Return to Kursk

Last weekend I put on another of my participation games at the local primary school's Christmas Fair.   Having done Wars of the Roses at the Summer event, I returned this time to the most successful format; a grand tank melee.

There are no action photos I'm afraid was I was far too busy running the game (and didn't have Jamie to assist me).  However, here's a shot of the battlefield before the fighting started.  The Soviets were to enter from the near end and exit from the far end.

By the way, this was the last outing for my old road sections in their current form.  They'll reappear at Christmas having been spruced up in line with my current figure-basing style.

I changed the rules this time.  A quick over view may be helpful.

I used a card driven activation system.  The game deck contained twelve red cards, twelve black cards and two Jokers.  All Soviet tanks would move or fire on the red cards, all German tanks would move or fire on the back cards. On a Joker any tank currently in the river would have to test to see if it bogged down.  If two Jokers came out together I planned to say that a randomly selected Ferdinand or Panther had broken down.  The important thing, though, was that once the cards were all used, the game was over.  This provided the Soviets with an incentive to keep move as they needed to exit the far end of the table to win.

Movement was by means Slow, Medium or Fast sticks (I used some sticks I created for Song of Blades and Heroes).  Place the stick in front of your tank and move to anywhere along the stick.  Crossing the river, other than via the bridge, required one card spent in the water.

Firing was by two 1d6 rolls - a To Hit roll using a table that cross-indexed range with target movement and a To Kill roll using another table that cross-indexed gun size (small, medium or big) with armour weight (light, medium or heavy).

Interestingly I had to do a new price sheet for the tanks this time as the old one got lost when an external hard drive failed.  I'm pretty sure that I made the top-end tanks cheaper to purchase (the Ferdinand coming down from £2.50 to £1.50).  Despite this the game made the same amount of money (a little over £30) for PFA funds.

I ran through the game twice with a single Soviet player winning the Order of Suvorov 2nd Class for exiting the table on each occasion.  Several Orders of Suvorov 3rd Class were awarded for getting across the river as were Iron Crosses for knocking out Soviet tanks.

In the end my voice was giving out from having to shout over the background noise.  A few players were keen to have another game and two of them, Rachel and Oscar, managed to play the game from my play-sheet without much help from me.  I call that a pretty good sign!