The Portable Wargame Book WWII Eastern Front Battle (Part 1) - Example Run Through

This one has been on the bucket list for quite some time. Ideally I wanted to play "The Portable Wargame" well before I went to CoW 2018 earlier this year and met Bob in person. Unfortunately there was too much 'other wargaming stuff' going on at the time to fit in, but when a friend announced he has purchased a set of Kallistra hexagons (envy!) I jumped on the opportunity. The first thing to do was to decamp some of my dust gathering wargame kit from the loft to fulfil its "wargame destiny". To familiarise ourselves with the rules we decided to run through the play test in Bob Cordery's book, The first thing to do was to set up the German defences. I re-used the scenery I had made for the Fire-Move Hex game, fortifications were made-up of random lengths of platic sprue (I have started keeping this with a hope for a "use") and finally added the minefields with wooden counters, recently picked up from "The Works" - I still have the inclination to put skull and cross bones on them. (see below, a PSC Pz IV, two units of four-figure infantry "platoons", two units of two-figure MG "sections", a Pak 40, 105 Howitzer representing the Mountain Artillery):

The attacking Soviets charge on, heavy in armour (the dreaded T-34) and infantry (see below): 

The Soviets rushed the German defences, lead by a phalanx of T-34's and wave of infantry following. The T-34 fell victim to the German Pak 40's opening round (see below):

As Bob was performing more of a"tour de force"of the rules, a second T-34s charged through a minefield to its destruction - minefields being particularly as we were playing the one-hit sudden death variant of the rules (see below):

With 50% of the T-34's down the great patriotic hope shifted to the mass of Soviet infantry following them (see below):

A third T-34 was lost close assaulting a German fortified infantry position. The lack of obvious anti-tank assets is mitigated by the assumption of hand held AT infantry devices in this period of the war are profuse (see below):

As the final T-34 succumbed to the Pak 40 the scripted game came to a close. Another interesting feature had been the card driven sequence of activation as opposed to the more normal IGOUGO system. Again Bob was walking through the various rule mechanisms you could use ratherthan setting up the 'perfect attack' (see below, as the Russians cut their loses and retreated):

Having served its purpose as a bit of "Victorian Theatre" we decided to set up and replay the scenario. We decided to keep the instant kill (as opposed to step loss) rule in play but return to the standard IGOUGO sequence of play. The number of units that can be activated remained decided by an activation card draw (half the force value +/- 1: for the Germans FV: 8 implies [3, 4, 5]; for the Russians FV:13 implies [6, 7, 8].