The March of Father Time

Sadly, the house of Prufrock had a recent birthday, which forced the painful realisation that I am not as young as I once was. 

One bonus though was that workmates kindly put the hat around to get a prezzy card for me, accompanied by the stern directive to 'get something for yourself'. 

Needing not to be told a second time, I promptly ordered some Memoir '44 materials - the Breakthrough kit and the Winter Wars expansion, to be exact.

SP came over today (Labour Day) and we tried out the Sword Beach Breakthrough scenario. What a good game it was.

As the Allies I took an immediate pounding from a well directed air attack on my left. We had some hard fighting for the 6th Airborne to do around the Orne and Caen canal bridges while also trying to get off the beach. 

We took a beating, I have to say. Despite some fortunate dice, the Airborne were first ousted from the bridges and then destroyed as SP got reinforcements to where they needed to be.

We made heavy weather of it on the beaches. Fierce counter-attacks held up progress and took heavy toll on our men before looming reinforcements eliminated them. 

We were crushed. Thrown back into the sea, even.

Not far advanced from where we had started, but with significantly fewer troops, and about the same number of those damned Jerries!

Well played SP. We both thought it was a cracking scenario, and breakthrough a superior game to vanilla Memoir '44. 

You could almost call it...