General Rookie

'Um, right. Er, well then. Carry on!

This is my take from a 'rookie' General's point of view on my first ever tournament. From what I could tell from some of the armies I saw on display and some familiar faces in the FoW crowd, I knew this was not going to be an easy day.

On April 22nd I found myself in Petawawa at Perkins' 15 minutes before games were about to start. I registered earlier in the month and paid my fee once I got in the door. I was scrambling to find somewhere to hide my case and backpack. I was already a mess trying to think of what kind of day it was going to be. I had played no more than a dozen games up to this point and was so busy the past few weeks to even look at my FoW stuff, let alone read up on missions or talk to other DD members about what I should expect.

After coming away with a hard fought victory my first game, I found myself with a huge uphill fight in my second round matchup. It's unfortunate neither my opponent nor myself can read, because we both botched up the mission and we had everything on the table at the start. OOPS!
It was a quick game and there were bombs from planes and some sporadic rocket fire that more or less rendered me very much on the weak side of trying to flank an objective to at least make a game of it, wait.....what?? Both of my command elements are dead? Hmm......good game sir.

Waiting patiently for my third match, the realization that I was taking the Australian DIV CAV into a cityscape was a little troublesome to say the least. After my opponent pretty much blocked my left axis of advance with AT guns and open fields to cross, it forced me into the narrow city streets. German 88's had the centre street covered to the half-way mark of the board and only turned into a good fight on both sides once I had some Marders to contend with. Neither my opponent, nor myself could really gain much ground, I had both objectives covered very well and likewise had his surrounded across the train tracks that were the 50% of the line in the sand. I did some damage early on, destroying a few Infantry stands and pinning one of his platoons early on, it allowed me to at least tuck my tanks in alleyways and force him to bring his observers up. Mine stayed in place well enough to continue my 25 pounder barrage and kill some units. At the end of the match, we had a 1-1 draw with neither of us inflicting enough damage to gain a point advantage. On turn 5 I was too busy getting my Shermans from the 8th Army into play, I forgot about my recon units I had on the sidelines. A gross error on my part for sure, as I could have used them to gain some ground and potentially re-direct some attention.

So I went 1-1-1 through the day and could have done a little better, I may look at some changes to my list, but was actually happy with the way it performed against players of more experience than myself. The crew at Perkins' in particular Gary and Bob were great, and had some help feeding us at lunch, which was provided as well. I'm looking forward to working on some more of my buildings for my Italian layout and hopefully we'll see that on one of the tables in July. I know Drew took some great pics of bombing the crap outta my artillery positions, so hopefully we see them soon.