I played my first game of Picking Up The Pieces from the Normandy expansion tonight, I played solo, playing both sides.

I have an observation and a question

observation

I noticed the crater terrain markers are really underused in the expansion as a whole, featuring in only two scenarios. I thought there may be an operations card that would allow you to customise your scenarios to put them in during off board artillary/fire or bombing runs etc but there isn't. It's a shame as they are a good feature and can change the battlefield during the game providing cover where there wasn't any before and making terrain harder to traverse. Perhaps there might be something in the Russian expansion to use them more. So it seems that you are really only going to get to use them in home brew scenarios at the moment.

Questions

In the scenario Picking Up The Pieces there are two sides; British and German. The American Elite units are in fact British 6th Airborne. The scenario states that the British win if they are able to occupy the the neutral objective marker by the end of round 6. Well, the British Airborne squad can get to it on turn 1 and pretty much keep it uncontested throughout the game, so I take it the scenario means that a tan coloured squad has to fullfil the objective? Also in the above case of the Airborne squad taking the neutral objective do you put a British token on it and claim the command points from it?

Am I right in thinking that I can call a Naval Bombardment many times within a game round, restricting only to 1 attempt per turn as long as there is a fresh officer about (regardless of success or failure)?

Thanks

I agree with your observation.

As for the other two points, they are both in the FAQ and/or in the clarifications thread on boardgamegeek. Yes, a tan coloured squad needs to occupy the victory hex and the naval bombardment can be attempted once per action turn NOT per game round. This makes it potentially much more lethal! However, in the first scenario of the Normandy campaign book (Bloody Omaha) the card IS supposed to only work once per game round, as stated by the scenario's designer: Bill Jaffe.

We've also played the Picking up the pieces scenario on various occasions and used the once per game round interpretation. The game seemdd perfectly balanced to us then and we fear that allowing naval bombardment to be attempted once every action turn, might severely unbalance the scenario. We haven't actually tried it again as such, but we'll leave that to your consideration.

Kingtiger said:

Really? Maybe my memory is going, but I seem to recall Bill Jaffe saying his intent with that card was that it can be tried every game turn. Opposite what you said. Can you point me to the thread this was cleared up in?

Lebatron said:

It's in the clarifications thread on BGG. Yes, NORMALLY every ACTION TURN, but for the purpose of this specific scenario every GAME ROUND.