Return to Gaming

It has been a very slow year on the gaming-front for me and my gaming buddies. But finally, we managed to string together multiple tabletop gaming sessions over the past four weeks.

Tiny Tank Blitz

Between myself and friends Kevin & Wally, we played 6 games of my new self-designed Tiny Tank Blitz miniature tank battle game. We did that over 3 consecutive weekend game-sessions, which is a rarity for us, but the scheduling happened to work out well.

These were the first games of a new game-design. While I was hopeful things would be fun, I’m experienced enough to know that caution is the operative word when trying out any new rules. Color me pleased. I made some not-unexpected tweaks and small improvements to the game during the course of our game-playing run, but every session was truly FUN — more fun and successful than I could reasonably expect it to be.

Tiny Tank Blitz was ultimately born out of my desire to make a game that felt very different than What a Tanker! (the only WWII tank game that my friends and I played before). I wanted a game that let us command more tanks, played faster, was bloodier & more decisive, and ultimately was a lot more fun.

The game is played on a 4-inch hex gridded battlefield, which really speeds up movement and simplifies several aspects of the rules. The standard game lets you command a platoon of 6 tanks per player (we also played a 2-on-1 game where I controlled 8 tanks as the Germans, and my two opponents in charge of a Russian force commanded 4 tanks each). The larger set of tanks makes players feel more like a platoon leader, rather than the commander of one individual tank.

Tank activations are done by drawing and assigning playing cards to a subset of your tanks, then flipping them over to sequence activations in card-rank order between the two sides. This provides a nice layer of strategy (which tanks do I assign my highest ranked cards, so I can get the jump on my enemy?) and gives a nice fog-of-war to game-play. The card color also determines whether your activated tank performs 2 or 3 actions, which adds another interesting decision-point for commanders.

Every tank is rated for Type (Light, Medium, Heavy), Speed (hexes it can move), Guns (D6 dice rolled when shooting), Armor (number enemy needs to match/exceed on each D6 to hit it), Durability (number of hits needed to eliminate the tank), Special (some tanks have a special power such as causing Critical Hits or Slow Aim), and Points (1 to 6 pts, so you can balance out forces if desired). We jotted down all the tank stats on 3×5 index cards; each side had a card which included all the tanks in their platoon.

Another major feature of the game is the Fate Deck. Each player has a handful of playing cards that let you play them at opportune moments to inflict extra Critical Hits on enemy tanks you’ve struck (damaging treads, turrets, wounding the tank commander, etc.), call off-table Artillery strikes, gain extra actions with your tanks, force enemy tanks to make a gut-check (preventing them from acting this turn if failed), perform tracer-fire, and even reveal a hidden bazooka/panzerschreck unit to ambush an enemy tank that drives by their spot. Playing these cards at just the right time is not only a hell of a lot of fun, it keeps you focused on strategy and really adds to the chaos of the battle. Some variation of Fate cards are featured in most of my miniature wargame designs because they greatly enhance game-play in my humble opinion.

Our games took around 70-90 minutes to play and on average 4 tanks on the losing side were eliminated. That felt great because I wanted to achieve much faster play. No more 3-hour games where each side killed 1 enemy tank! Heck, we got to play TWO back-to-back games during each session, which was really great. Even better, the games generated some memorable moments and great stories. Plus, I got to justify to myself that my recent spending spree on 1/72 scale diecast tanks was all worth it. Ha ha!!

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Thunder Road: Vendetta

This past Thursday evening, four of us got together for a wild & crazy game of Thunder Road: Vendetta. This is basically Mad Max the board game. Between racing through a landscape checkered with oil slicks, rocks, mines, and smoking wrecks, to slamming into other cars and firing your guns at them, to avoiding being blown up by enemy choppers all while trying to get one of your cars across the finish-line first, this game is a pure hoot.

If you are the type of gamer who only enjoys heads-down, optimization, think-fests, then Thunder Road: Vendetta is not a game for you. For those who embrace randomness and storytelling, you won’t find many better board games than this one.

I’m always a target in these games, so it’s no huge surprise that my 3 cars were either blown to bits or rendered inoperable before everyone else’s. Still, WHAT A BLAST! You just have to laugh and enjoy the ride. Laughter filled time spent with good friends is what it’s all about.