My original plan for last weekend was to spend my Saturday relaxing – I’d had a busy weekend on the one previous (with family events and running a game for one half of TTE), the Sunday was to be airsoft, so Saturday would be a lazy, lazy day.
And then Ben, the other half of TTE casually mentioned an interest in a game of Sangin and so, I offered to run a quick game. After quickly writing up a basic idea, sending off the in-character brief and then cursing myself for not having written a character creator app yet, I had a prepared battle good to go.
Unfortunately, the gods were against us and Ben had to drop out for some real-world stuff. Luckily, we had a backup man in the form of Evan, the fourth soul in charge of moderating the Ultramodern Discord and an all-round great fellow. He found himself with an evening to kill and so was promoted from “watching with interest” to “running his team”. Luckily, this is one benefit of remote play – if something happens all the usual concerns of travel and having people on hand don’t really matter, you can just swap out the person at the other end of the camera.
(All times are Bazi local time)
0900: TTE squad arrives at vehicle interdiction point in SUV (Vic1) and a Pickup truck
(Vic2)0903: Target vehicle enters interdiction point
0905: Vic2 impacts target vehicle. TTE employees recover target. Team and HVT exit the scene in SUV
0907: Unknown hostiles begin high-speed pursuit of Vic1. TTE HQ begins calls to an Unknown number in Albion to request additional support.
0917: Vic1 receives catastrophic damage and is forced to halt at roadside. TTE Team disembarks with HVT and takes shelter in a nearby garage awaiting collection.
0920: 2x vehicles halt at crashed Vic1 and begin sweep of the area
0925: Predicted arrival of extraction vehicle sourced from Albion Contact
Transcription of logs recovered by AESA Remote Communications Team from servers of Tactical Training Enterprises (TTE) after the Al-Khoufra Affair
Translated to English, the four-man contractor team Evan would be controlling had been hired to snatch an HVT from his morning commute. After successfully executing a traffic stop (forcibly) and bundling their target into the main vehicle, the contractors then found themselves in a high-speed pursuit and exchanging gunfire with their pursuers. Receiving enough damage to cause them to halt, the TTE team went to ground in a civilian area waiting for their evac. Unfortunately, their pursuers followed behind and are now sweeping to clear the area.
The game takes place as they decide to make a move, needing to return to the road to be ready to be collected. However, they aren’t 100% when the extraction will appear, forcing them to potentially sprint out of line under fire.
As for the table layout, I decided to swap out the buildings on the table and go with some of Sarissa’s colonial buildings to make more of a suburban area feel. As well as the large civilian buildings, I also added the construction buildings from Supreme Littleness Designs for a little variation (and because they would offer a potential overwatch point). Because of the civilian setting, I got to break out all my vehicles to fill the streets, as well as a few figures for civilians to help set the mood.
I think the one thing missing is some pavement pieces to sit under the buildings to help make it look a little less “buildings plopped on a baseboard”. I think I’ll work on some separate pieces to allow different arrangements of the buildings, or even leaving them open topped for some area under construction or as a marketplace.
While the local civilians stood around gawping at the crashed car and taking photos, the two pursuing vehicles rolled up and came to halt, letting the figures inside disembark. The locals quickly spotted the unmarked black cars and decided not to risk stealing from people packing PKMs in the boot.
Down the other end of the board, we had the garage where the TTE team of Contractors had gone to ground along with their HVT. The contractors were a mix of Elite (Evan), two Veterans (Wolf and Fox) and an Average (Bear) – all armed with assault rifles, pistols, body armour and frag grenades except Bear who swapped out his assault rifle for an LMG (automatic rifle in the rules).
If that squad layout seems pretty familiar, that’s because this is a learning game much like the first one I played remotely. For a new player, four characters is a reasonable number to activate and get used to running around (especially if they also have body armour) while the mix of ratings provides a range of values to marvel/shout at based on how skilled they are. Assault rifles are the basic weapon everyone uses but adding in an LMG or DMR gives you a feel for some of the different weapons.
Sidenote – This is a personal point, but I still really dislike the fact this version of the game refers to LMGs as Automatic Rifles. Although the term is still used by the US Army for the role of the SAW gunner, when referring to weapons it is a term that refers specifically to the BAR and similar weapons in the era of the Bolt Action/Semi-auto rifle. It also acronyms down to AR, the same as Assault Rifle which leads to some confusion.
With their command providing updates from the overhead drone, the Contractors started moving out to take up defensive positions. Evan took up cover behind the roller door, watching the street as Fox bounded across the gap. Both ended their move having “Gone Firm”, making the best use of cover to avoid being spotted or engaged.
Side note: while in the first game we managed to maintain pretending to be adults, playing at late night meant we all started finding “Going Firm” funnier than perhaps a group of grown men should. Going forward, I’ll be referring to it as “Gone To Ground”.
Wolf, the contractor keeping an eye on the HVT, went out the back door of the garage to stick to cover, dragging his captive with him.
Out on the streets, the Bazi locals in leather jackets pushed past the civilians, as the smart started finding cover.
Bear moved outside to the street corner and Went To Ground, setting up a pretty terrifying field of fire down the street.
Wanting to get a good line of sight, and potentially work on a plan to get the hell out of here, Evan moves up to the concrete walls and peeked around the corner. He quickly spots some attackers, probably not helped by the man with the PKM swaggering down the street.
Unfortunately, this quick look around the corner did attract the attention of some of the pursurers. Luckily for Evan, this spot occurred at the end of his movement, meaning that I had to stop him (because -40% to spot while moving is a nightmare) leaving me without enough AP to actually take a shot.
From the north side, the local bad guys reached the point where they rounded the corner and got into contact. Unfortunately, the lead fighter was completely lacking in observation skills and ended up in the centre of the street.
The guy behind him was a little better trained, so rather than rushing out of cover, he instead managed to get behind the sofa on the street, Go To Ground and then spot Fox as he lurked at the street corner.
What a horrible sofa to hide behind.
Down the other end of the street, the Contractors had spotted the approaching bad guys and decided to do something about it. Fox at the front started the part off with a few shots after reporting in the target, but Bear was already on the ball to unleash hell with the LMG.
And down goes the first enemy contact. Luckily his teammate behind the sofa was just out of the LMG’s burst zone (and it was safe to say the civilian pieces would have gotten out of the way rather quickly when the rounds start flying).
With his teammates having opened up, Evan took another peek around the corner and managed to actually get a good line of sight on the attackers starting to advance to the sound of gunfire as it echoes off the surrounding buildings.
Things were starting to get a little spicy for the Contractors – there were now multiple groups of OPFOR converging on their location. Admittedly they have some pretty secure firing lines too, with the static defence letting them spend the AP on shooting AND spotting in the same turn. However, that didn’t stop the enemy fighters from moving closer and closer, bounding from cover to cover.
That said, the enemy was not invulnerable – Fox managed to put two shots into the enemy that attempt to hide behind the column basically blunting the northern offensive group.
Perhaps most worrying was the masked figure totting the PKM – he had dug in behind the concrete, taking full advantage of both the Cover and the -30% Going To Ground modifier. This makes him a pain to actually spot and hard to hit, giving him a pretty great defensive position, even against troops with far superior training.
Of course, he was going to need it. After spotting the two bad guys closing on him, Evan pulled the pin on a frag grenade and tossed it around the corner. Both fighters were inside the inner kill zone and so receive the full blast of shrapnel tearing them apart. Even the machine gunner was on the edge of the damage zone although luckily the concrete blocks absorbed the flying shrapnel.
As a side note, we spotted after the game that we had been using the wrong AP costs for throwing grenades. It actually uses 3AP to prime and throw a grenade. We’ll remember it for the future.
With the rounds flying outside (and having just been covered in dust from his own frag), Evan’s next activation put him inside the building and in cover.
More concerning was the Bad Guys now literally on top of the team. The lead gunman came round the corner, saw Fox and put two pistol rounds into his chest. Luckily the body armour managed to absorb the damage (1d10 damage vs 1d10+4 armour) and fired back, joined rather swiftly by Wolf who repositioned to shoot past him and deliver a wounding blow that dropped the pistol fighter to the deck.
Evan, having just seen the injured bad guy crawling past the window and another OPFOR having left the cover of the sofa down the street to regroup with his team, realised they were probably about to be overrun by another push. And so rather than risking himself, Evan simply pull the pin and posted it through the window.
The injured gunman, his back to the car in the street had a brief moment to spot something land in front of him before roughly 180g of Composition B ignited. The fragments wiped out both guys right next to it almost instantly, while the gunman on the other side of the car was taken out, even with the cover benefit.
Something I’ve noticed in Skirmish Sangin players is a concept I’d call Frag Rage. Basically, as soon as you discover just how powerful frag grenades can be, you soon realise that the best solution for many problems is 3″ Kill Zone, 3D10 damage.
With this detonation, there was now a single enemy bad guy left standing. Unfortunately for the Contractors, the specific bad guy left standing was totting 100 rounds in a box magazine, a foul mood and in a pretty good position behind a set of cinder blocks and able to lay down a storm of fire.
Time for the Contractors to work the problem.
First step? Spot the guy. The cinder blocks + Going To Ground modifier made him hard to spot. That said, opening fire with a weapon using the Infantry Weapons skill reveals your position rather well, and with another AP (thanks to using Tempo Points) to boost the skill, Evan got the spot. With the final AP, the spot was passed to the team via radio.
Having had the target passed to him from his teammates, Bear was able to bring his LMG onto the target. The way suppression works in V2 means that, even though the enemy was in heavy cover, when you miss you can start to degrade the capabilities of whoever you’re shooting at. With the combined fire from Evan, Bear and even Wolf inside the single-room house (after telling the HVT to open his mouth and cover his ears), the suppression was able to keep the MG positions head down.
With the MG down to 90% suppression, and rounds pitting the cinder blocks, Fox decided to pull the hail mary move. Busting down the flank, Fox came to a halt and fired an aimed burst at the target… that reduced him to pinned and rendered him basically combat ineffective.
And at this stage, the game ended. But then again, this is a narrative wargame. And so Evan decided to add some narrative – picking one of the unattended vehicles nearby, the contractors bundled their HVT into the back, as well as dragging the last gunman with them. He may prove a useful source of intel for the TTE team in the region.
At the start of each turn, I’d had Dan (the other half of TTE and Bazi Prince murderer) roll a D10 to decide when the extraction team would actually arrive. Unfortunately, the rolling was not on the best side for the contractors, leaving them delayed and waiting for extract.
Which of course made it amusing that, having borrowed a local vehicle in a real “we’ll do it ourselves” move, guess who decided it was time to show up? A certain Tsarist contractor and his friend, fresh off a previous job and still in the area after their last gig, luckily put in contact with the TTE team thanks to a mutual friend on the other end of a telephone line.
And with that, the game was over! Everyone involved had a really good time, and even in places where we got the rules wrong, it was still really fun to play and pretty satisfying for everyone crowded around the table, even if it was done virtually. And for all my comments about things I’d tweak and change, the core of the game is everything I loved about the first version of Sangin when I played it in 2014, now updated and improved, slimming down some of the nitty-gritty that could lead to extra mental work while adding in a few new systems to really make the game feel realistic.
From a scenario designer’s perspective, it didn’t quite go as planned – my intention was to force the player to move, to have to do a running gun battle down the streets against the fore, rather than turtling up in the corner. Talking to Evan during the game, he pointed out I’d given him far too good of a defensible position and, with no evac in sight, it didn’t make sense to move. What I should have done is either position the starting building in the centre of the map or at the very least put it in the centre of the far side, with multiple firing lines on to it. The other option would have been to deploy OPFOR figures a little closer in, forcing some reaction other than digging in.
Finally, in terms of the setting, this is maybe not the best place to be. Although the mission was successful, they did decide to potentially poke the bear by kidnapping one of their pursuers. Hopefully, they aren’t related to any form of local government… right?