What do you do when you have a several competing wargaming desires:
- I want lots of tanks
- I’d like to see many people engaged in a tense competition
- Can we get those gamers into the feel of a historical battle on the tabletop?
Here’s what we did
- We made our own scenario.
- We playtested it.
- We found a venue that brings seasoned and new gamers into a big gaming event.
We had just such an opportunity in April, 2019, at one of our local annual historical gaming events: AMBUSCADE! 2019, in Portland, Oregon.
In that event, we…
- Put 150 tanks on the table
- Simulated at least that many tanks again, to feel like a battle with over 300 tanks.
- Got 5 gamers to push tanks, roll dice, sweat and cheer.
Above: The Russian wave of tanks closes on the German panzers
What is AMBUSCADE?
AMBUSCADE! is an annual one-day historical miniature war-gaming event that feaures several sessions of historical and fictional tabletop miniatures games, hosted by local gamers in the Southwest Washington and Northwest Oregon areas. It gets bigger every year. It is organized by an avid historical gamer who also has his own blog Portland Little Wars. The games run the gamut of ancient historical to pulp fiction, and everything in-between.
What was our battle?
We chose a day in the Kursk Operation (German Operation Citadelle, a.k.a. “Unternehmen Zitadelle”, Soviet “Operation Kutuzov”) at a time and place where the most tanks were engaged in battle in a single day. We chose the Battle of Prokhorovka, on July 12th, 1943. This was the southern German pincer into the Kurks bulge. We narrowed our scenario down to the Panzer units of the 1st SS PanzerGrenadier Division and the Tank Brigades of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army (5 GTA), namely the 18th Tank Corps and 29th Tank Corps.
Limits on the Scenario
On this day, in that sector of the battlefield, infantry, pioneers, artillery and aircraft were also fighting, but we abstracted those in the scenario. We were keen on focusing on the tank part of the battle. It is often easier and faster to get new players pushing around tanks than learning the steps in an infantry assault in the Flames of War ruleset.
How’d it turn out?
In a word: GREAT!
In 4 hours, we had 100+ wrecks and still a lot of tanks on the table. The Soviets were on the verge of victory, the Germans were on the edge of defeat, but hanging onto their objectives by a thread. A German victory, but a rematch was demanded. New players were excited, and old players were surprised, challenged and desiring to do this again, soon.
More pics on our blog pages here.
We made a video Battle Report
My gaming buddy, Souldier3, recorded the event on video. He and I added audio commentary and condensed the video from 4 hours of game play to 1 hr + 9 min, and posted it on YouTube.
Rose City Dukes and Duchesses 