By Howard West

Background

With the “official” Team Yankee points reduced for this year’s US National events and with the changing META caused by the new NATO books as described in Tom Gall’s recent No Dice No Glory article on chasing the And since several other upcoming local tournaments have reduced point levels, in the following order 110, 94, and 70.

I wanted to see what a 2nd Warsaw Pact formation might look like and I started playing around with different formations and kept coming back to an old reliable T55/T54 Tank family. Team Yankee represents the T55/54 Family in 20 different tank and motorized infantry formations in 5 different books from the Soviets, East Germans, Czechs, Poles, Oil Wars(Syrians and Iraqis).

By David Garvin

From the 10th of June 1940 until the 13th of May 1943, Axis and Allied armies struggled against one another across North Africa until the Axis surrendered 275,000 prisoners of war. Many of us know of many of the battles and famed figures of the war. Kasserine. El Alamain. Tobruk. Rommel. Montgomery.

They all evoke images of the hot, dusty sand and the sweeping tank battles across the desert. There are many games that depict battles in North Africa, but few do it at the tactical level. After how, how does one maneuver over a barren landscape bereft of cover? Well, the folks at Avalon Hill came up with a way to do this with their Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) series.

So that’s what I’m going to discuss: how tactical desert warfare is gamed using ASL and some of the implications of fighting in the desert. Finally, I will discuss how Multi-Man Publications have brought the desert back to ASL after 34 years.

By Richard Steer

Many wargamers that I know keep a recipe book, a notebook that is used to record which paints have been used for a particular project. This record is invaluable should the project be put on hold for a time, or ends up being extended at a later date due to new releases, as it avoids the question of “what on earth did I paint those with?”

Model Colors is a free iOS application that I have started using in place of my own recipe book. At its core is a paint library holding over 24,000 products from a wide range of manufacturers, which includes other types of products such as inks, pigments, and thinners. It also has a number of features that mean it can serve as more than just a catalog of the paints that you own.

By Richard Steer

The North African campaign has always been the theatre of World War II that I have been most interested in, and specifically the British perspective of the conflict. This interest carried over into , with British forces in the Mediterranean has been my primary focus in the game.

To be honest, I was pretty disappointed with the first releases for FOW V4. Desert Rats and felt very lightweight compared to the previous lists for the African Campaign that we had been playing with, being the original North Africa compilation from 2009. That’s not to say that the V4 lists were bad. On the contrary, with the exception of the 17/25pdr anti-tank gun, Desert Rats was a reasonably historical representation of the most common British armored formations in Egypt and Libya in the middle of 1942. The British lists from Desert Rats were later expanded and re-released as Armoured Fist, which filled in many of the gaps, but the fact remained that the army lists had taken a step backward in detail and completeness under V4.

By Tom Gall

January 2nd 2022 The Wargaming Company announced series 3 of Et Sans Résultat (ESR) their Napoleonic results for playing grand / epic scale Napoleonic conflicts. That’s not all,  on December 29th The Wargaming Company announced their own line of 10mm figures was coming. a few of the initial images that David Ensteness from The Wargaming Company had shared.

These two developments make 2022 a pretty exciting year for grand-scale Napoleonics. I have a fondness for the Napoleonic era, there are some good rulesets out there from Empire to Sharp Practice but none scratch the itch for large-scale battles like ESR. For me, ESR is my go-to system for these large battles. Besides the rules, The Wargaming Company has a great lineup of campaign guides that includes very impressive uniform guides for painting your armies.

Check out this interview with Jason Petho the designer of the PC game Campaign Series Vietnam. Jason talks about the development and all of the new goodies in the latest title in this iconic series.

By Mitch Reed

To kickoff 2022 I had some fellow gamers over to play two different games from the Command & Colors game system. We split into two groups, one playing the American Revolutionary War-based Tricorne and the other team playing the re-make of Samurai Battles. Since this event, I have been thinking about the Command & Colors system created by Richard Borg over twenty years ago and how I became a fan of it.

By Tom Burgess

When we first saw the Flames of War Version 4 Formations charts, we all wondered what the “Wildcard” box was meant for. Many of us speculated that perhaps that might have some future tie-in with “Mid-War Monsters” or some future rare/special units. Battlefront has been mum on the purpose “Wildcard” for over four years. With the release of the North Africa Mid-War Forces compilation, we know that this was an avenue to bring Mid-War Monsters back into the game.

But that’s not the only way the new North Africa Compilation will let you add for Mid-War Monsters. Battlefront also added new formations to utilize these beasts in their full glory. I think many of us expected to see Mid-War monsters to come back into the game at some point with Version 4, but I don’t think any of us expected to see new formations explicitly for these special units.

By Troy Hill

After two years of miss or hit, mostly miss gaming, we’ve finally had our first Bolt Action tourney in North-East Indiana. Power Nine Gaming in Fort Wayne Indiana hosted our Rumble in the Fort, Bolt Action tourney. I was the humble Tourney Organizer (TO), and we hoped to have five tables. Going into the week, it looked like we might make that.

But, cold-like symptoms, such as sore throats, kept two players home. We ended up with seven players, and I jumped into the roster as the “ringer.”

The Tailsmen have Mike Tunez on to discuss Firelock’s plans for 2022 and he spills all the beans. Glenn, Tyler, and Tom all talk about their last year in the hobby. Who won New Year’s Resolutions? What will the promise to do this time? tune in and find out.