The Rally Phase: An ASL Blog

Huge break in my writing was also a huge break in my ASL'ing!

Essentially work and life changed dramatically for me over the past 6 weeks. I have had 2 job changes in a relatively short period of time. My previous employer gave me a nice promotion and extra responsibilities which was great. What was also great was that a new job opportunity opened up and I was lucky enough to get that job. So I went from an excellent situation to an even better one which seems pretty rare so I feel very blessed.

My ASL counters went unpunched. My ASL Journals were unread. My regular game night for ASL went un-attended. It was a very game-less period in which ASL was neglected.

The bright spot was that I had plenty of time to digest and upon my return to ASL found that I forgot only about half of what I knew which wasn't too much to begin with so I was alright!

Last weekend there was a great ASL day at The Gamer's Armory locally and I was lucky enough to play against a guy named Derrick who walked me through my first guns and armor game. We played an early war scenario (I'll have to look it up later) that featured Germans and Russians with a little armor and a nice QSU 37 gun along with a more powerful 88.

I drew the Germans and Derrick had the unenviable position of playing the Russians in this scenario that, on paper, looked pretty German slanted. I believe it'd be even more German slanted with a good player commanding the Germans.

Here are the things I took away from the game:
* You cannot immobilize or kill an AFV if you don't shoot at it. Take the shot!
* AFVs and Guns add a ton of flavor to the game that infantry and support weapons just don't add to it.
* A patient, knowledgeable, teacher can make anything seem easy. I had glanced through chapters C & D only and he made the rules easily digestible without me having to ask a ton of questions nor did he hold back when fringe situations arose. Do I know everything about AFVs? No. Do I know enough to play again? Yes. That's the key here!

I am struck, again, by how intuitive the ASL rules are. If you can do it in real life there's a way (in most cases) to do it in ASL. For example, the crew manning my AT gun routed. The half-track that moved it into position was immobilized, but the crew survived. I could get that crew out of the half-track and have them man the gun. How cool is that?

Likewise I'm impressed by how many ways there are to solve the puzzles in ASL. Infantry in an AFV heavy scenario still played a key role and give the defender something to consider since CC with infantry can be nasty business. I had more fun with my DCs even though they didn't have any effect they could have and that would have been neat. I think perhaps set DCs might have been a better option to funnel traffic on the map, but still it was great to throw em out there in a last ditch effort.

Ultimately the game came down to the last turn in a tense face-off between 4 Russian tanks and my lone 88 who had some spectacular results with ROF in the previous turn. In the end though the sustained fire was unable to get the damage I needed inflicted and those pesky Russians got away to fight another day.

So what does all this mean? It means play, play, play and try new things. I had never dealt with towing guns and setting them up. The rules for it were pretty easy and we even dealt with two kinds of gun deployments with the QSU (Quick Set Up) vs. the 88 which required a full turn to get crewed.