Crossfire! A Meeting Engagement in Normandy

November 07, 2022

Crossfire in Normandy

Ran a game of Crossfire! Josh Atchley, Benjamin Earnest, Chris Bark, and I put on our second game, but it was the first for Chris. Somewhere in Normandy in late June, an armor-supported U.S. infantry battalion clashed with an armor-supported German infantry battalion. Last time we played with a lot of my toys, so we had Josh and Ben break out their FOW collections for the game and I filled out some odds and ends with my own figures. This was a large table, so all of us brought all of the western European terrain we could, and I need to make even more!

For those of you who don't know, Crossfire! needs a lot of terrain because it does not use tape measures. Most of the time you move from terrain piece to terrain piece, but you can move a stand/platoon continuously as long as you don't lose the initiative. If you want to see a review of Crossfire!, I recommend watching the Little Wars YouTube Channel for their latest video.

We did the meeting engagement scenario, but we picked terrible objectives. Technically the USA won in the first half hour of the game, but that is boring (we may have set up wrong as well), so we just decided to keep going and see what happens.

It was bloody in the end (crossfire is about results) so my armor and infantry on the right took heavy casualties (~70%). Josh on my left faired much better despite some horribly bad luck in the first 6 initiatives on that flank (terrible shooting!). However, Josh was able to use smoke cleverly, HE to suppress, and carefully use his armor to support his infantry to clear a lot of the Germans off his flank, while Chris did the same to my flank.

The highlight was Josh's stuart that was able to carefully maneuver through scattered woods to flank a Panther platoon that was fording a river. It managed to suppress and pin the panthers before being destroyed which allowed the Sherman 76s time to maneuver towards the opposite banks and engage in a deadly slug match with the Panthers. The Shermans rolled away victorious!

We all agreed that Crossfire! is an incredible game. I know that it is my new favorite set of rules for battalion-level WWII, and I think the other guys also agree.

We used house rules for the Armor combat heavily based on this blog with data sheets I made myself. They worked very well and will be using them from now on. To see all the house rules we used (and are currently using) as well as the data sheets I have put together, visit the Crossfire House Rules page on this blog or click this link.