At 15 counters, this scenario is the littlest I have ever played. It pitted Cretan villagers against German paratroopers on the first morning of the invasion . The objective here for the Germans is to clear all Cretans from hex 98:0810 out to a two hex circumference. What does this mysterious hex hold? Players are left to guess. A company of 3rd Regiment paratroopers moves from the eastern edge of board 97 into Cretan held territory. There are only six Cretan irregular units against three German infantry plus a Para MG. The Germans have 15 turns to accomplish their mission. Hidden setup and movement is offered to the Cretans in the game, but I dispensed wih this option because I played solo.

There are challenges to both players. For the Cretan, the difficulty lay in setting a defensive plan in topography that offers no obvious clues other th digging in olive groves. But should they play aggressively or let me enemy come to them? For the German, the question is how and when to attack.

The Cretans set up a picket line and dug-in around hex #0810, but in only two hexes, positioning two units dug-in in adjacent hexes. When the picket line was approached by the Germans, it abandoned its position and hurried back to the positions around hex #0810. Originally the Cretans stacked three units in each dug-in position. It took the paratroopers eight turns to setup their initial attack against the Cretan positions. It was decided to soften up the Cretan defense with DF, but two turns of these attacks only produced a couple of DR. As the Germans tried to storm the Cretan dugouts, they were stunned by doubts snake eyes. This resulted in an unaffordable step loss by a paratrooper unit, and eventually would cause desertion of a leader. The Cretans lost two steps, but the lost firepower by the Germans weakened their attack. It would stall and game time ran out before the Germans could properly regroup.

Author	treadasaurusrex (Germany)
Method	VASSAL
Victor	Germany
Participants	Reconquista
Play Date	2024-09-24
Language	English
Scenario	PoCr005

This was a small-scale (15 units) and oddly-tedious, 15-game turn scenario that we finished in 4-sessions. Reconquista led the poorly-armed & angry, but playful & enthusiatic Cretan villagers, while I had a company-strength force of attacking German paratroopers. It took quite a while, but the paras had little trouble levering the Greeks out of Hex 98-0810 by the end of our 8th turn. Pushing them further away to create the security zone took until the middle of the 13th game turn, when the last of the Greek force was either eliminated or permanently demoralized. All the Greek platoons deployed in hidden mode at the start, but were rapidly in distress at the close approach of the Jerries, leading the Cretans insurgents to counter attack in piecemeal fashion, This misstep was unfortunately accompanied by very poor combat & morale recovery die rolling in 3 of our 4 sessions. A single step of German paras was eliminated during this play-through. All the Greek units were lost in very heavy - mostly close quarter and adjacent-hex fighting

This was a marginal scenario that we decided gets a rating of 2, as it needs a rewrite, should be shortened to about 12 game turns, and was obviously not play tested properly. Try this one in SHARED mode only, so that the Greek peasants can set up in hiding. It is possible that it could go either way, but this time the Germans took it.