Tanks @ MindSay

So I guess I should write something about miniatures gaming instead of all of this personal hurricane crap. :-)

A few months ago, one of my favorite game companies (Two Hour Wargames) came out with Nuts! - a WWII version of their very cool Chain Reaction game.  I bought it, read it, then put it on the shelf since I don't have any WWII guys to try it out with.  One of the neat new parts (aside from generally streamlining the rules and coming up with a new "army list" system) was some rather more detailed vehicle rules.  In this case, the rules were for Tanks.

Now, my very first video game programming job was working on a Tank game (iM1A2 Abrams, in case anyone really cares - I did the gunnery physics and all the tank UI, sound effects, voice recording and processing, AI (sorry it was kinda sucky - first job, don't you know), and driving models.)  So I have sort of a soft spot for armor.  In fact, BattleTech was my first miniatures game, and "Tigers&Stalins" was my first historical miniatures game.  But aside from T&S, which is an extremely amusing "Beer & Prezels with a dash of History" tank brawl, I haven't done any tank gaming in many years.

Well, since this weekend left me with some time on my hands, I dug out the old microarmor tanks and decided to just give Nuts! a test drive.  I didn't bother with actually setting up a game, I just wanted to see how the tank combat would play out.  The thing about THW's products is, you can only really understand them once you try to play them a few times.  It's not because the rules are badly written, but because they are very subtle and contain a number of interactions that aren't apparent until the poo hits the fan.

Nuts! takes a different approach to tanks than many other games.  Since Nuts! is fundamentally a 1-1 skirmish game, instead of making the tank a single entity, the game actually models the crew inside the tank.  The TC rolls for enemy spotting and "courage checks", the gunner rolls to see if he can put the shell on target, the loader tries his best to slam a new round home, and the driver tries not to throw a tread while turning too fast, or crashing through a building's wall.  This isn't really much different from the "Roll to hit, roll to reload" system most games use, but by actually assigning characters to those crew positions, it give the player a different mindset.

So to make a long story less long, I put some T-34s and Panzer IVs out on the table and had them open fire on each other.  I gave everyone REP 4 (that is, average abilities for a trained soldier), and had them facing each other on an open field so that I could just study the interactions of shooting at each other.  Due to the armor and weapons involved, I only had a 1 in 6 chance of penetrating the enemy armor.  The tanks blazed away at each other, occasionally failing to reload in time, and finally the T-34s won the day.  Not very exciting, but it did help me get a feel for how to shoot and check for kills.

The Nuts! armor system is very different from the infantry combat system.  Due to the reaction system, I think that a tank duel in a city or bocage choked field would be much more amusing and tense, so I'll have to try that out some time.  Now, I don't really enjoy solo gaming very much since I'm not motivated to win, so I'll need to convince either Christy or my nephew to try it out with me. 

I think that Nuts! would work best with a "Saving Private Ryan" sort of tank scenario with way more men than tanks, but I wanted to see how it held up as a tank platoon battle system.  And I cautiously say "it does very well".