What a Tanker! - Down Under...

This Thursday at the uni we gave the Two Fat Lardies' What a Tanker! rules a run out. Kaptain Kobold has given an excellent account of the action in the 2 games we played here:
The Stronghold Rebuilt - What a Tanker! so I won't repeat the details of the action again...I'll just share some more eye-candy with some random thoughts...

The rules come in the inimitable TFL style, and I do like the use of the Wehrmacht Panzer Pink Waffenfarbe to outline the title! Note the difference in scales with the Panzer IIIs - the one nearest the camera must be 1:48 scale compared to the 1:56 Rubicon ones of mine. In the game we played it as a PzIV.

WAT! seems a great opportunity to dust off my burgeoning collection of 1/56th scale model AFVs - people can get a bit sniffy when you turn up with wall to wall T34s for a game of Bolt Action!

I was running C/S 26, a Rubicon model T-34s or Tritsatchivorka. Despite the Fast Tank attribute it took me a while to get into the fray! But I really like the decision making processes you have to go through with your handful of command dice, and its interesting how different values rise or fall in worth depending on the phase of battle you are in!

With our first game, set in 1941 on the Eastern Front, we limited ourselves to model 1940 Tridsadviorkas and Panzer IIIs and short barrelled Pz IVs, which made for a relatively mobile game as we wanted to get in close to inflict serious damage...



Ok, maybe too close! Even with 8 players all WAT virgins we got through this big game in about an hour and half; the game mechanisms are simple and intuitive, especially for our diehard TwoFatLardy fans!



I should say at this stage that WAT! has no stats for armoured cars at present, but I believe that is coming down the line, and given the comprehensive data lists provided, it shouldn't be too hard to extrapolate your own stats if your tastes run to rubber...Similarly with AT guns, and, dare I say it, infantry tank hunters...

Having really enjoyed the first game so much, we then sought our next hit, this time a late war game, featuring 4 x T34-85s vs a Tiger 1 and 2 Panthers.



We tried to space the cover out a bit more, but not really enough: the 2 Panthers got brewed in the opening few moves by 85mm shots right across the table. This elicited some grumbling about realism from the grognards amongst us...

But we certainly all agreed that we were having great fun!

Well, not all the time - our youngest player, Kaleb, who, let the record show, was the first of us to earn a Kill Ring, was left on his own, albeit sitting in a Tiger, as the rest of us circled for the kill...

So after 2 large and action packed games, I have to say I am hooked - great fun, really open to large team games, and lots of tanks - whats not to like? The early demise of the 2 Panthers did cause some concern about authenticity, but I think they were just flukes from the dice Gods. Throughout the game the Tiger quite historically bounced kills until the very end, and we had far too little terrain that allowed table-wide shots.

An important plus for me is that WAT! really lends itself to solo play, but that's something I intend to explore in a future post, this time set somewhere in Normandy...TTFN!