Apologies, it has taken me a while to get this one out, and it may be a bit of a long one.
This year at Cangames I took the chance to run a Team Yankee game but with a bit of a twist. Instead of running a full-scale Team Yankee game with 100's of points on the table, I took a look through some of my gaming past and decided to go with TY Tank Aces as the framework for the game. Instead of 100's of points and dozens of vehicles, parking lot their way through the European countryside, I looked at the Tank Aces campaign set and went with much smaller force structure.
The main objective: to get a game run at the con and to get models on the table that I had not had the chance to before - in fact, it had been a number of years since I had thought of gaming Team Yankee, and yet I have been plugging away through vehicles and grunts for the past couple of years. So, a few models were vying for their time on the table.
At the same time, I thought this would be a good chance to try out a few homebrew rules and with the smaller point count it would be easier to try out some new mechanics. Similar to Force on Force, I wanted to have the 'Overwatch' ability in place, along with a TY version of 'Across the Volga', and I did find some versions online for destroying buildings...but with a lack of actual infantry teams, no one ended up targeting any buildings (but there are some homebrew for that). I will do a separate post breaking down the homebrew, mechanics, and some add-ons.
Anyway, the setup was inspired by some Google Maps shots from what would have been the Canadian and American area of responsibility. Given some rough planning for how long it would take to play the game, I planned for roughly 3 distinct rounds or phases of battle, roughly focused on vehicle types that would be on the table; I had after all made the game open to beginners:
- phase 1, clash of the recce vehicles (unarmoured vehicles with anti-tank capability) with distinct objectives for each team.
- phase 2, anti-tank and IFV's as reinforcements to achieve initial objectives for each team
- phase 3, main battle tanks with random AT/IFV platforms thrown in. This would be the main slug fest.
Other items for the setup included additional Tank Aces special objectives, called “tactical edges” in the campaign instructions. Any given Tank Aces game would normally have 6 of these beasts, given that I was looking at 4-6 players, I wanted a few more…so I settled on 10, and built a table of special objectives that players could take if they controlled the point at turns end. The objectives themselves were a mix of the normal tactical edges and some additional enhancers that I thought would be interesting…again, more on those in another post.
Enjoy the pics, I will drop some game relevant notes as we plod along…warning, there are some holes in the photo coverage.
For Tank Aces, I wasn’t concerned with command distance or ‘lone survivor’, and to reflect that there were no overall force commanders. The idea being, take elements of Tank Aces but also simplify where possible. To track success, each vehicle had their own chip (red for Warsaw Pact, blue for NATO), when a player killed a vehicle they took the corresponding poker chip.
Warsaw Pact setup: looking towards the west and Little Geheim; farming community with fields, forested sections, and copse of trees surrounding the countryside. The initial Soviet force was 4 x BRDM2’s in 2 platoons of 2 vehicles and 1 platoon of 2 xBMP1’s and a lone BMP1. Soviet’s deploy behind the dirt road running north to south at the edge of the treeline.
NATO setup: Troops looking east towards Little Geheim and the frontier. roughly same point value as Warsaw Pact, 3 different platoons rocking TOW launchers…Humvee TOW’s, M901 ITV, and Canadian Iltis jeeps. In the real world the Iltis TOW’s would have been part of the Canadian Airborne Regiment TO&E and they would have been slated for defense of Norway ops…but the Iltis with a TOW looks really cool and needed to be apart of this.
Closer views of both sides…I’ve had the buildings for far too many years without hitting the gaming table…back when Battlefront was selling them through a subscription. The cityscape was vinyl matting for toolboxes with cabinet liners painted to resemble cobblestone and the roads were offcuts from the vinyl matts.
Initial movement by NATO…their objective was to form a defensive line on the eastern end of the village, and then make communications calls back to headquarters to relay their position. In this pic, you can see some green poker chips, these were some of the Tank Aces tactical edge special objectives and Iltis’s getting quickly to their defensive positions.
The Warsaw Pact moves up using a barn for cover.
Some close shots of smoking Hummers and BRDMs running amock in east Little Geheim.
The first phase actually took a few hours to get through…NATO was able to get their position reports in, the Warsaw PACT made a general retreat losing most of their vehicles. At this point, I gave the players a 10 minute break and setup the next phase…given the time, I went right to MBT and advance anti-tank time. For the Warsaw PACT this meant an understrength company of T72’s, a company of T64’s, and a platoon/understrength company of BMP2’s…I did not deploy or include any infantry teams.
NATO players get to ride up in M1’s, Leopard C1’s, and M150 TOW with a couple of ADATS buddies riding shotgun. The objective at this point is for NATO to stem the advance and the Warsaw PACT to destroy and get past the village.
At this point, I introduce the Overwatch rule that allows a vehicle to be designated as overwatch instead of shooting. The red tokens are indicating vehicles that are in overwatch. The Soviets look to capitalize on this early.
NATO puts a vehicle or two on overwatch as well…the main gist of the rule, take a competing skill test roll to see if the Overwatch player can shoot…competing roll to see who actually gets to move first…targeted player can continue with move or react to the shooting attempt (ala Force on Force). The firing lane is fairly narrow, it is not anything to the front, it is a measured lane to the front of the vehicle.
At this point in the game, one of the players uses his tactical edge special objective and places the game in NIGHTTIME…using the nighttime rules, the players now have to roll for visibility with weapon types having some additional capability or limitation. The blue tokens are used to signify who has fired in the round previous, making them clearly visible. In this shot, the Warsaw Pact are making good progress into the ville.
With NATO tanks trying to get some side shots…the game ended roughly around this point…the top dog was one of the NATO players with a large number of kills…the Soviets did well in terms of ground covered, but most of the kills went to NATO.
Next post I’ll share some of the background mechanics and scenario items. Take care.
