12 years undefeated...

When I first started playing ASL my second ever opponent, and second ever game was against Burnie Fox.  Burnie was in the UK on assignment for work for a year or so, and we hooked up to play about 10 or so games.

He beat me in all but one of those games and the one that I did beat him in had two things going for it. The first was that we'd just played the same scenario and had some spare time at a tournament once so we swapped sides and replayed it.  I modified his setup enough to call it my own (shuffled some dummy counters around, most likely) and essentially I played Burnie against Burnie.  That simply wouldn't have been enough.  I got lucky too on the last meaningful shot of the game, which if I recall in 'Noble Craft of Warfare', was a long range IFE shot at a CE tank needing to exit for the win.

Burnie was back in town, and we'd agreed beforehand to get a game going.  I said I'd meet up with him when he arrived, but it had been 12 long years and my memory of faces must be getting worse.  I assumed I'd recognise him when I saw him, I remember he was tall but also that he was "carrying a little timber".

So, I'm walking around the hall and some ripped guy with a sharp hair cut extends out his hand.  Dave Ramsey? "Sure, hi" I say.  "Burnie Fox" comes back the reply.  My only response was "No way dude!" - and as he'd later told me, he's dropped 120lbs and he was looking great.  If I wasn't married, with kids, (and had an inkling for guys), I might have blushed!  Burnie also has the geekiest tatoo you'll ever see; he has his wife's name tattooed around his calf - in Hexadecimal! Nothing says "I love you"  more than 49:20:6c:6f:76:65:20:79:6f:75 (you can work that one out..)

When I regained my composure we caught up and agreed to play later on.  Given my early finish to my previous game, I decided to see if tonight I could double my win count against the old enemy!

We picked one from the newly released Cruicible of Steel (did I mention how awesome that whole pack looks?!) - I forget the name - Onion Highway or something (it definitely wasn't onion, btw), but I'll add it in here when I dig up my pack.  Russians defending a small intersection against what felt like a horde of Germans armed to the teeth with good tank support.

The Russians have a dug-in cupola and receive 4 tanks as reinforcements, including two Valentines, who arrive just in time to ensure the fight is taken to the wire.

Burnie couldn't bare to watch
my troops collapse

Burnie is as cunning as the proverbial fox, no doubt where that surname originated from - he eeks out every advantage from his supporting OoB and then some.  Before you know it, he's encircled you, he's going back in to his box for more prisoner counters, then some more disrupted counters, and finally when you think he's done all he can do, he double checks, and breaks some more of your guys.  He's a mean player in the nicest sense of the word.

We started at 8 and finished up at 1:30am.  There were plenty of other games cracking on, but the jet lag was starting to sink in some more - 3 (or is it 4?) nights now with broken sleep - the mind tends to take a while to relax again after the games, meant that I could have done with an early-ish night.

Taking nothing away from Burnie though he cut through the Russians like a hot knife through butter, I kept the game reasonable by going to the last turn but with a few key breaking squads the idea that I had any chance evaporated.

At least it took him 12 years to beat me again!