Yet another ASL game to report. Life is good! This time, I was matching wits with the wiley Allen "It's good to be the" King. Allen wanted to play Jura Juggernauts out of the latest Schwerpunkt and took the defending Russians, who are attempting to hold three bridges over the board 40 river.

I was feeling pretty good as I looked over my OB. It's 1941, and I get an initial wave of seven 4-6-8s in HTs, along with seven assorted tanks, several of which are the mighty (for this time frame) PzIII H. This bunch is followed up by 13 more elite squads, including some assault engineers with a FT and DCs.

Facing this impressive array of force, the Russians get twenty first line squads, two 37L AT guns, and seven reinforcing tanks on turn 3. Interestingly, they have the 3 ELR, which gives them decent staying power for "day one of Barbarossa" Russians. Still, matched up against the elite German force, it would be no contest, right?

As I looked over the rest of the scenario card, I wasn't so sure. In 7.5 turns, the Germans need to exit 49 VP off the far edge of the map by turn four and then take and hold all three bridges. A little math shows that if the initial German wave takes no losses at all, you can exit all seven HTs fully loaded for the EVP, leaving 13 squads and 7 tanks to handle the 20 Russian squads and their seven tanks.

Obviously, taking no losses is fairly unrealistic. I figured I'd lose one HT/tank to each AT gun, and another HT kill from MG fire or other random fire. That would force me to exit even more force, but would still give me 13 squads and 4 tanks, which should be enough for the win.

That plan went out the window in a hurry when I malfed a PzII, PzIII, and PzIV MA in the first two turns. I was too afraid to risk the chance of recall to repair them, and decided to exit them for points and keep some extra infantry and HTs on map in exchange. Allen, meanwhile, was playing a very cagey game, maintaining concealment, sitting in stone buildings, and really making me work to clear a bridge I could exit across.

Things continued to deteriorate on my turn three when a pesky Russian fired an LMG at a HT, took it out with ROF, and later destroyed another one. Meanwhile, I used a malfed PzIII to VBM freeze another Russian, figuring the risk of Allen making a PAATC and then rolling a 4 or less to take it out was acceptable. One passed PAATC and a snakes later, the Russian squad was neutralized by a blaze/smoke counter rather than a freezing tank...

To make a long story short, I ended my turn four with the 13 squads I'd planned, but only a PzII and a PzIII to support them. Over the rest of the game, the dice gods reversed their curse enough that I was always on the verge of getting into the game, but I could never quite manage it. My FT, for example, took shot after shot and never ran out of fuel. Even better, by turn 5, I'd rolled up three heroes. Stacking them all with the 9-2 was pretty fun...Allen figured out real fast not to stack when I was taking 24-2 shots at guys in stone buildings.

Even these heroics couldn't get me through those Russian tanks and onto the last bridge, though. Allen parked four AFVs around it and kept shuffling concealed units into the front lines until I ran out of time. The game ended in amusing fashion as my 9-2/3x5-4-8/3x1-4-9 death stack dashed towards the bridge, only to met a grisly end with a snakeyes 4-2 shot from a T-26.

It's hard to judge a scenario when the luck is so wacky, but what struck me about Jura Juggernauts was the respective skill levels required for each side. The Germans need a lot of finesse to get that initial wave off with no losses, while the Russians simply sit and skulk, and even their set up is scripted. I don't think I've ever seen a scenario where the required skill gap is so vast.

That probably make it a good scenario for a grognard showing a newbie how to handle a mobile assault, but I'm not sure it's so good for tourney play. It seems like a lot could go wrong with the initial German assault, effectively putting them out of the game, while the Russians should be able to hang in to the end of almost all games, regardless of their luck or play.

Moving away from balance and onto the scenario feel, I'd say Jura Juggernauts gets mixed marks here as well. It was fairly frustrating to see the big HT force on paper and then have to drive it off without doing anything with it. The Russian force seemed better than I'd have expected ELR-wise for that period of the war as well.

Keep in mind, though, these are the ramblings of an embittered loser, are probably biased, and should take nothing away from Allen, who played a very solid game, made every move he needed to win, and even managed to make the whole experience enjoyable for me. I'm already looking forwards to our next game, in which I plan to exact a horrible revenge...