Naturelich Games

On Wednesday, Shelak and I played our second Memoir '44 scenario: Omaha Beach (scenario #5). We are both beginning to like Memoir '44 a lot. The first game we played a week ago was real fun and we decided to try the famous Omaha Beach battle. I guess this scenario depicts the first wave of Allied attacks. We picked this scenario because we wanted to try armor and artillery units which were not included in the first introductory scenario. Plus, we had to give the beach board a try. This required us to digest plenty of new terrain rules that we hadn't really bothered with during our first session (e.g. beach and ocean hexes, hills, bunkers, etc.). The hedgehogs came into play, too. Therefore it was a real small challenge.

Omaha beach scenario
Find the starting position above. The Allied forces outnumber the Axis forces by a few. But the German troops are heavily fortified by bunkers and their artillery can hit almost anything on the board. In the first game, Shelak played the Allied forces while I was defending the coastline. As we quickly noticed, the artillery units are practically invincible for Allied armor units (at least when attacking from the seaside). In the center, the Allies broke the German lines with armor units and were able to take a city. However, the Axis simply concentrated on wiping infantry units with their artillery and the game was quickly over, scoring 6 medals for the Axis and 4 medals for the Allied player.

We switched sides for the second game. Due to my command cards, the Allies had to focus on the left flank during their first few moves. As the Axis forces had issued far more sandbags than originally anticipated the right flank was totally guarded and the allied armor unit was annihilated very very quickly. I therefore decided to focus my attack on the center and the left flank of the board. The US troops took out the artillery unit in the bunker with two armor units that had broken through the center passage. Those two units were placed on the hill right next to the artillery. This at least allowed me to roll one battle die per attack and I eventually got lucky. However, Shelak was able to defeat many many infantry units on the left flank while they were attempting to break through. This was eventually successful but my losses were terribly high. One of my infantry units had been shot down to just one figure. I thought to be lucky when I drew a Behind Enemy Lines command card which basically enabled this unit to move six hexes in one turn, gain one victory point by taking a village and start a close assault attack in the middle of their movement. The maneuver went perfectly fine, but the Germans wiped that infantry unit with an Barrack attack which gave them another victory point and made me loose one. Lesson learned: at least have an infantry unit with two men standing when you take a remote village (in the middle of the game - it shouldn't be a problem during endgame).
Eventually, I had run out of command cards for the left flank. I therefore tried to activate my special forces unit plus the remaining infantry unit and moved it towards the center flank. I tried to break through the center hole in the German defense, but this was the ranger's death sentence and Shelak's medal numero six. A six to one victory - how embarassing!

The final result of the rematch

To sum it up: the results of our two games are in total sync with the AAR (after action reports) on the Memoir '44 site: only 19% Allied victories. Seems to be a pretty hard one for the Allies to win...