Tanks The Modern Age

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.

Unboxing Tanks TMA

Inside the box, you find almost anything you need to play. Three plastic tanks (one US Abrams and two Soviet T64s), some cardboard flat terrains like houses and woods, and all counters/dice you will need. Also, you will find the cards to use almost any Team Yankee vehicle you have in your collection, like TOW Humvee, British Chieftain or Scorpion, French AMX-30, German Leopard 1 and 2, Russian T55 or BMPSs. Like Team Yankee, you will build your armies with a set maximum total of Army points, so if you already have a TY army you will also have a strong Tanks TMA force. In the box, you’ll also find a couple of card arrows for the movement system.

Helicopters can fly “low” (between buildings and woods), or “high” in the sky. In the first situation, they gain some cover but can’t see everything, in the latter they see and are seen vs everybody.

Setting up the terrain

Any living room or kitchen table of average size will quickly become your battle terrain: you need 3’x3’ (or 90 x 90 cm). If you have only the Tanks box, you will use the card buildings and terrain features, but if you play FOW or TY I’m pretty sure you’ll already have lots of beautiful 3D terrains. Just place a couple of houses, a broken factory, and some woods and you will be more than ready. Battlefront also sells special mats made for Tanks, you will see one of them in this feature’s photos.

An average starting force will be of two tanks and one helicopter. Yes, the major difference between Tanks WW2 and Modern Age is in the skies: you can field Lynx, Cobras and Hinds, and battle at low and high altitude!

At the begin of each turn, you and your opponent roll a dice: the highest has the “initiative advantage” for the full bound, and in case of units with the same initiative, the winning side moves last and shoot first.

How does it work

Tanks rules are much easier than FOW v4 or TY but are also more engaging for a newbie player. Both players will move and shot their units in any turn, so no player will ever be totally passive for a full bound – we know a young guy can get bored after a few minutes of inactivity. Once deployed all units, the first turn starts: all units have a specific initiative, with the lowest being the worst. The first unit to move will be the one with the lowest initiative, then will move the second worst and so on.

When you move a unit, you just need to place the card arrow touching in any way its base: so you can move straightforward, on your side, or even in reverse. A valid move ends with one your unit orthogonally touching the end of the arrow – pure and simple. Depending on the unit, you can move up to three times the arrow, or choose to be stationary. The faster you move a unit, the more difficult will be to be hit but also to hit enemies.

Initiative causes the “dumbest” units to move first, so the “smartest” can react and move in the best position.

Helos move in the same way, you just need to touch the transparent base with the arrow at the start and at the end of movement. However, helos can choose anytime to fly low or high. In the first case, they will be preying low altitude, slaloming between buildings hunting down the enemy. In the latter, they will be hovering so high they will see almost all battlefield – but also, everybody will see and be able to shoot them.

Charlie one, open fire on the target!

After every unit moved, it’s time to shoot. You will go by initiative like the movement, but downward: the highest initiative will shoot first.

This system works very well: the “dumbest” unit will move first, so the “smarter” ones will move in reaction, maybe in a spot where they have a clear shot on the enemy but keeping some cover. And since they will shoot first, they will deliver damage before them.

Tanks system is really similar to X-Wing / Wings of Glory ones: however, here the destroyed tank will shot until the end of the turn, so you will receive (or give) retribution even if you “die” in that turn. Also, movement is even easier here in Tanks, since you can 90 turn with an Abrams and will you not need to tail an enemy to be able to shoot him. Same flavor, but easier.

Bad news for Yuri: despite throwing more dice since he moved in cover behind the destroyed house, Uncle Sam’s guns proved too strong for the People’s armour, delivering two lethal Critical Hits. 

When you shoot, you just roll the number of dice shown on your unit card. A T64 rolls 5 dice, an Abrams four of them, but it has “advanced stabilizer” so it can reroll up to two dice. With “4” and “5”, you hit the enemy, with a “6” you also score a critical hit. A normal hit delivers one damage – a typical tank has 6 or 7 damage points; a “critical” forces you to turn a damage card, with something nasty linked to the simple damage. You can draw an “ammo explosion”, with more damages, or the tank could catch fire, or a crewman could be killed.

But is not all lost: when you are hit, you can roll some defense dice. The base valor is significantly lower than the attack one – for example, a T64 will roll only one defense die! However, if you are partially hidden and in cover, you add one dice, as you do if you moved in the bound, one dice for every “arrow” used. Also, if the enemy moved you will also add dice: hitting on the move is harder! Again, if you roll a “4” or a “5” you will stop one hit chosen by the attacker (so he will discard the 4s and 5s, before the critical 6s), but if you roll a “6”, you will be able to choose the attacking die to be parried, avoiding the feared critical.

Few units, but lots of variety

Each unit has some “special rule” written on the card itself to have unique effects. For example, VADS are weak units but particularly effective against helos and unarmoured vehicles (its rule says that he has 7 dice vs helos or unarmoured instead of 2!); the AMX AUF1, French artillery, can shoot thru allied vehicles and upgrades one normal hit to critical (it’s the Tanks version of the Team Yankee Brutal rule). Hammerhead, when hidden, has 3 dice more for defense instead of one (for they are always Gone to Ground in TY) and can Spearhead after deployment (one free movement before the game starts).

To add some spice to the game, you can use crew cards. In the base box, you can find a good selection, but if you buy the Tanks expansion with a new unit, you will find some new juicy card, like a powerful crewman, or some kind of ammo – again, X-Wing style. Every card has a point value, so you will need to stay in the maximum allowance set for the battle. Adding the crewman Richard Kelp to your M1 Abrams means you count the “3s” as a hit, while the card “missiles” allows you to fire missiles to an enemy helicopter for one shooting phase.

You can reuse the most significant units and teams of your Team Yankee armies, but no place for infantry in this game: just tanks and helos!

Tanks – The Modern Age keeps exactly what promises: it’s a fast rule system specifically good with inexperienced players. We used Tanks TMA rules at a display during a major event and was really easy to ask people who never touched a miniature to play in minutes. It’s really easy to get involved, and “see” the helicopters moving in the streets and hunting some tanks. The initiative system is so easy even a kid can understand it in few turns: my daughters played with me and understood perfectly that the T64s are sturdier but can be outmaneuvered by the US tanks (so I invariably ended up using the Russians!).

The tanks can absorb different hits, so even a totally inexperienced player moving his tanks blindly in the open will have the chance to shoot back some dice. Despite that, Tanks games are fast: you can set up a game and play it in under one hour – if you use the card terrain, even half an hour. And since the base game contains a good quantity of vehicle cards, it’s definitively the “easy” game you should try with your kids if you already have some Russians and NATO troops!

(The Author would like to thanks Claudio Tiso for the help in test games and Luca Mondani for the awesome photos).