ITLSU - Umbrella Hill, 3rd Gaza 1917

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Oh heck, here it comes!

[Martin1914]

(Photo 19) Karparc Bey sensed the situation was slipping from his grasp. He wanted to launch his counter-attack and every minute lost would make it harder to retake the redoubt. He could tell the enemy had got MGs up there now. Over the noise of rifle fire, his men would not respond and continued in their firefight.
(Photo 20) Even within the hard cover of trenches, MGs at such short range proved deadly. Losses and suppression within the Turkish companies mounted rapidly. Karparc Bey realised he had lost his combat strength and would not be able to retake the hill. He conceded defeat and would have to live with the humiliation.
156th Brigade had successfully taken and held Umbrella Hill with minimal loss, removing the threat to the main attack that was to follow. The 1/8th were down half the company, but the 1/7th hadn't lost a man.
Well there you have it. Thank you all for your comments.
3 hours to play 8 turns, representing 40 minutes of real time. The Brits ran away with it. Certainly, getting the run of the cards. The Turks couldn't get into the fight and could only be reactive. Frankly, Jase played a blinder! (Pun intended).
As for the Turkish artillery? Historically the Cameronians suffered quite heavily from retaliatory shell fire. In this scenario, Karparc Bey, rated Young Turk, had the chance of D6-1 turns of artillery fire. I rolled a 1! Summed up my night really.
Regards to all for 2019.
Mart

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Mart,
A superb series of reports, full of excitement and flavour. I could learn a lot.
Well played all.

[paulr]

 

A great looking game and fun to follow

One tweak we have made to ITLSU is to have two blinds cards for each side in the deck, only activating on the first drawn
This increases the likelihood of a blind card being drawn and reduces the frustration of large parts of a force doing nothing

We also tend to deploy our brigade commanders so they don't have to wait for the blinds card to turn up

Both of these would have made things more 'interesting' for the Scots

[Martin1914]

Thanks Paul.
I fell foul of the very thing that attracted me to TFLs rulesets like IABSM and ITLSU in the first place - card induced friction.
I like your ideas, particularly about deploying commanders. They would be waiting for their own cards in the deck rather than just the one Blinds Card. It implies they could use command pips to activate units on Blinds even before the Blinds card. I will give it a try.

Happy New Year to you.

Mart

[paulr]

The card induced friction is definitely one of the major strengths of the rules

The trick is to get the level of friction right

[Norm]

Lovely table and the lighting invokes exactly the right atmosphere for the subject.