Armored Brigade or How I Now Get My Team Yankee Fix between Games

By Bill White

Sometimes at NDNG we like to hear from our readers and today Bill White has provided us with his review of Armored Brigade, and new release by the folks at Slitherine/Matrix Games. Armored Brigade is a PC game that puts you in the role of a NATO or Warsaw Pact commander whose mission is to reach the Rhine in 7 days or blunt the WP forces from rolling over West Germany. The game has multiple nations in which you can play and even includes the forces of the non-aligned Finns. You can find the game and check out the special offer we have at the end of this article.

For those that love to play and wonder what to do when there isn’t a game available, we now have Armored Brigade from Slitherine/Matrix Games. The game basically breaks down into three parts, set up/force building, deployment, and playing. Very similar to Team Yankee. I have been creating battles rather than playing the scenarios, so I will focus on that.
The set up/force building portion is almost as fun as playing the game. You get to pick the geographical area of your battle between several areas in Europe and even Ft. Irwin in California. You can then fine tune it using a zoomed in view of the area to allow you to hunt for terrain that looks interesting to you. You then get to choose your nation, type of mission (advance, meeting, defend, and dynamic), points level, and type of force (Infantry, Mech, or Armor).

There is also a whole slew of modifiers to fine tune your force. My favorite part of this game and Team Yankee is list building. There is a myriad of options to choose from, based on the date you choose for your battle. This ranges from the 60’s up into the 90’s. I’ve been playing as the US around 1985 and enjoying the Bradleys!

Once you’ve selected your force, next up is deployment. There is a deployment area for your main force and then a forward deployment area for your recon units. Deployment is pretty straightforward with positioning your units where you want them based on whether you’re attacking, defending, or having a meeting engagement. The interesting parts are setting up your helicopters. You need to pre-plan their entry on to the battlefield and then pick two areas for them to operate in while they’re on the field. You also choose target reference points for your off-board artillery, if you have taken any. Then it’s go time.

The game offers two different ways to play, continuous or rounds. With rounds, the game automatically pauses after a set amount of time. I started off with 1-minute rounds until I got the hang of playing. Otherwise, gameplay is continuous with the ability to pause, as well as speed up and slow down time. This is a nice feature as when you are waiting for your air strike to show up and you’re getting hammered by the Soviets, it’s a long four minutes.

The game allows you to give orders to units or individual teams. There are settings for each that allow you to give each team or unit “SOP” (standard operating procedure) as the game calls it. This way you can give them movement waypoints and control how they’ll act and respond without having to keep stopping the game to give new orders.

One example is how they’ll move. They can either use the best cover, the shortest route, or the fastest route (not always the shortest). Another one is whether they’ll engage the enemy at maximum range, effective range, or hold fire (useful for scouts). The game is won or lost based on both capturing or defending objectives, and on force attrition. It keeps you updated on both sides’ losses at the top of the screen. The games seem to last about 30 minutes with the medium size forces I have been playing, but seem to be over before you know with everything that is going on.

Before I played Armored Brigade, it was described as Team Yankee meets blue force tracker. This is accurate as it is very much a tactical simulation. My first thoughts, after I played a game, was that it reminded me of the Harpoon PC game from the 90’s, as you’re looking at a detailed map with very nice graphics and symbols moving around the map. This is my cup of tea and I was anything but disappointed! If you decide to pick this up, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. I wish you good luck.

Bill won a copy of the game by winning Best Painted award during the Team Yankee portion of the 2018 Iron Man tournament held at Fall-In. You too can share in Bill’s win and get a 10% off coupon for this game. Just leave a message in the NDNG forum under the thread We will send you a code to get 10% off Armored Brigade.

Bill White lives in Virginia. He is an avid Flames of War and Team Yankee player and is one of the best painters in the game