Saturday, January 10, 2009

Memoir in the Desert - session report

This week at work (lunchtimes) I got to play a couple of games of memoir. I had taken in the base game and the Terrain pack. Because we were playing in the far too short period known as lunch I opted for the first scenario in the book which is very quick to set up.

The scenario sets up on the desert board and contains hardly any terrain. A few hills on one edge, a three hex wadi and a couple of oasis is about it and all of these are around the edge of the board. Now add in the fact that this scenario is made up of only tanks and guns and you've got a smashing fun game lined up.

I played the scenario twice against two opponents and I played the allies both times.

In the first game I started with a couple of good cards, I had an "All" and "3" card for the centre. Unfortunately I didn't start with many tanks in this region. So I planned to use up my rubbish cards to try and move units from both wings towards the center. Then I'd use the "3" then the all cards to make a smashing attack. Sadly it didn't work like that. My opponent moved forwards, and as I moved pieces in, he was smashing them, thus I was not able to build the massive smash I wanted in the central region. In the end I just ended up playing a poor game, because I was trying to move rather than attack. Although I comfort myself with the knowledge that I did still manage to get 4 medals.

After the reset we started the game in the usual manner. Both sides closed towards the center, I took a lot of hits and thought I was onto a real loser from early on. However I managed to turn it round mid game. I bypassed my opponents tanks on my left and sent my tanks straight towards the guns. Of course we traded shots tank-on-tank as I went that way but then in a couple of lucky shots I took out the guns. Then the action switched to the right wing where once again I was closing on the guns. I was taking a beating and many units were severly depleated. However I was close on an opponents single tank unit and on 5 medals, as was my opponent. I open fire and guess what. MISS! My opponent took his turn and his single tank fired at my single tank and guess what. HIT!

So I ended the day happy to have played two good games but just a little sad becuase of two losses.

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