OGREs coming and going

I hauled OGRE up to Blacksburg, and Josh arranged for his friends Will and Kelson to come get an introduction to it. Both of them were impressed and amused by the sheer size of the game--over twenty five square feet of boards! Over 1000 counters! We played one scenario, with a pair of Mark Vs attacking a command post defended by 40 infantry, 30 armor, and two Mark IIIs, with Josh and I handling the defenders. Our strategy was to knock off the Mark Vs' primary batteries and then focus on the treads, using our Mark IIIs to ram as well as shoot. The Mark Vs came on separated, and I think that was their undoing; they couldn't protect each other and we had room to get our entire force engaged.  Getting them down from speed 3 to speed 2 was tough, but once we managed that, we could pile on and drag them down. We lost 3/4 of our infantry and more than half our armor, but we managed to immobilize the Mark Vs at 8 hexes from the Command Post. Quite a creditable effort for our two new players and I'd have to replay it a couple of times to see if I could do any better. And at the end of the game, Kelson fiddled with his phone for a few minutes and announced "I have a Great Big Box coming to my house on Wednesday!" -- he'd found a copy for $120 and snapped it up. And a good time was had by all.