Silver Bayonet 21 - Operation All The Way (1)
Tags
My usual Vietnam opponent and I revisited GMT's Silver Bayonet to finally dig into a campaign scenario, in the this case Operation All The Way which kicked off Operation Long Reach in the Ia Drang valley in late October 1965.
This was a two day effort, starting yesterday July 2.
We've played Silver Bayonet many times in the past, but the most recent was three and half years ago, so we're both rusty on the rules. Also, we only a campaign scenario for a couple of turns. So it was a slow start, finishing up Turn 1 around noon (from a 9:00 am start). Subsequent turns went faster, and we finished off Turn 5 right after 4:00 pm. I believe we'll be able to finish or come very close to finishing today.
Today we picked up at the top of Turn 6 and played through Turn 13, where I managed to acquire an automatic victory by dint of destroying 20 steps of NVA, getting supplies to Doc Co, and eliminating an HQ. The HQ was particularly troublesome. It took me at least 5 turns to eliminate it. I rolled multiple 9s and 10s on both bombardment and manuever combat, which produced no effect results for turn after turn. Pretty crazy!.
We did get better with the rules today. We were playing some of it wrong yesterday, and both of us ended up with more casualties than we should have.
And as usual, the turns went faster the further into the game we got. I suspect the campaign game would play pretty quickly once the rules were internalized.
Given the full campaign is roughly double the number of turns, I believe we could likely do a full campaign in three days. Would probably be good to do both the other smaller campaigns first, though.
Here's the state at the end of the game:
