more variation in how they look.

The Bren gun came from the box, but the MG34 (or MG42,I can't tell the difference) came from the bitz box, I think it's from a Warlord Games frame.

As these are meant to be 'French' partisans, many of the heads provided are wearing berets.  As I have a great start on forces for the campaigns in Italy, though, I decided to make some of the figures a bit more Italian by giving a couple of figures Alpini hats from the Wargames Atlantic Italian Infantry box to make them look like some Northern Italian farmers - and so raising questions about what they're doing in Sicily or Calabria!  The chap with the red scarf and the Italian red devil hand grenade is meant to reflect the red scarves of the Communist-alligned Garibaldi Brigades. 

And these two have Beretta submachineguns, also from the Italian Infantry box set.

And then here are the rest of the first batch.

All in all, I'm quite happy with this set, and will probably be picking up another box depending on how many more civvies I want to build.

Italian Armour

 Now that I've started an Italian force, I need to consider providing them some support.  Fortunately, I already had a few Italian vehicles!  

The AB41 Armoured Car and Semovente M41 da 75/18 were previously in the collection as German beutepanzer.  I have repainted/reflagged them to their original owners.

In addition, Doug gave me a Renault R-35 that he carefully researched based on the Italian counter-attack against the American landing at Gela during Operation Husky.  It's a beautiful model, and Doug went full on into it, with a commander who can be removed, with a door on a hinge that can be closed.

And as a final bonus, Doug also gave me a turret of a M14/41 medium thank that has been dug into the ground as a 'Tobruk' gun emplacement.

Italian Priest

As my little Sicilian village grows, it's become clear that it needs a priest to tend to the needs of the residents and to be in charge of the church.  I recently found a couple of Russian priests, but these fine gentlemen would not be acceptable to minister to Roman Catholics in Sicily!  So I started a search for a suitable mid-20th century Italian priest.  There's a great variety of mediaeval and dark ages priests available, even suitable priests and monks for Napoleonic Spain.  To my eyes, however, none of these look right for 1940s Italy.  I discussed this with my friend Doug, who simply reached into his collection of unpainted miniatures and gave me a plastic Perry Miniatures ACW officer in a frock coat.

I took a cut away his sword and pistol, and also trimmed his moustache.  I also extended his frock coat with some green stuff.  An Italian priest would likely wear a biretta, but that would exceed my meagre modelling skillz.  So instead I gave him a simple skull cap (aka zucchetto).  I kept the officer's sash to be the priest's fascia.  A village priest would likely have plain black fascia and zucchetto, but that would be pretty boring or even invisible against the black cassock, so instead I promoted him to monsignor so that he'd be allowed to wear purple.  As I painted him, I was reminded of Sir Alec Guiness and Leo McKern in Monsignor Quixote, a 20th-Century retelling of Don Quixote set in Spain shortly after the end of Franco's regime.  

His face is a little unfortunate.