Played against young Alan in our ongoing tour of France in 1940. Alan has described the situation well in his excellent AAR so I won't repeat here. I had set up in the town and just behind plus a force in the woods on one flank, I did think of actually completely giving up the town and deploying to to the rear to wait for the tanks. I an sure if I had done so I would have lost even more comprehensibly than I did, and to be honest well beaten anyway. The Germans have the advantage of darkness as they sweep towards the village, I had hoped to inflict some casualties and hold the town for at least an hour but his first artillery shot demoralized the stack, then straight into assault and in less than 30 mins four steps lost and Stonne in German hands. The problem then is there is no where for the French to go as there is no cover from the Germans on the ridge and their off board artillery just peppers away at the French troops causing little in the way off losses but disrupting and demoralizing the PBI at will. The French imitative was zero as in fact the French never went first in the entire game. The French H39 tanks arrive on time but I felt that I had to throw them into combat straight away in an attempt to disrupt the fine defensive line Alan had built on the ridge, not sure if this was an error, but they failed to make any headway against the German INF/HMG who just kept blasting them with small arms fire which caused morale checks which they promptly failed. In fact I though Alan was a bit cautious at one stage and if he had assaulted those tanks could well have wiped them out before the B1's arrived. The B1s were in fact late arriving and all they could do was surge towards the front line, the H39's tried to support them but this time Alan threw his INF forward in spoiling attacks and stopped the assault cold. I had move my sole a/car into his rear in a sneaky attempt to grab a ridge hex but the PZIV out paid to that. A final desperate assault by reduced INF platoons was brutely crushed by the German artillery and that was that. *This gets a low rating from me, for several reasons (a) It appears to be unbalanced (b) Once the German player has taken the ridge he digs in and sits tight waiting for the frantic French counterattack (c) The VC are strange I had a chance to win this on even though Alan had played well and had the luck of the dice, the reason is that the French need to have one undemoralized unit on the ridge to win, this statement may contradict point (a) but if my reduced INF or A/Car or B1 had survived one more turn I would have gotten the win, which would have been totally undeserved. This may be a good replay of what occurred at Stonne but it makes a very average game *