What A Tanker!

We tried out the new 'What A Tanker' rules from Two Fat Lardies yesterday, using Ralph's collection of 28mm tracked beauties. Not ones to do things by halves we had eight players, each running a single tank - four T34/76s on one side, against a trio of PzIIIs and a lone PzIV on the other.

Here's my T34, taking a long shot at a PzIII on the far side of the table.

I found myself somewhat isolated from the other Russian commanders, and had a bit of a lonely fight for the first couple of turns. I scored some non-damaging hits, though.

The other Russians move up.

The first kill; Bryan's PzIII got overconfident and paid the price. Kaleb got the credit for that one.

Colin had worked his PzIII around the Russian left and now had a nice line of fire on a couple of the T34s.

An aggressive push by the Russians put Colin under pressure. meanwhile my tank, despite being shaken by a couple of hits, managed to knock out Caesar's PzIII.

We called time on the game after that; two German tanks faced four still active and confident T34s, so we reasoned they'd quit.

People were keen to try some later war models in a second game. Or, at least, heavier tanks; I picked a KV1 of some kind; not that hot in terms of a gun relative to other tanks on the table, but a nice-looking model.

The other three Russian players had T34/85s. Opposing them were three Germans, running two Panthers and a Tiger I. Unfortunately we set up the terrain badly, and tanks had a clear line of sight from the first turn. This saw a Panther knocked out on its baseline.

The same happened on the other flank; my KV1 managed to line up a well-aimed shot against the other Panther, and destroy it. This left Kaleb's Tiger facing four Russian tanks. We closed in.

I got a hull-down position on its flank, although its Heavy Armour ability meant that this wasn't too much of an advantage.

Colin and Ralph closed in from the front, using some ruins as cover. Kaleb engaged them, but couldn't make any shots count. The Russian shots bounced off his hull.

Caesar did a mad dash and got in close, but still couldn't knock out the German monster.

It was Colin who finally got in a shot that knocked the Tiger out.

The second game was great for rolling handfuls of dice, but the terrain setup and initial placements meant that it wasn't as exciting in terms of manoeuvre.

We all had a great time with this game. It's not one for the WWII purists, but as a light game of tank on tank combat it has a lot to be said for it. managing the command dice, which dictate how you can move, aim and fire, gave each player a range of choices on their turn, and I suspect we were ahead of the curve in terms of outright kills, with the average game probably having more temporary or cumulative damage on vehicles. It certainly needs plenty of terrain, both to spoil spotting and shots and to block lines of sight entirely.

Obviously it looked great with the large vehicles, but there's no reason a game couldn't use much smaller models on a correspondingly smaller playing area.