‘O’ Group - looking at the gun / armour system

‘O’ Group are David Brown's most recent set of rules (he is also designer of Pickett’s Charge and General d' Armee rules), covering World War Two. Published by Reisswitz Press (a publishing arm of the Lardies), the rules cover action at the battalion level. That is, a typical game would see two to three infantry companies per side, plus assets.

Each infantry base represents a section, they are gathered together to make the basic manoeuvre unit - the platoon. Interestingly, each armoured model is representing 2 - 3 vehicles and is referred to as a section, with two sections forming a typical platoon.

As armour is my primary interest, this was the first part of the rules that I turned to and the rest of this post is going to give way to discussing the gun / armour relationships in the game and the processes that fall out of a typical little vehicle duel.

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Old School tactical - Tiger I v T-34 performance

Over time, this blog has looked at several tactical systems from the perspective of Gun / Penetration interpretation using these two vehicles as a benchmark and today we will be taking Old School Tactical (OST) for a spin. As per previous posts on the matter, I just like tactical games, I do not have particular knowledge of the subject, so treat this as a bit of fun, rather than something to hang your hat on.

OST is a tactical boardgame designed by Shane Logan and published by Flying Pig. Counters represent individual vehicles and squads and a hex is representing 50 metres, so this joins the popular ranks of Squad Leader, ASL, ATS, Band of Brothers, Lock ‘n Load Tactical, Conflict of Heroes and no doubt a bunch of others that I have missed. This article is exploring whether the Tiger and T-34 have an inter-play that delivers the ‘feel’ of what we might expect from combat accounts and testing ground experiences.

We will be looking at how the two vehicles compare and using the stereo-typed example of T-34’s ‘charging’ towards a Tiger to highlight rules and system mechanics. We will also be comparing the Tiger and Panther tanks, simply because it always interests me how designers approach the characteristics of these two similar (in game terms), but different (in real life roles) vehicles!

It is a lengthy post, so bring coffee and nibbles.

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Panzer by GMT - analysis of T34 v Tiger I

Panzer published by GMT and designed by James Day

As part of an ongoing series of articles that looks how individual tactical games deal with gun / armour rules, this post offers some observations about the game 'Panzer' published by GMT.

As usual, the article will be comparing how a design handles T34/76 tanks running up against a  German Tiger I, while giving some insight to design / play processes.

Above graph showing gun fire values at point blank range.

Panzer is a tank centric game that interestingly takes a more ‘hard data’ approach to processes than we are generally used to seeing in these days of abstraction based tactical games. Does this bring us closer in terms of simulation?

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Iron Cross T34 v Tiger I

Iron Cross - Great Escape Games.

Iron Cross are a fast play set of WWII rules for miniatures. They use an innovative activation system, which I will briefly go into in the post, but primarily the post is about how the system portrays gun / armour tables.

There are a couple of similar comparisons made for various systems between the T34/76 and the Tiger 1 on this blog and links to the relevant postings are show at the foot of this post in the resource section.

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Conflict of Heroes - Armour (T-34 v Tiger I)

This post looks at how Conflict of Heroes manages armoured action, with a focus on the Russian T-34 and German Tiger I tanks.

Taken from the box art of Storms of Steel -  by Steve Paschal

There are similar posts on this blog for other tactical game systems, so to maintain some continuity between the articles, we will choose the 1943 model of the T-34/76 to work with (from the Storms of Steel game). 

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Tiger Vs T-34 analysis in Band of Brothers

For those gamers who have a keen interest in WWII tactical wargames, these two vehicles will be well known to them and so they make an interesting study when trying to analyse the Band of Brothers (BoB) system and its gun / armour relationships.

An iPad doodle of the T-34

At the time of writing, we do not actually have any official scenarios in which these two vehicles meet. The Russian module 'Ghost Panzer' does not have the Tiger I (though it does use the 88/56 gun in an anti-tank role, appearing in several scenarios) however, the sister game, 'Screaming Eagles' does, so this article uses the game parts from both modules to make its observations.
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Tiger Vs T-34 system analysis

Tactical gamers are generally aware of the handling and capabilities of key vehicles such as the German Tiger I and the Russian T34/76 tanks in their rules and in historical accounts from the period. This article is just intended to show how Lock ’n Load deals with these two adversaries, so that gamers can compare this to their own systems.

At the conclusion of the article there is a link to a fascinating source for gun / armour penetration tables (the introduction alone is valuable).

One of my vehicle drawings for a home grown tactical game.