Team Yankee in 6mm

As I have said before, in addition to tabletop role-playing games, I also dabble in tabletop wargames. One of the wargames I play is Team Yankee, a game from Battlefront Miniatures, a delightful company out of New Zealand that has a popular World War II game by the name of Flames of War (yup, another wargame I dabble in). Team Yankee (TY) is, unlike Battlefront's other games, not based on an actual war that happened in Earth's history, it is a "what if?" scenario based on a fictional novel of the same name by Harold Coyle - what if World War III kicked off in Eastern Europe in 1985? It's an interesting time as it was the time when Gorbachev took over Soviet Union, the moment when the Soviets realized they were not keeping up with NATO and the West economically and could have chosen someone other than Gorbachev who would have kicked off WW3 just because it was their only choice to survive as they were at that time. In TY, that is what the USSR does, chooses a warhawk as General Secretary instead of Gorby (remember when he was the bogeyman here in America?) and the tanks start rolling towards the Fulda Gap. It is also interesting, time-wise, because it is pretty much the last time when the USSR enjoys technological parity with NATO and the West. Shortly after the mid-80's, I know that America improves many of their weapon systems - M1 Abrams were upgraded to M1A1, the Cobra attack helicopter was replaced by the Apache, the Dragon man-portable anti-tank guided missile was replaced by the Javelin, the M113 armored Personnel Carrier was replaced by the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, and so on. Many other countries in NATO also were upgrading their equipment. That is not to say that the USSR and later on Russians made no advancements, but those advancements were not as major as what was seen in the West.

Enough geopolitics, just know it's an interesting concept (yes, may you live in interesting times kind of interesting) and Battlefront made a fun little game based on their Flames of War (FoW) rules set. It is kind of funny, because in addition to FoW, Battlefront had several other wargames related to it that had not been as popular - one for WW1, another for the Vietnam War, and another for the Arab-Israeli wars in the '60s and '70s - but had still made them because the company was interested in making them and there had been enough demand in the market for those games. They figured TY would be more of the same and gave it a similar limited release... and then it became more popular than FoW. At least until FoW, which was in the need of a rules refresh, got that rules refresh and became top dog (at least in Battlefront's stable of games) once again. But it still is interesting to see that Battlefront totally did not expect this game to be as popular as it is, which is where we find ourselves today.

So about the time TY came out, I was just getting into FoW due to a friendly coworker in the Army Guard who wanted to get into that game and wanted to make sure he had someone to play with. We discovered TY at about the same time, and the same friend made the comment that TY would play so much better in 6mm. Back in my Confessions of a Tabletop Gamer post, I talked about how I am playing TY in 6mm, but this is where it started - my friend was interested in playing TY in 6mm because he knew the classic modern wargames (Cold War Commander and the like) play mostly in that scale and a major miniatures manufacturer, GHQ, had been making miniatures for US Army sand tables and civilian wargame players for generations. I took a look at prices of the standard 15mm models vs 6mm models, the size of tables needed to play one vs the other, the common scene of "tank parks" in TY games (so many tanks on the field they are parked track to track), and told my friend, let's do it. And so I did, I purchased a bunch of 6mm mini's for the US and the Soviet forces, got some pieces together to do terrain, bought rule books and army books, joined FB groups, talked with other friends who have played the standard 15mm version and have played exactly zero games. Until today (or a few days ago, depending on when I get this typed up and posted).

This is a real photo of a major TY game in 15mm back in July. No, tanks rarely get that close together in real life.

It does not seem like much of a difference, so why not just play the game in the standard 15mm? For me, and these arguments have gone on many other places so I am not really breaking new ground or convincing anyone who thinks that 15mm is their preferred scale, but for me it is a better scale to play this in. The savings on the cost of minis is a big factor for me. Due to this being military vehicles, Battlefront can't put their trademark on them, so they are not the only suppliers of these models like other wargame companies, and their prices are competitive with the other 15mm scale minis out there. And quite good quality (as long as you stay either with the metal or plastic minis, and away from the resin minis), but for my game I want huge armies clashing over big fronts, tens of vehicles and hundreds of infantry clashing across huge battle boards, and when you talk those numbers, none of the 15mm mini manufacturers can be close to the 6mm price. Not just on the tanks and infantry, but on trees and buildings and roads and so on, not to mention storage for everything is also commensurately cheaper because everything is half the size. In addition to cost, the size of the game expands greatly. As you will see in the pictures of our game later on, you can play a 6mm game in a very small space and still have plenty of room to maneuver. And space to maneuver in a game like this is so much more satisfying than sitting there, front armor to front armor and pound away at each other. Having said all that, are there downsides to playing in 6mm? Yes, it has been noted that these types of games are much more visually attractive in 15mm, so potential new players are more likely to come over and see what you are doing, as it is more visually striking. And, of course, Battlefront tends to make more money from book and miniature sales than they do just book sales, it's always nice to support the company who makes the games you play. 

Today (or, you know, whenever), after a long hiatus, the friend who originally got me interested in FoW and TY and I played some Team Yankee, in 6mm. Both of us have had some pretty intense life events the past couple of years, including one of us going on a deployment to a foreign country with the Army National Guard, buying and selling houses and moving, changing jobs, and life in general. But today the stars aligned and we finally got to get some playtime in. My friend, who is very much a war buff, has never really played many tabletop wargames, though he has played a lot of the simulation board games, he just never had the opportunity to play wargames. And to be honest, even as popular as FoW and TY are, they really aren't historically accurate, leaning more towards playability and fun and expediency over simulation and accuracy, but I think he understands that is why he can find people to play those games, but not the more accurate board games he has played in the past. I on the other hand have tabletop wargame credentials going back to high school with games like BattleTech, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, and more recently Mobile Frame Zero and Gaslands, games that are more like FoW and TY. Plus, as I have all the books - my friend has been meaning to buy the books, it is not me saying he cannot, just he hasn't done it yet - and have other friends who are actively playing the game (albeit in 15mm despite all my attempts to get them to try 6mm), I am more familiar with these type of games. But I still had not played the game much more than my friend had. Knowing we both did not have enough familiarity with the game, we decided to throw a game together, play with what we had, and learn as we went.

By "throw a game together, play with what we had", that is what we did. Even though I have gathered some terrain bits and pieces together, namely some size appropriate trees I have yet to put on bases, plus some road pieces that need painting and assembling, and a ton of papercraft buildings that need printing and putting together, I do not have any finished terrain and my friend even less than that. So we took some sheets of paper and started drawing out some basic terrain pieces - trees, hills, roads, buildings, walls, and even fields. Knowing that terrain has to be mirrored, something I have seen far too often in other games is an unbalanced board giving advantage to one side over the other, I set up a board that offered a good mix of dense urban and open and close wilderness areas. Too often I see wargame tables that offer little to no cover, something that anyone in the real world would look at and decide it is tactically not worth going into that particular killing field, so I made sure the board felt like it had decent cover (not just in the start box), but not so much that there weren't any open fire lanes at all. Over all, as cheesy as it looked - tiny table covered in various paint hues from past projects, half painted miniatures (even some standing in for other vehicles or pieces of paper standing in for even more minis I did not have ready), and pieces of paper representing terrain, it was still lots of fun.

I am not going to go into the details of the Battle, we both made pretty big mistakes tactically, but it was a learning experience that we can build on and that is what matters. The cogent points of what we learned about the game are as follows:

-Repetition, repetition, repetition is what teaches you the game. The more you play it, the more you remember it, the easier and faster the rounds go.

-Don't spend your opponent's turn thinking of what you should have done on your turn, use that time to think about what you are going to do next turn.

-The rules try to be as common sense as they can be, but let's face it, you will come across something Ina my game that you don't remember perfectly, don't be afraid to dig in and verify.

-As in many wargames that used six-sided dice for everything, TY uses just one d6 to decide if you hit or not. Try to do as much as possible to make that chance to hit worse. If by using cover you change your chance to hit from a 3+ (or on a 3, 4, 5, or 6, or 2 chances in 3, or 66%) to hit to a 4+ (or on a 4, 5, or 6, or 1 chance in 2, or 50%) to hit, it may not seem like much, but you have changed the odds significantly. And in games like this where there is an element of randomness to everything, you have to swing the odds in your favor as much as possible.

-The one thing I had to keep reminding my friend was "this is a game and not a simulation." TY is a fun game, and fairly historically representative, if not 100% accurate, because the makers realized it is a game and must do some things for the game's sake. It does a good job of giving the feel of the forces and technology in play at the time - the Warsaw Pact has lots of cheap vehicles and infantry with some high tech, costly options, while the NATO forces have lots of high tech, costly mainstays with a few cheap options that help them balance out the force charts. It is very much "quantity vs quality" on one side and "quality vs quantity" on the other.

Enough of me prattling on, time for the pictures.

I told you, pieces of paper were our terrain. Here we are after the end of everyone's first turns. Yes, the table is under 4' corner to corner (the long way) and you can see that we still have enough area to do some maneuvering around each other. We settled on halving all distances, even the area covered by artillery bombardments, halved to accommodate the scale of the miniatures.

The Soviets stuck together while the Americans went for envelopment. The Soviets' biggest tactical error was not going for cover whenever possible. And clustering up under repeated artillery barrages, though every time I "ranged in", he made sure to run away from the marker.

The American Abrams are standing in for M60 Pattons, so this is not as threatening as it looks. We played 50 point armies, which is not all that bad, but Pattons meant I could do more than minimal tank platoons. Likewise the Soviets went with T72s instead of T64s to get more on the field. 

Yep, one of my biggest tactical errors - M901s go BEHIND any other vehicles, as they have tons of range and no armor. With a moving ROF of zero and a minimum range on their weapons, M901s need to get their firing positions early and sit as far away from the action as possible.

Americans have already lost their scouts, but the Soviets lost their arty and some tanks. The American Pattons are doing well only because they are forcing misses by sticking to cover, as the T72s' AT of 22 is a bit much for the Pattons' front armor of 15. I did manage one roll of "7" on an armor save... but only one.

The Soviet BMPs died to concentrated fire from several different units but most of the Soviet infantry managed to bail out and not die. The American infantry is trying to set up to assault, mostly because I wanted to test out those rules, not because I thought this was a good idea. 

The American HQ sat at this corner of the building and calling in artillery more than doing anything else. The American artillery was busy the whole game, and while it would have been most effective against the infantry, it never got to shoot at them as no one ever got a line of sight to them. And in the background, yes, that is Shilkas fighting M901s at point blank range. Oddly enough, the M901s made it through the battle.

Yup, besides one move at the very end, American artillery sat here from the beginning and kept their guns hot. And I just realized that my friend who was playing the Soviets wore a red shirt. That irony escaped me until just now.

The end. The M901s have run, the T72s have been almost wiped out, the Shilkas died to concentrated Patton fire, the American infantry lost their M113s but are having a good time assaulting the Soviets. The Soviet Commander is about to get wiped out and have to jump into a nearby T72.

The Americans did not come out unscathed, one Patton platoon is wiped out and the HQ Commander passes from the Captain to the Lieutenant. 

As we had spent more time than necessary learning and researching, we decided to end it here even though we were playing Annihilation. With as many losses as the Soviets had - all that was left was part of the infantry, the commander, and the last two T72s of one platoon - we decided the Americans won and called it there.

The biggest lesson from all of this was, if you want to play a game, just go play the game. You don't have to have fancy terrain, painted minis, or know all the rules. Or even a table of sufficient size.