If this play-by-comment Combat Mission experiment was a frame of snooker, I reckon the referee would be warning the players that a re-rack was imminent if they continued in their current cagey fashion. Reduced to a single ‘tank’ apiece, and…
In Poland a person with a great sense of humour is sometimes said to “laugh like a Lodowician”. The Silesian city shows its mirthful/mischievous side halfway through Turn 14 when a Studebaker truck barrelling along Copernicus Street decides to explode…
September 17 is ‘Ladislav Day’ in Lodowice. When there isn’t a war on, citizens gather on North Bridge to commemorate a Catholic priest drowned by Protestant rioters in 1621. After tossing little decorated crucifixes into the Vistula at precisely midday…
I’ll need to tread carefully while writing and illustrating today’s report. Although house rules mean each team has perfect intel on enemy AFV movements, opposing grunts can move unseen until CMRT’s sophisticated spotting routines decide they’ve been detected.
Dozens of the Narcissus for which Lodowice is moderately famous, have been thrown into confusion by the events of the past ten turns. In several spots in the grounds of Lodowice University and on the banks of the Vistula, subterranean…
Four of the eight AFVs that started this game of PvP play-by-comment Combat Mission: Red Thunder are alive and kicking at the start of turn 10, but, as two of the four – the IS-2 and the King Tiger –…
“They say fortune favours the bold, but they never explain what fortune is likely to do when both sides display equal boldness.” (T. Stone, 2023)
The waypoints and ambush arcs I plot on behalf of the Comment Commanders at the start of Turn 8 promise fireworks. The Panther’s final path pyramid sits in map square a4W, a spot the IS-2’s commander and gunner plan to…
There’s no mistaking which tanks are the lionesses this turn and which the worried/weary/wounded wildebeest. While the two Soviet AFVs retreat eastward before pivoting to confront their foes, the three German felines purposefully close distance and look for opportunities to…
If there was a Hundred-style win predictor at the bottom of the above screenshot, I reckon the red German section of the bar would be at least 50% longer than the blue Soviet one. Outnumbered 3 to 2 (3 to…
Ten seconds into this turn’s sixty-second action phase, the two tanks involved in last turn’s surreal square dance meet again. Although both gunners are expecting trouble and, on paper, are equally adept, it’s the triggerman ensconced in the…
Aged seven, Leonid Ivanovich Arkhipov fell from a speeding express train near Dnipropetrovsk. Three hours after the accident he was found unconscious but otherwise unhurt laying between the rails of the adjacent track. During his time on the sleepers, ten…