Another day, another Haywire game. We’re on game five of our campaign here. The objective is to destroy two enemy mortar positions. I’ve opted to place them in a built up urban area, replete with sandbags and dense buildings to keep us from being able to just fire AT at the positions and call it a day. This mission got off to a rough start, with three injured models leftover from our last battle and a deployment that… uh… caused some problems.

We deployed a sniper and AT Specialist on top of a building on the west side of the board. My son proceeded to move them and… uh… got his AT Specialist spotted on turn 1. We rolled three turns until the rest of our force arrived. This was bad.

The board went crazy with enemy spawns. I have around 30ish models and placed almost every one of them on the board before our remaining forces arrived to back us up.

Unfortunately, we had no choice but to pull onto the board in front of enemy units on overwatch, one of whom managed a perfect 20 to disable our vehicle. We were forced to pile out of the back and started with light injuries on the two most forward men. We were now stranded in a back alley, facing heavy fire from every angle, with a wrecked escape vehicle.

We reasoned out our best bet was to pop out, throw a grenade, weather some fire, and then bail off the board.

We repositioned to get as many lines of fire as possible, taking out most enemies we could immediately see from the alley. We sent three men up: one to rescue our AT Specialist, one to counterfire the sniper, and the other to Hail Mary a grenade into the remaining nest. By dumb luck, we had just drawn a very appropriate fog of war card to help us out.

By some miracle of dumb luck, we pulled it off. As we were adjacent to a board edge, we were able to immediately get our butts back off the table while 20+ remaining enemies closed in. Mission success, but it darn near wasn’t.

This is admittedly a case of a mission gone comically wrong. I probably should have let my son off the hook for moving, but he did so against my warning. Sometimes you have to learn the hard way. The end of this mission saw another three models injured, leaving us with five out of 12 men down. Ow. We spent our earned logistics points to recruit two more men and upgrade our medical services to get two of the five injured to start recovery. This means next mission we can still start with a reasonable set of two four man teams, but I’m really hoping for a clean mission to help us get our forces back up and running.

Overall? It was a blast. I once again love how the narrative comes together. We arrived for what should have been an easy mission, screwed it up, and proceeded to fight a desperate shoot out in an alley until we could come up with a Hail Mary plan to get our butts out of there. Just a great narrative for a mission, really.

But… I have to acknowledge I’m ignoring the narrative the mission descriptions give. They feel short, half-baked, and a touch childish at times. Here’s our next mission, already rolled up:

I almost wish they’d used an AI to rework these. “Let’s ambush it and cause as much damage as we can” is far from a reasonable narrative for why our spec ops forces are taking on this mission. The flip side is that it is a very different mission from any we’ve done so far. Depending on how we deploy and what support assets we have, it will definitely present a unique scenario from any other ones we’ll play in this campaign. I just wish it were a touch better written.

Still having a blast. Still looking forward to it. Just a little disappointed on the chrome. I suspect that idea will come up a lot in my review of the rules. Held up against their cost, it feels a touch more disappointing. A thorough editing pass from a more critical reader would have done this ruleset a lot of good.

Now to go see if I need to paint up any additional cars for this one. I probably don’t need to, but you really never have enough cars to blow up, right?