Hitting the Beach - Heroes of Normandie Style

The scenario pack sleeve - yes it really does feature a ‘hero’ character that looks like the above!

The back of the outer sleeve - note the use of squares.

Following on from recent post about Heroes of Normandie the first of the two expansions I was able to source has arrived. The D-Day Scenario pack consists of six double sided geomorphic terrain boards and three sheets of counters. The former features everything you would expect in a littoral based game so the sea, beach, defences and the beginnings of the hinterland are covered whilst the game counters include a lot of offensive and defensive stuff - bangalores, grapnels, shovels, flamethrowers etc for the former and various beach defences for the latter. The US have an engineer type unit whilst the Germans have a fortress style garrison. All very ‘Saving Private Ryan’ - in fact there is a set of overlays available from one of the associated Facebook groups that feature Captain Miller and his unit from the film, the idea being you could print them off, mount them on suitable card and away you go. 

The rest of the contents look something like the below:

Two of the game boards. These are 7 x 7 squares and the squares themselves are 40mm across. Ideal Portable Wargame sized actions methinks - certainly for 15mm although 20mm would work (vehicles typically deploy over two squares).

Landing craft, beach defences and part of the Atlantic Wall

The Germans and yet more defensive positions

A close up of the units, in this case the Germans. Everything you need to know about the unit is featured on their counter

The Americans along with some hardware for tackling the defences and yet another piece of the Atlantic Wall.

I have scored a couple of other bits and pieces in support of this system - a couple of terrain packs and an upgrade kit that takes the core system up to the current version of the rules. In terms of the terrain boards I now have eighteen - six each from the base game featuring generic Normandy countryside, the D-Day set mentioned and also from the Carentan set - these feature a number of buildings in a village/town style setting. With the various terrain overlays I am pretty much set up for a wide variety of battlefields to fight over so my plan is that once I have organised the collection I shall be able to do exactly that.

This mini project certainly satisfies many of my ongoing and circumstantial requirements in that when stored it will be be fairly compact, the production quality is very high and so is visually very good to look at and above all of this it is a fun system.

Looking forward to this!