A blast from the past....Raid on St. Nazaire

This week in a change to our scheduled programme  played a game of Raid on St Nazaire... an old Avalon Hill boardgame which first came out in 1987.  It's one of those games that I always used to see in games shops (in the days when we had games shops) but never actually played.  We had been due to play a AWI boardgame but as Andrew had just acquired this and was keen to give it a go we changed plans.

RoSN is a solitaire game but it works quite well with 2 with the German player rolling a lot dice to determine the effects of gunfire and being in charge of the arriving German reinforcements.

The game is a very typical AH 80's style game...lots of hard to decipher counters ( the colour scheme on the commandos is especially hard to read) and charts to roll on.  There's a chart for just about everything!  The board itself is very pretty with counters moving from area to area denoted by movement lines on the map.

The British boats and commandos arrive in the 1st turn and have to weather a lot of gunfire on the way in.  It can be quite a demoralising experience as there is very little that you can do in response.  I was lucky in that most of my casualties in these turns were comparatively light:  most of the boats were slowed down and my approach had to be staggered over a couple of turns but at least only a couple of boats were actually sunk at this stage.

By the end of turn 1 we had reached the Old Mole and were drawing a lot of gunfire.  One of my MTBs was able to sink an outlying German minesweeper which at least reduced some of the attacks but the combination of searchlights and guns was beginning to tell.

Luckily the Campbeltown wasn't slowed down and rammed the Normandie dock gates at full speed, off-loading her cargo of Commandos before being scuttled and destroying the gates (the commandos are the orange counters...Germans are grey and boats are green).

The commandos were then able to pour across into the town, attacking the Pump Station and Winding gear.  Some units have a specific target (which gives them a bonus to destroy it) but I managed to forget all about this until all my demolition teams were in the wrong places!

Because of the delays caused by enemy gunfire my 2nd wave arrived a couple of turns later and poured ashore at the Old Mole and headed for a 2nd set of lock  gates, fighting off Germans who had appeared in the town ahead of them.

The Germans arrive at random locations (determined by another table)...luckily most of them seemed to arrive in the very top right of the map which kept them a long way from the action for most of the game.  The few that did try taking on the commandos tended to come off worst (not surprisingly)

By the end of the evening I had managed to destroy or damage most of the objectives in the southern half of the map and the Campbeltown had wrecked the lock gates.  A lot of the surviving boats managed to make it out to sea safely (whether they made it back across the Channel is another story!).  This did leave the commandos to fight their way out of St Nazaire.

The game was great fun and certainly gives a flavour of the huge task that faced the attackers.  In reality out of the 611 men who took part in the raid, only 228 made it back safely to Britain.  169 were killed and 215 became POWs.  5 somehow managed to make it to Spain with the help of the French Resistance.  Many of the boats were destroyed before they could get away.  89 decorations were awarded to the raiders including 5 VCs.  German casualties included over 360 dead.

Excellent fun and a game system that has aged surprisingly well.  I did find I needed this essential bit of kit to read some of the counters though!!!  I could blame the small counters and the colour schemes but I suspect my aging eyes might have something to do with it...