This was my first scenario played from 'Eastern Front' and also my first match against Wayne Baumber so the title "First Blood" seemed fitting enough. I went into this one believing first off, that the awake Soviet garrison would wait a turn or two to see where my scouting force would approach the village. Instead the Soviets came right out in the open and challenged the Germans halfway to the town, slowing my advance down. Some shots were traded with no effect on either side for a few turns. The second thing I expected to happen was that Soviet reinforcements would awaken right away or at least before I could get a unit into the village. Turns out that they must of tied one on the night before as the first Soviet INF reinforcement did not arrive until turn 7 or 8. I had split my forces up in three to scatter and confuse the angry garrison and this ploy worked, passing one reduced INF set-up in the road to slow me down and managing to avoid effects of opportunity fire while advancing one unit of INF into a northern town hex. That was the easy part, now I chose to retreat from the village and link up with the rest of my units to attempt some sort of fighting withdraw. At this point I had already taken one step loss and had some demoralized units outside of the town and the challenge was to endure 9 more turns without taking another loss.

I attempted to consolidate my good order units and give a fight at the same time but another Soviet INF reinforcement had awakened during this time and so 2 more platoons had left the village to counterattack -the horde was upon me. I was able to eliminate one step of Soviet INF until turn 11 when I took my second step loss and we called an end to it all with a draw as we had both met victory requirements. This was a very intriguing scenario and of course would of panned out much differently if the sleeping Soviets had awakened earlier. Then I most likely wouldn't have been able to slip a unit into the town hex unchecked and would of had to of tried inflicting 4 step losses to meet victory conditions without losing two of my own. I give it a solid '4' rating from my own personal experience with this one, especially since it was also a shared play. It was a good game of cat and mouse to start and I had originally intended to split my forces as I did but wasn't expecting the already awake Soviets to rush out to greet me. I am also very much looking forward to my next play with Wayne and it was a very enjoyable two hours time well spent.