BattleFront Games

On April 13th the Screaming Eagle put on a very special Firestorm Stalingrad day at D6 Games in Rochester Mn. Using the Stalingrad kit from Battlefront, players battled for the area around and in Stalingrad. In all, we had seven tables. Three of which were city tables, and four country tables.

Players were pledged to a side (Russian or German) and could bring a 109 point list for battles in the country and/or a 60 point list for battles in the city. I did make one allowance for Italians to be included, though, the Lancia was removed and replaced with another 88-platoon.

By Benny Christiansen

As FOW V4 was released, I still remember that surprise I felt when I found out just how mobile the game became. Mobile is a word that contains value based on your own point of view. In this case, I am thinking of the infantry and the amount of movement they made. In my V3 games infantry tend to stay stationary and in competitive situations, I would have a certain way I would deploy my infantry platoons to optimize my defensive position. After deployment, they would rarely – if ever – move.

Under V4 rules, my infantry will, in most of my games, be forced to move a lot. Under the V4 system, I see only benefits in moving them (in general). Standing still is an invitation for destruction. But such claims are easy to make and hard to prove. So I will try to make an example via a game I played recently.

By Benny Christiansen

Having played a few games with less than 50% win rate, I have decided to try and find a stronger list. One of the things that I have thought about earlier is the “Gun line”. Many of the lists in FOW MW are mobile and flexible. I find MW to be a game of mobility, but I have decided to test that requirement by making this Gun Line list.

After taking March off the guys are back to talk all about the new book for Team Yankee; Oil Wars.

Part of what we do here at NDNG is to bring excitement into our hobby and reach out to the community to get them to enjoy all the great games we play. Part of this is holding demo games whenever possible and I recently had the opportunity to hold a demo of the new Great War book at in Ashburn Va.

Holding a demo at this store seems fitting, my first taste of was playing FOW-1918 at a convention hosted by the owner of Huzzah Chris Huhn almost ten years ago. I asked Chris, who is a huge Great War fan if I can hold a demo at his store and he quickly found me some space at his store.

By Ian Birdwell

After having all of my time the past few weeks eaten up by “real life” and “responsibilities”, I was finally able to take some time to head over to the club to play a game.

Challis, one of club members, has also been waylaid by the same things I have been and hadn’t had an opportunity to play his soviets since August of last year (Check out the battle report here ) we were fixing for a friendly throw down.

Given our mutual love for all things Eastern Front, we opted to throw down with 109 point forces from Red Banner and Desperate Defense (check out the release article here ).

Right now, you can play a lot of rulesets: every history age, from chariot warfare to modern skirmish, sci-fi, and fantasy, any scale from 6 mm to 1/48. However, if you are an “aged” wargamer in his thirties or forties, you’ll probably have been looking for a ruleset to play with younger players. They could be those teenager guys at the club still playing Warhammer 40K and lingering on something deeper or different, or your own kids who’ve seen you playing obscure rulesets like so difficult to understand when you don’t know exactly what is happening on the table, but still wanting to “play with daddy”.

Tanks: The Modern Age (TMA) is a really good solution. It’s a fast, inexpensive set of rules (24 Dollars or 23 Euros) for tactical skirmishes. You can play almost everywhere since it needs a relatively small surface, and you can reuse your Team Yankee vehicles (or FOW ones, if you prefer the original Tanks, set in WW2 – the rules are pretty the same). Most importantly, you can teach the rules in 15 minutes even to your grandmother in law.

By Benny Christiansen

One of the things I enjoy doing is to experiment. City Fight rules, found in the back of Enemy Of The Gates and Iron Cross books, were very interesting for me. I was preparing for a tournament at the time and thus did not have the time to pay much attention to them.

Going through the rules, I noted a few things before my first games.

First, smoke barrage seemed very effective. Filling a room with smoke seemed a good way to protect your assaulting units. Assaulting teams benefit from concealment and bulletproof cover when assaulting rooms, and with smoke, it could be potentially very, very difficult to stop an assault.

I really wanted to find out more about this, so I decided there and then, to make sure I would test a list that could fire smoke.

Rubble and Tree lines are suggested terrain features, and I have realized that in V4, I really love the infantry, and so I could see a chance to throw loads of infantry on the table and have fun.

D-Day is coming! In June (could be any another month?) Battlefront will publish army lists for the Normandy landings, effectively starting the Late WW2 period. After years fighting with “hit on 3+” and “test morale on 5+”, US troops will finally get much better, with tanks able to worry the German counterparts. For this reason, I began to assemble my new US army, with a mix of Mechanized infantry, Shermans, M3 halftracks, 105mm artillery, and M10s to punch enemy armour. But I also wanted a “personal” army, something really unique. Each tank with a different layout, each infantry base with a personal touch.

In this first half of the US Late Army painting guide, we will see how to customize your tanks (they can be German or Russian, obviously) with some tricks and advice to have flags, sandbags, and nets where you want.

by Tom Burgess

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) makes its third appearance in the Team Yankee/Flames of War universe in Oil War. Having been an IDF player in the Fate of a Nation (1st and 2nd Ed), I volunteered to review them in Oil War. I was particularly keen to see how much of my previous Fate of a Nation collection would carry forward to the circa 1985 period.