This game played over Skype in a single evening session with Wayne Baumber.

This battle depicts a night engagement where Eritreans need to slip through Indian lines in order to escape an envelopment.

Usually, I write AAR's recording what occurred in the battle, but I really think any such detail here would be a spoiler. And here is why.

On first glance, this scenario looks like a banker for the Allied player. He will have 8/6 moraled Indian troops with bags of leaders and plenty of Bren-Carrier support which would be a tempter for the big transport stacks that have extra firepower. Against that, the Eritreans have a lowly 6/5 morale, few leaders (and all but 1 of mine had zero modifiers).

But what the Axis player must do is study his forces and the map as well as the entry points and plan how he can get more men off than he will lose as casualties.

I came up with what seemed a good plan and for 9 of the 20 turns, I believe I had the Allies on the hop. However, for one mad second, I made a very poor game-mechanics decision, and the effect of this was to turn what could have been a victory, and I stress COULD and not would, into a game where chances suddenly became slim.

It was very disappointing as I wanted to see the game pan out and see if it was possible to get the tactics to work, but the aforementioned event changed the whole face of the game. In the end, the Eritreans exited 8 steps, but lost 9. That said, there were still 6 or 7 turns left and more casualties would have been a cert for the Eritreans, so they, or I called it there. Wayne played a good end game once he was all over the enemy, and quite frankly, there was no way of wiggling out of the fix I'd found myself in once there.

I believe this scenario can be won by either side and I will one day return to it to try the plan on another opponent.

Anyway, try this one versus an opponent, I think it will get the grey matter going. Rated a 3 in response to Wayne's 4 thus giving an overall 3.5 which I feel is about right :-)