1st Annual Ronnie James Dio Memorial Heavy Metal Challenge

Before this gaming session we heard that the heavy metal legend Ronnie James Dio had passed away the previous day. Mr H decided to honour the awesome career of this great man by oganizing our 1st Annual Ronnie James Dio Memorial Heavy Metal Challenge game.

He decided to pick from his giganormous 20mm collection the heaviest tanks and organized a slugfest for the rest of us. Unfortunately only few of us could attend. Andy came in a bit late and thus was assigned, unbeknownst to Mr V to hidden Russian reserve and our club's biggest Dio fan, Eero (who just got to have been in every Dio concert in Finland since mid-eighties), didn't unfortunately make it to the game. My guess is that since we gt just automated replies from him during the whole day he must've been so devastated that he didn't make it to work.

We quickly altered the terrain from the previous BKC games and used Battleground WWII and until tanks were identified all German tanks were represented by PzKpfw IVs and Russians by T-34s. W Germans were in a town and Janne decided that even without any orders the objective of the Russians in 1945 would be to attack.

Here we have the right side of the Russian attack, two ISU-122s darting through marshy area from the cover of one forest to another.

The left flank of Russian attack consisted of IS-3 and a trio of IS-2s (still unidentified).
On the German right flank there was two Jagdtigers, the leftmost of which was still unindetified.
Mr V started shooting and kept rolling so brilliantly that he would've succeeded blowing up the Russian tanks even with the PzKpfw IVs, let alone with a duo of Jagdtigers and trio of King Tigers. Here we have some bonfires consisting of IS-3 and IS-2. The ISU-122s on the other flank fared no better. On the ridge behind you can see the two SU-100s that were using hidden setup. Andy controlled these and did some marvelous shooting with them.
Since it was noticed that the Russian armament was absolutely unable to penetrate the front armor of the German tanks Janne had no other choice than to try to drive like the wind through the open killing ground to engage the flanks of the Germans in the town.

Below we have some close quarter tank fighting between two Jadgtigers and the sole IS-2 to make it to the town. Due to the silly order of resolving things after scoring a hit Janne noticed that his shot had actually been targeting the real wheel and thus missed as it was fired on the building -particularly nice as this was more or less outside the IS-2's fire arc...
Nevermind the more numerous Russian casualties, the moral victory goes to the Ruskies as they managed to destroy Mr V's lone Maus. While Janne was directing ever more tanks to the German left flank Mr V decided to drive this monstrosity from the center closer to the threat and exposed it's flank to Andy's hidden SU-100s which promptly destroyed it even if the German propaganda tried to claim that the destruction was only due to electrical malfunction caused by simultaneous movement and turning of the turret.
After losing his only veteran crew Mr. V decided to evacuate the remaining tanks.

Casualties were:
Russian side: IS-3, IS-2, ISU-122, one immobilized IS-2 and ISU-122
German side: PzKpfw VIII

-Janne
(Played: May 17th, GM: Mr H, Russians: Andy, Janne, Germans: Mr V)