First off, this is a very tough scenario to set-up, play and even more tough for the Commonwealth to win. There are also a wide variety of morales for different battlegroups; the axis has three different ones (9/7;7/6 and 8/6) as well as the Commonwealth (8/8;8/7 and 8/6). In the course of play it is highly likely these units will get mixed together in some way, whether they are fleeing from demoralization or reinforcing other groups.

Axis objective: keep at least one unit intact on the upper hill levels and eliminate 10 or more New Zealander/Britsh steps. The key to axis success lies in getting their trucks up the hill, unload reinforcements, scramble to the upper hill area and dig-in as fast as possible. The axis deployment leaves a gap between the West, Italian flank and the East, German one. And there is also a gap between the Bersaglieri units South of the flanks. These gaps must be filled as quickly as possible.

Commonwealth objective: eliminate all units in the upper hill area and link up with the Tobruk garrison. This is a tall order even though both New Zealand and Britain have superior numbers and a lot of tanks. However, to counter those tanks are plenty of A.T. guns along with an Italian 90mm A.A.gun which is just about as capable of knocking out a Matilda as it's German, 88mm counterpart. My advice is to forget linking up right away and focus all British units deployed in the West, foot and mobile alike, on stopping those trucks from getting to the upper hill area and with the Southwestern Kiwi force to rush right into the Bersaglieri in hopes of eliminating the 90mm before it can be moved. Once again, those trucks have to be stopped as they are the only means of transport the axis has.

I won't go into too much detail of the scenario play as it was long at 36 turns and it was clear midway through that there was no hope in eliminating all of the axis blockading forces. The Italians were successful in getting all of their trucks through Bersaglieri lines and transporting their field pieces. Some bren carriers were sent to try to stop the trucks but were too late and only managed to slow some unloaded German units down through morale checks but even they made it through eventually as OBA covered their movement, eliminating one of the carriers. Another factor which benefited the axis was the visibilty limit of 2 hexes as this was a night scenario. Had there been full visibilty the Commonwealth forces would of easily been able to eliminate both trucks and weapon units alike and roll on over with the tanks. Also, the axis had incredible OBA available to them at: 1x24,2x16 and 4x12. There were some curious random events which also worked against the New Zealanders -twice in play a Kiwi HMG unit rained friendly fire down on it's comrades at point-blank range!

The Kiwis have not had much luck in these 'Desert Rats' scenarios so far and with my play, after this scenario sit at only 1 victory and 4 losses but they did give the German flank a hard time and though they never managed to link-up with the Tobruk garrison they were able to eliminate 14 steps of German INF and destroy all of the 50mm A.T. guns the hard way, through assaults. The problem was that once a German post was taken the Kiwis were left stacked 3 high and the axis OBA obtained deadly results with sometimes up to a 70+ column on the bombardment table. The New Zealand losses were: 9 steps of INF, and 2 steps of HMG. With the British, the garrison kept getting pushed back everytime they tried to breakthrough and only managed to take two Italian positions and lost both of them soon after. In the Southern portion of the battleground the Bersaglieri positions were regrouped after the field guns were transported and formed a wall of defense denying access to the upper hill areas from the second Kiwi attack group and did not give up one post by scenario's end.

So it ends with a decisive axis victory and Tobruk must wait another day to be relieved. I rated this one a 3 out of 4 because of the challenge factor and the amount of coordination required. However, I did have to use smoke, wire and decoy markers to distinquish units of different morales that got mixed in together so play was as tedious as it was long, taking four days to complete. Not a bad scenario overall and though it was another loss for New Zealand they did give a good fight for once without the assistance of the Maoris.