The news of my death have been mistaken

I am still alive and still hardly have a social life, which really prevents me from having anything much to say about hobbies and fun stuff.  I still buy way too much gaming junk only to have it sit and collect dust.  But, I have really started to drive forward with getting back into the hobby.   

How serious am I, well, a few Saturdays ago, I had a trial run of the Osprey’s Silver Bayonet with two friends, Glen and Craig.  Since all of the figures are unpainted and we were using proxies for the monsters, I didn’t take any pictures as evidence that it really did happen.  This is the first miniatures game that I played in since 2018, or possibly 2017 (?).  I like the mechanics of the system, so I will probably be doing some more in the future.  

But that is not all!  Saturday, I played in a game of Fistful of TOWS with Ravi, Pat, and Steve.  Ravi was running it as a trial run to see how the system works.  I guess it was okay, but I still haven’t heard of a good modern battalion size rules system out there yet as they either focus on the tech available during the ‘80s or only skirmish vs insurgents.  It is something seriously lacking in hobby.  Anyways, the scenario was a reinforced Russian Rifle battalion in BMPs, supported a half strength T-72 battalion, an engineer company, and a SP battalion, plus other support elements, including a recon company and drones vs a Ukrainian leg infantry battalion with Javelins and Stingers, plus a tank company.  I played the Russian left flank with a recon platoon, a BMP company, the engineer company, a SPAA battery, a SP-ATGM company, and the artillery battalion.  Steve pushed the rest.  I barely lost anything, but I was using caution and over watch.  In the end, it was pretty much a tie with us seizing one of the two objectives, but Steve’s force was wrecked and Pat’s Ukrainians were pretty much wiped out too.  We probably could have taken the second objective with what I still had, but we couldn’t expect to hold against a counter-attack if one would occur, so we stopped the advance.  Pictures below are from this game.

Opening turn with my Russians the closest to the river

My recon platoon engaging leg infantry on the other side of the river and routing them

Several turns in to the game.  I am preparing to cross the river.  The smoke in the woods towards the bottom of the picture was a ATGM firing and missing my recon platoon.

Hostile tank in the woods finally knocked out my recon platoon, but was chased off by my BMP's ATGMs.

Almost at the end of the game.  My engineer company (the five vehicles near the village - the white paper is an artillery barrage from my SP battalion) would get to the village, dismount in good order and seize the village.

Speaking of posting on this blog, I am really going to try to post once a month.  I am hoping to be mostly what I am working on, but I am trying just get use to posting things again and get into a habit of doing it.