This is is not a review of Tankwreck.

I don't think a person should review a game they haven't played, and I haven't had a chance to play Tankwreck yet. I won't for weeks or months, but that's not Tankwreck's fault. Meanwhile, I was frustrated that I had to buy them without reading a review first, so I want to correct the internet's lack of info on this game immediately. So here's an overview of Tankwreck. First of all, I like these rules. They look easy to employ, and they contain the full flavor of modern combat. The relationships between the various types of weapons shine through the system, and the actual organization of the forces is central to game mechanics. This latter is very exciting to me, because I know this topic consumes genuine military thinkers, yet it has virtually no role in most wargames. Oh, there's the occasional command-and-control system or unit cohesion rule, but these usually provide some constraints to keep the players from acting unrealistically, without actually portraying the relationships between units. Scale is straightforward: one inch is 50 meters (one centimeter is 50 meters if you're tight on space). One turn is five minutes, a base is a platoon/battery. Basing is one model on a 30x30mm base representing a platoon of three vehicles or thirty or so troops, though in the case of artillery one gun represents a six gun battery and spotters and aircraft a single model represents a single vehicle. The game seems designed for brigade vs. brigade. Two by five feet is described as tight but not unreasonable space for a game this size. Units are grouped into a hierarchy based on real military organization, which obviously vary over time and country. Ten sample organizations are described in the back of the book (they take about a page each), and more are available in the file section of the game's Yahoo Group. The sequence of play is classic. Players roll for initiative, with some modifiers for situation and troop quality. The player with the initiative may activate a unit or cause the other player to activate a unit (of the owner's choice). The other player then gets the initiative, and so on. When you activate a unit it may move, move and fire, fire without moving, or reserve fire. Afterwards the unit removes any suppression markers it may have. Units activated are typically companies of three to nine elements (platoons), but could be aircraft, HQs or spotters (single elements). Artillery are never activated directly, only along with a spotter. Movement is handled in an unsurprising fashion, with movement rates varying by terrain type (four: Good Going, Swamps/Jungle, Snow/Woods/Builtup, and Roads) and unit type (Infantry, Ski Troops, Irregular, Cavalry, Motor Cycles, Wheeled Vehicles, Tracked Vehicles, Helicopters). Reserving fire allows the unit to interrupt movement of an enemy unit later in the turn to fire at it. You may not fire and

then move, and if you move and fire there is a To Hit penalty. Fire is handled in a two-roll manner: To Hit and Effect of Hit. All rolls are on d10, and 0 is always a failure. To hit numbers are on the low side, typically three or four. They also reduce with range in 5", 10", 20", 30", 40", 60" and 100" bands. All weapons are categorized as Tank Gun, Auto Cannon, Small Arms, LAW, Early ATGW, and Modern ATGW. There are intrinsic modifiers to both rolls to allow for variation within a weapon class; for example, a standard Tank Gun (TG) is considered 105mm, a smaller calibre will have a -1 To Kill number, an a 120mm will have a +1. I think this is a fairly good system. Spotting rolls are eliminated, but we're all six hundred foot generals and the pretense that we don't see that ATGW group in the woods is not really helping. By lumping weapons into just a few groups the game guarantees that a particularly good autocannon will not in any way act like a tank gun. Each category has its distinct flavor, and just as a real tanker would pause fain to drive out in the open when there's an ATGW in the wood across the field, the player will not care much if it a lowly Spigot or a deadly Hellfire, its an anti-tank missile and you don't drive in front of it without suppression. Even so, with a To Hit or To Kill of 3 or 4, the +1 and -1 modifiers will give an appropriate bonus or penalty to the particularly good and bad members of the class. Its a good compromise that doesn't require a separate book of tables. Artillery fire is handled in a simple, flavorful way. A spotting unit which does not move may call for any artillery unit to fire at a target in LOS. There's a nice little roll for availability that varies based on the juiciness of the target and the relationship between the spotter and the artillery called for, that is a battalion spotter has a better chance of calling for its own guns than for another battalion's guns, or the brigade or division guns. If the artillery chooses not to respond, the spotter can call another unit, and another, and another until they find someone willing to toss over a few shells. Then you roll for a hit, then you roll to see if you get suppression, then you roll to see if the suppression becomes a kill. That's a lot of rolls, but they each bring in their own flavor and asdfasfdsa Artillery is considered to have unlimited range, which is not a bad choice since its probably only two or three miles across your playing space. Unfortunately that raises the question of why you even have your artillery on the board. Surely there's no reason to bring a gun with a range of ten miles within a mile of the enemy? Its certainly more fun to have it on the board, but since it needs no LOS I can't think of a reason not to bring it just barely onto the board, and preferably into the middle of a wood, where no one can see it. Two sorts of specialized artillery missions have some abstract rules: counter batter fire and . These are called in reaction. One oddity here lays behind the

The morale rules are clean, innovative, and possibly a big fat problem. Companies make morale checks if any Morale checks are rolled as attacks, with a target number of 2 with situational modifiers that may bring that number to zero or up to five or six. If Consider a battle of the First Gulf War, wherein a US brigade is facing an Iraqi brigade, and let's say the Iraqis actually bring some artillery to bear on a US tank company. They don't cause any casualties, but artillery fire is sufficient to cause a morale roll. In the most generous case (daytime, the entire company is in cover, no casualties), there's a 30% chance the company will break. Hmm, seems high. It gets worst, if the company breaks the battalion has to roll - that works out to 40% if no adverse modifiers apply. And if the battalion breaks the brigade has to roll, and with no adverse modifiers it breaks 40% of the time. So, at the first shelling there's a 5% chance the Americans will cut and run, without casualties, with only one company of tanks under fire from artillery. That was a conservative set of numbers, let's make some very reasonable adjustments. Let's say its night, let's say the Iraqis fire at a forward company that is technically flanked (its even with the forward-most Iraqi units). That's a 50% chance of breaking the company, 50% for the battalion, and 40% for the brigade for a net 10% chance of sending all those tanks fleeing. If the Iraqis can somehow bring two batteries to bear on two different companies there's a one in four chance of breaking two companies, in which case the chance of breaking the battalion goes to 70%. But if we stick with night time action and the 10% chance of a single, ineffective artillery attack breaking the brigade, and assume the Iraqis are getting utterly routed but they can keep up a rate of two such artillery attacks per turn. Obviously the US brigade has an 81% chance of not breaking the first turn, and a 64% chance of not breaking the first or second turn. They even have a 51% chance of surviving three turns. But there's only a 40% chance of making it through four turns, and over two thirds of the time they will be running before five turns are completed. I like the morale system, but I'm concerned its a little easy to cause morale checks, and while I like the cascading system, its too easy to end up with a brigade running There is What may be a problem? Not all the data you need to play is present. The book explicitly admits that since military organizations are constantly changing there's little point in trying to be encyclopedic in brigade organizations. The rules provide ten samples, and more are available on the Yahoo Group. The samples are interesting and helpful, but tend towards the "best of" sorts of brigades, rather than typical ones. The rules provide good help for rating weapons that aren't listed, but there's not much help toward putting together a brigade

organization table. Some vehicles mentioned in the brigades are not listed in the Vehicle table. That's not really a problem, a good reference book or wikipedia will tell you approximately what it is, and game ratings are very easy to derive. I think its acceptable for a historical wargame like this to require a reasonable reference book, but it bears mentioning. The classic move-then-fire system has a problem with withdrawal actions. Consider a scenario in which I am trying to withdraw my units quickly and safely in the face of your advancing forces, a classic military problem. In Tankwreck, I would move a unit away from you, and I might either not have a shot or have a shot at a longer range. You then move in pursuit, and have a shorter range shot. What's missing? There is no discussion of scenario design. The rules seem to assume that each player will pick up a brigade and run them at each other, but the author admits that this doesn't really There's no bibliography. I'm enough of a geek to want one. There's no section on painting, modeling, terrain, or any other discussion of the physical realities of wargaming, other than to say "cotton wool" makes good smoke (fyi, we don't call it "cotton wool" this many hours behind GMT). There are plenty of painting resources on the internet, and I've always thought it strange that some rules include a page on the topic, so its no loss. Oddities: both sides get air support. This is nuts. My understanding of modern warfare is that if is starts up the fighters will go at it or on side will run away the first day, and after that one side will have air support and the other will not. The rules make no comment about this. Any given brigade may have some air support, the rules explicitly assume that each side's CAS will get past any fighter cover. One the one hand, this might make a great game, air support is fun. And if you wan to fight out a particular situation, just take away CAS from the side without air superiority. The rules also suggest the possibility of incorporating the Shipwreck dogfighting rules, but its not obvious to me how you'd do that. So no big deal, but still odd.

Jets can move wherever they need to be to make the attack you want them to make, but can they do this without passing through the intervening space? Let's say I have an aircraft on the east third of the board, and my opponent has an AA unit that can cover the entire middle third of the board that has reserved its fire earlier in the current turn, and I want my aircraft to make an attack in the west third of the board. If I place the

aircraft in the west third, would my opponent get a shot at the aircraft as it passes through the middle? Or is assumed to take an off board route, or travel too high or too fast for the AA unit to get a shot in?