Armoured Storm - the Battle of Sidi-Hogg

 Matt and Martin came over for some more of  Dan Mersey's very jolly Armoured Storm. I have no actual tanks for this - I just provide the table (and cups of tea) - Martin has printed all the forces needed. As they're only 6mm his basic 3D printer is more than good enough for the job.

I laid out a battlefield, Martin had tweaked some army lists to be hopefully a little better balanced than our previous game and off we went with Matt assisting me with command of the British and Martin as the Desert Fox.

The British force was a mixture of Matildas and Honeys. The Germans had Panzer 2, 3 and 4s.

There's no deployment guidance in the rules, so we just set up as best we thought. After a turn or two we realised maybe a little closer together would have been better (especially for the very slow 'tildas).

James' painted backdrop is a lovely match for this terrain cloth.

As well as the tanks Martin printed the small settlement of Sidi-Hogg

We parked some Matildas on the rise overlooking the settlement to secure our flank, while planning to sweep around the other side.

We soon had some Panzers aflame.

The card squares represent "bunkers" an abstraction in the game to denote anti-yank/artillery/infantry presence.

We should probably build little camps or gun emplacements.

The lines closed slowly and we began to realise the folly of even thinking about flanking with Matildas.

Soon enough the British began to take fire.

As the Germans advanced on Sidi-Hogg we sent some reinforcements.

While the 'tildas kept watch.

The German left flank was taking some punishment.

But the British weren't having it all their own way.

Martin began a concerted push on his right.

And the force on the hill began to take fire.

More British casualties in the centre.

The German left went "hull down" 

The Matildas on the hill were suddenly wiped out - Sidi-Hogg was wide open.

Desperately we poured fire into the German left.

But the Panzers raced toward the town.

More British tanks brewed up

And the British were forced to withdraw and lick their wounds.

A great fun game with good company. The rules are very *light* but work well and the scale looks terrific - taking us all back to days of Airfix tanks.

We did make a house rule for the shooting which is supposed to be done tank-by-tank, but with all shots declared before rolling. This just felt very fiddly and unnecessarily complex, so we came up with a little alternative firing method that speeded things up no end. We also debated afterwards that command tanks don't really seem to have much impact or importance in the game - which seemed counter intuitive so we may look at a few minor tweaks to them.

That said they're a great set of rules and we'll be using them again - next time with some sort of scenario.  

Armoured Storm

Way back in April I went on a trip to look at WW1 battlefields as a jolly for James' birthday. Wargames author Dan Mersey was also along for the ride and after a chat over a few beers he offered to send me a copy of the tank battle rules he was working on in case I fancied giving them a try.
He duly did so, I duly read them and then didn't actually get round to playing a game. Fast forward several months and Martin bought a copy of the finished Armoured Storm rules, printed out some 6mm tanks and suggested we give things a go.

So I threw together a table using repurposed Afghanistan 28mm terrain and I took the 8th army and Martin the DAK.

The rules are (deceptively) simple and "light" and feature only tanks though there are additional abstracted  rules for bunkers, anti-tank guns in the bunkers and air strikes. As our first game we stuck with the basics. 

The forces were standard issue from the book - mine was all cruisers, the DAK a mix of Pz. III and Pz. IV with some Pz. II as HQ tanks.
There's no points values and no feeling that forces are necessarily equal - Dan suggests  using scenarios and a couple of other possible tweaks to balance things - but as a fairly light set of rules the expectation is for gamers to work out the balances and forces for themselves.

Most of the British tanks in the game are "unreliable" which means you might lose them before the game begins. I was lucky and only a couple broke down on the way to the front.

The (improvised) field of battle. There's no set "table size" for the game, so we went with 4x4 for this one.

The game starts with commanders "claiming" actions in turn on a board grid. Players take turns to place one of four tokens each on actions such as fire or manoeuvre. Once that phase is over action switches to the tabletop and the players again take turns to use one of their four actions. The choices are limited and some of the game is about taking actions in order to deny them to your opponent.

We both started by using the manoeuvre actions to move our forces forward.

However as soon as the range was closed we began firing. The cotton wool ball denotes damage to a tank - tanks take two of these before brewing up - although a lucky shot will brew tanks up immediately.

The German platoons of five tanks meant they had a definite firepower advantage over the British and I struggled to coordinate my more numerous force to counter this.

British platoons are of three tanks - in this case an HQ tank has joined the platoon to take them up to four.

The German firepower soon saw Cruisers brewing up across the board.

You can see the actions board top left of this image.

It wasn't all going Rommel's way though.

This poor blighter has had tanks brewed up on either side!

"Morale" is handled by the mechanic of losing a token for the objective board whenever a platoon is wiped out. So the British went on the back foot quite early.

More carnage for the 8th army.

In the end I was reduced to a single activation token and with the Germans still largely undamaged we called a halt with victory to the Afrika Korps. 

It was a good fun game. Big sweeping tank manoeuvres, lots of brewed up vehicles and early DAK outmatching the poorly equipped Brits. It looked very good too. Martin's tanks are free STL prints, but at this scale they looked just fine and give a nice mass effect. The gameplay is very straightforward and simple - the nuance and challenge is around the board and how to use the actions.

The shooting felt a little fiddly - you do it by tank versus tank and you should declare all your targets before firing a unit - we started doing it like "Warhammer" where you place hits against the unit and remove a tank each time you had two but part way through realised that meant you'd never have need of the Recover activation meaning a nuance of the board was missed. That'll teach us to fiddle with rules before we understand them. I think with practice (and probably a measuring stick) the firing process as written will be much less fiddly than we imagined.

Scenarios will clearly be key and maybe some balancing (Elite units etc.) for the Brits - or maybe just some better tanks.

I did spend some time Googling 6mm tanks afterwards, so I think we'll be playing again...