First Planes Playtest for TANKS

Finally I had the chance to make a first playtest of my custom (work in progress) planes expansion for TANKS by Galeforce 9. After I wrote the last post, I had a friend for visit and invited him to a small game of TANKS.

Luckily he has some experiences with the modern variant of TANKS, having been part of the battle at the Easter front.

I built 2 small platoons and set up an improvised playfield in my hobbyroom, made from a blanket and some pieces of styrofoam. Not the prettiest battlefield, but it is ok for this quick test. We decided against any crew or equipment cards to keep it simple.

My friend played the attacking forces. The German platoon included one Panther (A) and two Panzer IV, all made by the Plastic Soldier Company.

As new custom units he had a Ju 87 in 1:144 scale and a 3D printed SdKfz 7/1 for air defense. I think I did not show the halftrack in any post, the only thing I added after printing were some figures from the bitsbox.

The defending British platoon was played by me and included a Sherman Firefly from an old "Flames Of War" starterbox, and the Comet and Achilles tanks from the game expansions.

My new additional units were a Hawker Tempest in 1:144 scale and an 3D printed M17 halftrack for air defense.

A look at the battlefield before the game started. It looks pretty simply but I may build some snow covered scenery pieces (and wash the blanket) because I like this winter look.

By the way, today I won an ebay auction, when the thing arrives, a new battlefield for "TANKS The Modern Age" will be build soon, maybe usable for ww2 TANKS too.

Having only sightblocking elements and no cover pieces, the game would have a touch of an arena fight. The first two rounds were pretty unspectacular but it seemed that at least the movement rules for the planes would work as supposed.

Would work as supposed in future games. Experiences from this first game showed that a special movement template and its own movement arrow is needed for games using these new rules. Wish I would have built them before, following some older drawings in my notebook.

The selfmade bases were impractical, I already replaced them with bases matching to the standard "Flames Of War" flyerbases.

That the halftracked AA vehicles would work was pretty clear from the start of the game, Actually the only new thing to them was that they got an ability known from ww3 TANKS.

Giving them "Rapid Fire" was an easy solution for their arnament, a thing I had issues with from the beginning.

I think, at this point I should state out that most of the rules were written before "TANKS The Modern Age" hit the market, and even when I took some elements from the TANKS followup, most of the planes rules were written at least one year ago.

While the battle on the ground went as usual, we started to attack with our planes. Not only the equipped weapons were used, we also made some theoretical dice throws to test several variants of bombs and other stuff.

And this also worked almost as supposed.

The planes landed some hits and the AA halftracks gave their best to shoot them down. Since there are no effects for planes in the critical hits cards, we found a simple solution for this. A conversion list will be included in the actual rules addon.

And I think that we have found some good equipment pieces for planes, even some pilots and doctrines will be available. I do not want to spoiler this stuff but after my mate Olli and I discussed the pointcosts for the new stuff, it seems that a big part of this project is already done.

The game took about 2 hours, ending with a victory for the German troops. I decided that when all enemies ground units are lost, the game is over, no matter if there are enemy planes left or not.

Having planes available adds some new tactics and advantages to the game, even when this was a very first test it made fun.

And I learned a lot of things that will have to be included in the rules to make this whole as easy to understand as possible.

 

At the moment I think I am going to create units (for this expansion) only for plane models which I have in my collection, what means, the first edition of the planes expansion for TANKS will include 5 to 6 planes and other units, that at least each nation will get one new type of AA unit and plane available. There will be different planetypes available, but I will keep this for a future post.

Maybe some readers will allow me to use pictures of their plane models for new cards.

But since the expansion is just a fun project, it takes some time. Some more playtests will have to happen, the final costs for all the new cards will have fo be found, and than I can start to write the actual expansion.

Maybe some more units may find their way in future revisions, once all the digital work is done, it will be no big issue to create new cards for them.